Edition 81
The Leisure Principle
- Published 1st August, 2023
- ISBN: 978-1-922212-86-3
- Extent: 200pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes spelt out a vision of the impending utopia. Work, he said, will become a thing of the past. ‘For the first time since creation,’ he predicted, ‘man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to occupy the leisure which science…will have won for him.’
So where did this vision of future past go? Like baco-foil suits and meals of protein pills, it proved to be a concept that withered on the vine. Instead of an excess of free time to be enjoyed at leisure, a radically different regime now dominates the developed nations: the leisure principle.
The leisure principle is one of work hard to play hard, a rigorous pursuit of monetarised hedonism: YOLO, live your best life, have a good time all the time.
From the ecstasy of the digital to the monied spectacle that is sport, the gamification of everyday life to the flourishing hierarchy of influencers, Griffith Review 81: The Leisure Principle sets out to scrutinise the terms and conditions of this contemporary compact and consider how we came to cede so much just to amuse ourselves to death.
In this Edition
Revolutionary wave
This was the late ’60s, early ’70s and surfing in Wales was regarded by the parent generation as delinquency. It was for losers, layabouts, rogue males. In those early days Welsh surfers numbered around one hundred, congregated on half a dozen beaches down fifteen miles of coastline west of Swansea, known as the Gower. I knew each one of those surfers by the styles they deployed on the waves. So idiosyncratic was early Welsh surfing that out on the road if you saw a car with boards on the roof coming at you, both drivers would pull over for a chat.
The defence
The history of computer science is bound up with the game of chess, whose innate complexity and clearly defined rules make it the ideal proving ground for artificial intelligence. And yet the game not only survived the defeat of Garry Kasparov in 1997 by IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue, but also seemed to flourish in its wake. According to International Chess Federation figures, more people are playing the game than ever before, and not merely over the internet. Now, as a new generation of AIs aces the Turing test – according to which a machine may be deemed intelligent if the human interacting with it can’t tell if it is a machine or not – it might be worth taking a closer look at chess as a social and creative phenomenon that speaks to the limits of ‘smart’ machines.
We will never be modern
My Instagram feed, an information-stream cosplaying as a hyper-relevant town square, has undergone a radical transformation in the past few years. Whereas once that endless deluge teemed with benign yet revealing snapshots of friends moving through the motions and milestones of life – brunches, holidays, weddings and pregnancies – today’s experience is far removed.
Virtue signals
The sheer speed and volume at which data is processed, coupled with popular imaginings of the infallibility of machines, means that predictions produced by such processes are imbued with the aura of objectivity. As a result, hard decisions – acting in contexts of radical uncertainty, and having to determine winners and losers – become easy ones based on limited considerations directed towards improving the lot of as many individuals as possible while doing least harm. In other words, big data transforms the need to act politically into the possibility of acting only technically.
Upping the ante
As it turned out, Centrebet’s move online – coupled with the many other betting innovations it pioneered – led exactly to where Daffy hoped it would: a prodigious pot of gold. He says the company went from taking ‘fifty or sixty bets in one day’ to taking ‘five or 600,000 bets on a Saturday night from all over the world’. By the turn of the millennium, its annual turnover was in excess of $100 million and it had become – in the words of Piers Morgan, its then general manager – ‘one of the leading sports betting organisations in Australia, if not the world’.
The geography of respect
Starting in 2019, Parks Victoria closed or restricted access for climbers to much of Gariwerd-Grampians while it assessed cultural heritage and worked with Traditional Owners and conservation experts to develop the Greater Gariwerd Landscape Management Plan (GGLMP). These closures drew strong reactions from many climbers. They saw Parks Victoria’s actions as impinging on their rights, and its apparent focus on climbing as a risk to cultural heritage and environmental integrity as overblown.
In the fullness of time
Our devices and data are more than extensions of our physical bodies. The so-called ‘human-centric’ approach to designing wearable and carriable devices means that they disrupt traditional divisions between work and leisure, production and consumption. It’s difficult not to feel the incursion of work-logics into leisure times and spaces as normal. Stretched for time, couples, families and friendship groups are starting to organise themselves using tools like Slack, Jira, Trello and Asana – that is, in the same way as workplaces.
‘A world we must defend’
Schools across Australia banned Pokémon in an attempt to regain control, but this only caused the franchise mania to intensify. Now Pokémon wasn’t just fun – it was also illegal, which meant it was dangerous, which meant trading cards on campus made you a risk-taker, which meant you were seen as fearless, which meant that you were dangerous.
Women’s work
In the 1990s, increasing fiscal and social rationalisation shifted responsibility for leisure from the state to the individual and from the public to the private sphere. Leisure studies, with its emphasis on providing research and data to inform leisure quality, accessibility and access, was rationalised to enhance the ‘bottom line’ of universities that were now attuned to the pragmatic desires of industry sectors.
