> We are witnessing a direct clash between two different forms of materi-alized utopianism: on the one hand, an anti-authoritarianism that, in its emphasis on creativesynthesis and improvisation, sees freedom basically in terms of play, and on the other, a tacitrepublicanism that sees freedom ultimately as the ability to reduce all forms of power to a set ofclear and transparent rules.
For the last two hundred years, in Europe and North America—and increasingly, elsewhere—that latter, bureaucratized notion of freedom has tended to hold sway. New institutional arrangements that operate by rules so strict and predictable they essentially disappear, so that one doesn’teven know what they are (such as the physical or electronic post offices with which I began) tend to be put forward as platforms for human freedom that emerge from the very technical contingencies of running efficient structures of power. These arrangements seem to preserve the positiveelements of play while somehow circumventing its more disturbing potentials.
But time and again, we have seen the same results. Whether motivated by a faith in “rationality”or a fear of arbitrary power, the end result of this bureaucratized notion of freedom is to movetoward the dream of a world where play has been limited entirely—or, at best, boxed away insome remote location far from any serious, consequential human endeavor—while every aspectof life is reduced to some kind of elaborate, rule-bound game. It’s not that such a vision lacks appeal. Who hasn’t dreamed of a world where everyone knows the rules, everyone plays by therules, and—even more—where people who play by the rules can actually still win? The problem is that this is just as much a utopian fantasy as a world of absolute free play would be. It will always remain a glimmering illusion that dissolves away as soon as we touch it.
Such illusions are not always bad things. One could make a case that most of the greatesthuman accomplishments were the result of such quixotic pursuits. But in this particular case,and in this larger political-economic context, where bureaucracy has been the primary meansby which a tiny percentage of the population extracts wealth from the rest of us, they have created a situation where the pursuit of freedom from arbitrary power simply ends up producingmore arbitrary power, and as a result, regulations choke existence, armed guards and surveillancecameras appear everywhere, science and creativity are smothered, and all of us end up finding increasing percentages of our day taken up in the filling out of forms.