On play, creativity and the new politics of imagination for Gen Z/Alpha. Pat Kane talks with Planet: Critical's Rachel Donald
We are great fans of Rachel Donald and her expansive, super-smart Planet: Critical podcast and publishing platform. She combines a journalist’s sharp edge for questions, with a subtle and theoretical mind - bearing on climate crisis, as we should.
So we were honoured when co-initiator Pat Kane was interviewed by Rachel a few weeks ago - the YouTube embed of it is above, but you’ll also find it on all the leading podcast platforms.
She is a flowing and powerful writer, and her post-interview musings are often as (or more) exciting than the interviews themselves. Below is the blurb from the YouTube show - but below that is her short essay responding to the discussion:
“A life beyond your wildest dreams” is promised to those entering Narcotics Anonymous, a decentralised, collectively-run program for sobriety in which fellow addicts help one another get and stay clean.
The promise doesn’t make sense when you first hear it—it’s only after months, even years, of becoming someone different that you realise how limited your imagination was made by addiction.
I think of our global relationship to capitalism very similarly. It’s difficult to imagine life without it, and thus a better world, but that doesn’t mean such a world isn’t possible. So how do we unleash our imaginations and creativity to create a culture and a world beyond our wildest dreams, one in which we look after one another and the more-than-human world? How do we code for care?
This is what Pat Kane joins me to discuss. Pat is a writer and musician, an activist, and a futurist. He writes a column for The National in Scotland and is also the co-founder of The Alternative, a media organisation embedded into community resilience and imagining alternative ways of organising. Pat joins me to discuss culture—how to understand it, how to code it, how to change it.
We explore the possibility of the internet as emergent collective consciousness and a tool for creativity, resilience and connection. We discuss the importance of play: the psychology of play, the impact of play, and how play as resistance reveals the absurdity of the human systems that we are forced to interact with.
We meander through this and more on love, truth, cosmology, resilience, difficulty and imagination.
And here’s Rachel’s reflections from her Planet: Critical substack:
The Gift of Being Human
In a world of productivity we rebel with creativity
Last week I interviewed Pat Kane about culture, absurdity, joy, resistance, the internet, thoughtfulness and play. It was a fascinating conversation which spanned the cosmo-local nature of the crisis, and the inherent collective capacity of humankind to respond creatively.
The greatest robbery of capitalism has been to thieve, commodify and gatekeep our creativity, our imagination; art, now, an asset for money laundering and investment. Bound by frames, our vision narrows in, seeing only currency symbols, numbers, the world reduced to 0s and 1s.
Creativity and imagination are resources of abundance, multiplied when shared, yet they are captured by ivory towers, by galleries, by prestige, above all else, for value is dictated not by what is offered but by what can be offered to the possessor.
The great beauty of humankind is to be possessed by creativity, inflamed by imagination and spurred on by passion as we seek to uncover and explore and sink and fly and enrapture as if feathers sprout from our shoulders and harps hang from our hips.
The great tragedy of humankind is we attempt to possess creativity rather than be possessed; feathers turn to ash and harps burst their strings leaving only an empty frame through which the world falls.
It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Wealth not enough for the famished beast, it feeds upon the instinct which saw the first humans paint cave walls with visions of the world, the very instinct which sees a child dance, which sees a teenager doodle, which sees lonely adults pluck on guitar strings in the silence of their isolation.
It demands we line its stomach with words and with colour and with symphony, with images, with movement, with laughter. 8 billion people we are, stretched taut in the darkness trying to be enough and yet still its hunger grows; the pit ever-widening, ever-deepening, ever-dark.
What poor creature we have made, a Frankenstein of delirium, a machine filled with an ugly spirit, eternally dissatisfied, its open maw and hollow gullet filled with unsung screams, our own, its own. Yet even there, in the belly of the beast, a child dances, a teenager doodles, a lonely adult plucks on a guitar.
The way is dark, yet still we persist, still that instinct upon which it feeds, feeds us also. And whilst the hunger of that beast grows with every feed, we find satisfaction in our movement, in our words, in our colour, in our music.
Even in the darkness, our instinct shines bright, illuminating those cave walls so we may envision possibility. Stretched out as we are on the stomach walls of a ravenous machine with an ugly spirit as it attempts to digest us into 0s and 1s to feed its mechanical heart, still we shine with millennia of imagination, still we create without witness, still we move to the rhythm of our flesh.
We follow that call, respond to that compulsion, allow that instinct to move through us even as our monstrous value system deems such activity a waste of time.
In a world of productivity, we rebel with creativity, and illuminate the way.
Hear within your music the call of joy, see within your paintings the beauty of existence, read within your words a way through the stomach lining of the ravenous beast with the ugly spirit.
Send that call and beauty and way through along the 0s and 1s we can never be reduced to; follow the story that emerges back along the gullet and through the maw and turn to face the poor creature we have wrought. And shine so bright that its mechanical heart breaks, for all it could never dream to be.
More here - and thanks again Rachel. Flame on!