Oh, the shame of it
Modern leisure emerged in the West in the early 1700s when French and English cities developed new forms of society built around urban amenities – parks, cafés, fairs and shopping districts – servicing an expanding class of people with discretionary time and income. Public museums as storehouses of national culture appeared a little later in the nineteenth century where they contributed to the development of so-called ‘rational recreation’, a species of serious leisure intended to ‘civilise the masses’.
Stories from the city
Public art in particular is a great way for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to tell different histories and narratives that are site specific. There are lots of hidden histories that we know as community but that lots of other people don’t, and so we use these public spaces as opportunities to install different types of artwork to allow people to engage with these histories and stories during their everyday commute…
All work and some play
I’m often hearing about odd jobs that musicians or performers had and how it’s tied to their identity. You read about Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, who really identified with blue-collar people and railroad workers. After Kerouac got infamous, or famous, he went off to be by himself in a cabin in the forest as a fire lookout. So he went into a very solitary existence, and I like that kind of thing…
Dressed for success
Hip-hop was about taking this mainstream look – a nice, acceptable, appropriate look – and, like, changing it up. Sampling it like it’s a song and turning it into something new. So when preppy emerged in mainstream white corporate culture, it started mixing with denim in new ways and mixing with sneakers in new ways and becoming a form of streetwear.
Etc.
Together we were drawn mechanically across the road, boredom/fate reeling us in. The lawn sprawled over the grey-brick kerb. The house was painted green. Sellotaped to the windows were rows of pressed aster. The feeling of something too large to explain was heavy in the air. The door squeaked, swinging open, the main door ajar behind it, and through the gap we glimpsed a white hallway, a pile of discarded shoes on one side.
Hump day
The day they discover the meaning of life, Prue wakes with a headache. Across the kitchen table, Sam says I can’t believe it over and over again.
Prue sips her coffee and only half listens. ‘They what?’
‘See here, it says they’ve finally discovered the meaning of life.’ Sam thrusts the screen in her face.
Prue glances, seeing only bold text and underlined paragraphs. ‘Who is they?’
‘That group of geniuses. Genius Inc. The ones who got together and cured cancer.’
‘Ah. Genius Inc.,’ Prue says. ‘The ones claiming to solve all the big unanswered questions.’ How could she forget? It was all anyone could talk about for months.
‘Yeah. And I mean, they are. They cured cancer. They’re clearly capable.’ Sam buttons his shirt with shaking hands.
‘Curing cancer is one thing. Discovering the meaning of life is quite another.’
Lying on grass
Jamie wishes he could be more like Todd. Not because Todd’s excellent, but because he figures out what he wants and does it. As they pull out bits and pieces from the skip to build their drum sets, Jamie thinks about how he wants to be free, but doesn’t know if that’s something a person can ‘do’. After a while they’ve constructed two sets side by side at the front of the driveway. They’re not buckets, tins or lids: they’re tom drums, snare drums and cymbals.
Salted
We are absorbed in our work until we are not. Mostly we take breaks together, sitting outside in the sunshine waiting for our thoughts to settle, waiting for our lives to begin. Gus and I have both applied for the same scholarship. We’ll find out at the end of the month. Eve is organising a group show and wanted my latest painting as the centrepiece, but I won’t finish it in time, so I drop out.
‘I’ve got something ready,’ says Gus.
Easy enough to find someone to fill my place.
All the boys she ever loved
Lacey complained that she wanted to show him the new books we’d gone and bought together the day before, to which I said he could wait by the door while she went in and got those books, and then she could show them to him no problem in the living room, or the hallway even, if that was what she wanted to do, and so she said – in a tone I knew would only become more prevalent three months down the line when she turned thirteen – Fine.
Open water
Brenda clasped her whistle as she waited. She had a special let camp begin call that only got used once a year. The newbies would learn quickly what Coach’s unique calls meant. Brenda contemplated if she would join in this year’s campfire singalong. With her whistle, she had been practising a rendition of ‘Eternal Flame’ by the Bangles. She knew the girls went wild for their coach’s dorky antics.
The rise and decline of the shopping mall
Perhaps it is instructive to consider how archaeologists of the future may conceive malls. How might they seem, these empty labyrinths – like rituals that had to be endured in order to receive goods and services? As great monoliths, colosseums constructed for our entertainment? As places of worship? Or perhaps malls will seem more like pyramids do to us: mysteries to be unravelled when the tracks of global trade and communication have faded…
A night at the theatre
At the end of the play, I remain in my seat, as to stand would risk such a huge amount of pain and blood loss I am not sure I would survive. Having been allocated this ‘best available seat’ I don’t know how to leave. The actors smile in a strained way as they take their curtain call and each of them casts an eye at me. I make them uncomfortable, perched as I am on these horns. Stuck as I am while the rest of the audience applauds and exits.
Their presence
Straight away you’re taller, sprung firm andspry by their ecstatic vocal runs and upscaling,by their tripping lightly over pages of dogma in the opening chorus of the ‘Magnificat’.To hear such voices rise above the swayingstrings, and airs of blown breath, continuo and drum strike; to hear...
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