Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schüll

Context: This is my book review of Addiction by Design by Natasha Dow Schüll, which is motivated by my personal experience having accidentally visited a casino in Melbourne, Australia.

As gambling as shifted unrecognisably away from being a place of ‘fatefulness’ and of social, competitive thrills as in the 1960s, it’s developed into a highly designed, solitary activity where players can access the numbing, affectless ‘machine zone.’ On the flip side, corporations reap its complement which they’ve termed in the coldest of cold language, ‘continuous gaming productivity.’ With precise and elegant writing Schüll examines the current machine gambling paradigm and the people, ideas and machines that make up the industry in a tour de force of social science with a suprising philosophical backbone of Foucault and Delueze. Throughout, the book uncovers the dynamic linkages between the many different agents and their outputs in the industry. For example, the feedback loop that operates between the algorithmic payoff schedule of the machine and the players who become slowly conditioned expect greater ‘time on device’. The culminating example of these dynamic linkages is the question of gambling addiction. Schüll presents it as an emergent property with a number of interlinked causes: the hallucinatory patterns on the casino carpets, the ploying messages on the devices, likely some genetic susceptibility on behalf of the players, and even the fact that addiction treatments often exacerbate, not help, gambling addicts.

Further, Schüll writes about the common features of general instability and unexpected tragedies in problem gambler’s lives. She links this to the Freudian death drive and hypothesises that this might cause them to find safety in the ‘machine zone.’ However, she does not discuss in detail the possible heritability of gambling addiction. She makes the point that the research is difficult to examine due to the co-opting of research by industry backed institutes and academics, but I would have liked to have seen more of a discussion on this beyond the necessary but obvious refutation that individuals (which I understand as the sum of a player’s life events, genetic predisposition and also some aspect of personal agency) are not wholly responsible for their addiction.

My motivation to read Addiction by Design was seeing the idea of the ‘machine zone’ applied to social media in a direct analogy between machine gambling and Twitter. However, I believe it has much further generality. When the psychologist Csikszentmihalyi’s ‘flow’ concept was referenced, I found myself reflecting on my own activities beyond social media, and how under the right conditions games such as chess, for example, can become self-destroying and an ‘escape backward’ just like machine gambling. A further motivation was my location of Australia, the country with the highest person per machine ratio in the world — shockingly there are eighty people for every machine here. I even accidentally visited the largest casino in the Southern Hemisphere in Melbourne where ‘pokies’ and baccarat tables compete for space in a labyrinthine, sweepingly surveilled complex. I did not expect the cinema ticket I had booked to be nestled in the heart of a casino, like the milk section cynically placed at the back of the supermarket.

Finally, the book was published in 2012, so how has it held it up ten years later? Schüll did not make any specific predictions beyond that her methodological framework would become increasingly applicable, and in that she was certainly right. The ideas of the book, especially the ‘machine zone’ and the mechanisms by which it is reached, have proliferated into all areas of life that to talk about the dangerous, addictive excesses of social media and frictionless stock investing seem like the height of early 2010s naïveté. In a strange way, I think there is something nostalgic about this analysis of a straightforwardly exploitative, evasive industry that acts in collusion with the government to collect a regressive tax on the weakest part of society. Gambling is one of the original vices together with tobacco and alcohol that dominated the 20th century and so, while Schüll is of course depicting its transformation into an algorithmic, solitary activity, the book’s concern with gambling feels like the product of a much simpler time. I think this is connected to the rise of what the sociologist Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou calls ‘speculative communities.’ This describes how the world is becoming further uncertain and financialised as platforms such as Uber, crypto markets and Airbnb cement their dominance. This leaves society with a constant background buzz of algorithms making us constantly feel off balance. The consequence is that there is an ever-present requirement in society to be a self-managing, actuarial being. Schüll writes this model of humans as being both subverted and conformed to by problem machine gamblers.

Overall, this book is fascinating and indirectly complements other canonical depictions of growing American atomisation in society.