Truthdig
A Nation of the Walking Dead
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_nation_of_the_walking_dead_20170402/
Posted on Apr 2, 2017
By Chris Hedges
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
Opioids and experiences that simulate the deadening effects of narcotics are
mechanisms to keep us submissive and depoliticized. Desperate citizens in
Aldous Huxleys 1932 novel Brave New World ingested the pleasure drug soma
to check out of reality. Our own versions of soma allow tens of millions of
Americans to retreat daily into addictive mousetraps that generate a
self-induced autism.
The United States consumes 80 percent
(http://lab.express-scripts.com/lab/insights/drug-safety-and-abuse/americas-
pain-points) of opioids used worldwide, and more than 33,000 died in this
country in 2015 from opioid overdoses. There are 300 million prescriptions
written and $24 billion spent annually in the U.S. for painkillers.
Americans supplement this mostly legal addiction with over $100 billion a
year in illicit marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin. And nearly
14 million U.S. adults, one in every 13, regularly abuse alcohol.
But these monetary figures are far less than what we spend on gambling.
Americans in 2013 lost $119 billion gambling
(http://theweek.com/articles/451623/how-did-americans-manage-lose-119-billio
n-gambling-last-year) , with an additional $70 billionor $300 for every
adult in the countryspent on lottery tickets.
Federal and state governments, reliant on tax revenues from legal gambling
and on lottery ticket sales, will do nothing to halt the expansion of the
industry or the economic and psychological toll it exacts on those in
financial distress. State-run lottery games had sales of $73.9 billion
(https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/14/your-money/the-billion-dollar-lottery-ja
ckpot-engineered-to-drain-your-wallet.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FLo
tteries&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics®ion=stream&module=stre
am_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=collection&_r=1 ) in 2015,
according to the North American Association of State and Provincial
Lotteries. This revenue is vital to budgets beset by declining incomes,
deindustrialization and austerity. State lotteries provided more revenue
than state corporate-income taxes in 11 of the 43 states where they were
legal, including Delaware, Rhode Island, and South Dakota, Derek Thompson
wrote in The Atlantic
(https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/lotteries-americas-70-
billion-shame/392870/ ) . The poorest third of households buy half of all
lotto tickets, he noted. Gambling is a stealth tax on poor people hoping to
beat the nearly impossible odds. Governmental income from gambling is an
effort to make up for the taxes the rich and corporations no longer pay.
Slot machines and other electronic gambling devices are engineered to draw
us into an Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit hole. They, like our personal
computers and hand-held devices, cater to the longing to flee from the
oppressive world of dead-end jobs, crippling debt and social stagnation and
a dysfunctional political system. We become rats in a Skinner box
(https://www.google.com/#q=skinner+box&*) , frantically pulling levers until
we are addicted and finally entranced by our compulsion to achieve fleeting,
intermittent and adrenaline-driven rewards. Much like what happens to people
using slot machines, the pigeons or rats in Skinners experiments
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner) that did not know when they
would get a reward, or how much they would get, became the most heavily
addicted to operating the levers or pedals. Indeed, Skinner used slot
machines as a metaphor for his experiments.
The engineers of Americas gambling industry are as skillful at forming
addiction as the countrys top five opioid producersPurdue Pharma, Johnson
& Johnson, Insys Therapeutics, Mylan and Depomed. There are 460 commercial
casinos, 486 tribal casinos, 350 card rooms, 55 racetracks and hundreds of
thousands of gaming devices
(http://www.cbsnews.com/news/slot-machines-the-big-gamble-07-01-2011/) ,
many located in convenience stores, gas stations, bars, airports and even
supermarkets.
The rush of anticipation, available in 20-second bursts, over hours, days,
weeks and months creates an addictive psychological zone that the industry
calls continuous gaming productivity. Heart rates and blood pressure rise.
Time, space, the value of money and human relationships hypnotically
dissolve. A state of extreme social isolation occurs.
