The Slot Machine and Uncle Sam

Hayes, Chris. "The Slot Machine and Uncle Sam." chapter 3 of The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. NYC: Penguin Press, 2025. Available as E-Book and audiobook (both from Apple Books, audiobook from Audible, read by the author).

Note relationship of users and "the machine" of slot machines: being pulled into the zone of the machine, a special space more important than winning or losing. Cf. and contrast Harlan Ellison's "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes."

Hayes bases his discussion on the research of Natasha Dow Schüll, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, © 2012, published 2014). From the blurb from Princeton on Addiction:

Drawing on fifteen years of field research in Las Vegas, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll shows how the mechanical rhythm of electronic gambling pulls players into a trancelike state they call the “machine zone,” in which daily worries, social demands, and even bodily awareness fade away. Once in the zone, gambling addicts play not to win but simply to keep playing, for as long as possible — even at the cost of physical and economic exhaustion.[1]

Patriarchy aside, TV personality (as well as serious scholar and best-selling author) Chris Hayes will give Schüll's academic work a larger audience and the larger context of the competition for our attention in the age of celebrity, information, internet, and devices like the smart phone.

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Sidenote on "the zone": The great Utilitarian principle is "Seek pleasure; avoid pain,"[2] and seen through this figurative lens, masochism is very strange. Erlich read one masochist's noting that after a period of pain, he was "in the zone," and that ... receptive state was a strong reward for him. Getting into the rhythm of a machine giving intermittent rewards of winning (along with frequent mild punishment: losing) is less mysterious.

RDE, finishing, 24Mar25 f.