Gambling addicts, like many addicts, are often driven to crime, bankruptcy
and eventual imprisonment. Many lose everythingtheir marriages, their
families, their jobs, their emotional health and sometimes their lives.
Gambling addicts have the highest rate of suicide attempts among addicts of
any kind1 in 5, or 20 percentaccording to the National Council on Problem
Gambling.
Donald Trump is in large part a product of gambling culture. His career has
not been about making products but about selling intangible and fleeting
experiences. He preys on the desperate by offering them escapist fantasies.
This world is about glitter, noise and hypeTrump called the Trump Taj
Mahal, his now-closed casino, the eighth wonder of the world. The more
money you spent, the greater your value, the more you were pampered, given
free hotel rooms and gifts, handed passes to special clubs with lavish
buffets. Scantily clad hostesses hovered around you serving complimentary
drinks. If you spent big, you were invited to exclusive parties attended by
supermodels and famous athletes. Decorated chipssome featuring a photo of
Donald Trumpturned cash into a species of Monopoly money. But in the end,
when you were broke, when there was no more money in your bank account and
your credit cards were maxed out, you were thrown back, in even greater
financial distress, into the dreary universe you tried to obliterate.
Roger Caillois, the French sociologist, wrote that the pathologies of a
culture are captured in the games the culture venerates. Old forms of
gambling such as blackjack and poker allowed the gambler to take risks, make
decisions and even, in his or her mind, achieve a kind of individualism or
heroism at the gambling table. They provided a way, it can be argued, to
assert an alternative identity for a brief moment. But the newer form,
machine gambling, is an erasure of the self. Slot machines, which produce 85
percent of the profits at casinos, are, as the sociologist Henry Lesieur
wrote, an addiction delivery device. They are electronic morphine, the
crack cocaine of gambling. They are not about risk or about making
decisions, but about creating somnambulism, putting a player into a
trancelike state that can last for hours. It is a pathway, as sociologist
Natasha Dow Schüll
(http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/how_gambling_become_americas_premier_e
ntertainment_escape_20170328 ) points out, to becoming the walking dead.
This yearning for a state of nonbeing is what Sigmund Freud called the
death instinct. It is the overpowering drive by a depressed and traumatized
person to seek pleasure in a self-destructive activity that ultimately kills
the organism.
It is not the chance of winning to which they become addicted, Schüll
writes in Addiction by Design (http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9156.html
) : Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, rather, what addicts them is the
world-dissolving state of subjective suspension and affective calm they
derive from machine play.
Gamblers are closely tracked by the casino industry. The length of time
gamblers spend on machines increases the profits for the casino. The science
of keeping people in front of slot machinescalled time on device within
the industryhas led to the creation of ergonomic consoles, the appealing,
warm screens on slot machines, seductive video graphics and surround-sound
acoustics.
The industry also invests heavily in surveillance. Gamblers carry player or
loyalty cards. They insert these cards into the slot machines when they
play. These cards, linked to a central database, are used by the industry to
build profiles of gamblers. The value and frequency of bets are captured,
along with wins and losses. The industry knows when the players take breaks,
where and what they eat in the casinos, what they drink and what hotel rooms
they select. Slowly the traits and the habits of the gambler, triangulated
with demographic data, are pieced together to allow the industry to build a
personal profile. With the profile, the casino determines at what point a
player will accumulate too many losses and too much pain and is about to
walk away from a machine. A few moments before that pain level is reached, a
hostess will magically appear with a free drink, a voucher for a meal or
tickets to a show. Casinos can also use profiles to project how much a
player will spend gambling during his or her lifetime.
The industry was the human laboratory for refinements now incorporated into
the security and surveillance organs of the state. Many surveillance and
marketing innovations first used in casinos were only later adapted to other
domains, Schüll writes, including airports, financial trading floors,
consumer shopping malls, insurance agencies, banks, and government programs
like Homeland Security.
They have an algorithm that senses your pain points, your sweet spots,
Schüll told me. The zone is a term that I kept hearing over and over again
as I went to gamblers anonymous meetings and spoke to gambling addicts.
This really describes a state of flow where time, space, monetary value and
other people fall away. You might say a state of flow, or the zone, sounds
very different from the thrills and suspense of gambling. But what the
casinos have hit upon is that [they] actually make more money when [they]
design a flow space into these machines. People dont even know that theyre
losing. They just sit there. Again, its time on machines.
When you look at contemporary slot machines, they dont operate on
volatility, she continued. One designer of the mathematics and algorithm
of these games said we want an algorithm that makes you feel like you are
reclining on a couch. The curves, architecture and the softly pixelated
lights, they want you to sit back and go with the flow. I just couldnt make
sense of that for the longest time in my research. Gamblers would say, Its
so weird, but sometimes when I win a big jackpot I feel angry and
frustrated. What theyre playing for is not to win, but to stay in the
zone. Winning disrupts that because suddenly the machine is frozen, its not
letting you keep going. What are you going to do with that winning anyway?
Youre just going to feed it back into the machines. This is more about mood
modulation. Affect modulation. Using technologies to dampen anxieties and
exit the world. We dont just see it in Las Vegas. We see it in the subways
every morning. The rise of all of these screen-based technologies and the
little games that weve all become so absorbed in. What gamblers articulate
is a desire to really lose a sense of self. They lose time, space, money
value, and a sense of being in the world. What is that about? What does that
say? How do we diagnose that?
Its the flip side to the incredible pressure, which is experienced as a
burden, to self-manage, to make choices, to always be maximizing as youre
living life in this entrepreneurial mode, she said. We talk about this as
the subjective side of the neoliberal agenda, where pressure is put on
individuals to regulate themselves. In this case, they are regulating
themselves, but they are regulating themselves away from that. This really
is a mode of escape. Its not action gambling. This is escape gambling. You
can see it on their faces. The consequences and ethics are distasteful. Its
predatory. Its predation on a type of escape where people are driven to
exit the world. Theyre not trying to win. The casinos are trying to win.
They are trying to make revenue. Theyre kind of in a partnership with the
gamblers, but its a very asymmetrical partnership. The gamblers dont want
to win. They want to just keep going. Some people have likened gamblers to
factory workers who are alienated by the machine. I dont see it that way.
This is more about machines designed to synchronize with what you wantin
this case escapeand [to] profit from that.
Trump understands this longing for escape and the art of creating an updated
version of P.T. Barnums Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan &
Hippodrome. Trump used his skills as a con artist to pull in hundreds of
millions of dollars and then to achieve the presidency.
People have called it a mode of ludo-capitalism
(http://alex-reid.net/2007/11/ludo-capitalism.html) , Schüll said. In a
way, you can connect that to the ludo-politics that we see. Pleasure. To get
what you want. What you want is to escape into a flow, to be taken away. We
see this in the political domain a lotin the rallies, in the surging of
feelings, the distraction. If you look at the way a casino is designed, and
you remember that Trump is a designer of many casinos, including his
non-casino properties, they follow the same design logic of disorientation
and trying to sweep people away from themselves, away from rationality, away
from a position where they have clear lines of sight and can act as
decision-making subjects. You see that on the floors of casinos, you see
that in political rhetoric today.
The corporate state will expand our access to a variety of opioids and
numbing situations to temporarily alleviate our stress, financial
dislocations, depression and anxiety. Aided by state and local governments,
it will build new pleasure palaces. It will lure millions into its
glittering and seductive Venus flytraps. It will make sure we have tempting
retreats within easy reach to achieve a death-in-life experience. Much of
the society will be put to sleep. Those who refuse to become zombies, who
rise up to resist, who seek at all costs to remain distinct individuals,
will be silenced with the corporate states cruder tool for submission:
force.
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