Trapped in the Maw of a Stillborn God (Pt. 1)

Vegas as a laboratory for surveillance and social control, the explosion of gambling as a sign of a degenerate culture seized by despair, AI delusions at CES, and the future.

Jacob Isaacsz van Swanenburg, Hell-Fantasy (Sybil and Aeneas in the Underworld), circa 1600

I am back from Las Vegas, my second visit there but first time going to CES—an annual consumer electronics trade show (CES is NOT short for Consumer Electronics Show, or anything really) where companies and countries tease glimpses of the future of consumer electronics. It may be hard to believe, but my foray into CES suggests the tech sector is getting even more removed from reality than its temporary host city.

I love Las Vegas because it is one of the more honest expressions of what it means to be an American: desperately scrambling to silence the occasional stirring of what passes for a soul in this country. And, yes, the city is very fun when you don’t have a Protestant upbringing buzzing in your ear (e.g. all the food, alcohol, drugs, strip clubs, parties, dayclubs, nightclubs, spectacles, desert adventures, and gambling you could want), but only if you don’t think too hard about it.

If you think about it, though, you end up in a dark place! Even before the Supreme Court struck down the federal prohibition on sports gambling in 2018, however, it was clear where we were headed. Take a 2017 Chris Hedges Truthdig column, in which he argues that a culture as committed as ours to gambling is one committed to numbing and killing itself by any means necessary:

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 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.

Hedges’ column starts by talking about addiction as of 2017: the United States consumes the vast majority of opioids used worldwide, sees tens of thousands die from overdoses, spends tens of billions on painkillers, lets millions suffer from alcohol abuse, and spends well over $100 billion on heroin, methamphetamines, cocaine, and weed. These are sums eclipsed by gambling. Here are the numbers (again from 2017):

Americans in 2013 lost $119 billion gambling, with an additional $70 billion—or $300 for every adult in the country—spent 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 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. “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.

Hedges sees these machines, casinos, and gambling more generally as finely tuned to "cater to the longing to flee from the oppressive world of dead-end jobs, crippling debt and social stagnation and a dysfunctional political system." To make his case, he leans heavily on Natasha Schüll, citing her landmark study of machine gambling in Las Vegas (“Addiction by Design”). On close examination, gamblers are less addicted to winning than to the "world-dissolving state of subjective suspension and affective calm" that machine play offers. The shape and feel of consoles and seats, the displays and interfaces, the acoustics of the floor, the lack of natural sunlight, these and much more are engineered to maximize “time on device” and thus the casino’s profits. To further that end, casinos engage in an impressive array of surveillance to track gamblers, construct personal profiles, kick out winners, and determine the breaking points of losers—intervening just before they leave so that time on device can be maximized.

Because of the extensive data collection involved in managing a casino (i.e. ensuring gamblers are losing as much as possible), casinos have also functioned as a testing grounds for other industries interested in surveillance. Schüll names "airports, financial trading floors, consumer shopping malls, insurance agencies, banks, and government programs like Homeland Security" as just some of the beneficiaries of Las Vegas's technological innovation.

In a conversation with Hedges, Schüll doesn’t mince words:

“When you look at contemporary slot machines, they don’t 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 couldn’t make sense of that for the longest time in my research. Gamblers would say, ‘It’s so weird, but sometimes when I win a big jackpot I feel angry and frustrated.’ What they’re playing for is not to win, but to stay in the zone. Winning disrupts that because suddenly the machine is frozen, it’s not letting you keep going. What are you going to do with that winning anyway? You’re 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 don’t 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 we’ve 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?”

“It’s the flip side to the incredible pressure, which is experienced as a burden, to self-manage, to make choices, to always be maximizing as you’re 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. It’s not action gambling. This is escape gambling. You can see it on their faces. The consequences and ethics are distasteful. It’s predatory. It’s predation on a type of escape where people are driven to exit the world. They’re not trying to win. The casinos are trying to win. They are trying to make revenue. They’re kind of in a partnership with the gamblers, but it’s a very asymmetrical partnership. The gamblers don’t want to win. They want to just keep going. Some people have likened gamblers to factory workers who are alienated by the machine. I don’t see it that way. This is more about machines designed to synchronize with what you want—in this case escape—and [to] profit from that.”

This, Hedges argues, will be the building block of our future politics: perpetual immiseration obscured by public-private partnerships to build digitally mediated pleasure palaces, alongside robust efforts to improve access to various opioids and soma, and reinforced with a healthy dose of outright force when we step out of line. After CES, I think this vision doubles as a diagram that connects gambling and Vegas (as a laboratory of odious technologies of surveillance and social control and extraction and immiseration across society) to CES (as a place to fine tune hype narratives obfuscating the scramble for these tools) to capitalist technology and our political-economic order.

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On Gambling

It may have been unleashed by the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision, but as I wrote in 2021 it was partly supercharged by the Covid-19 pandemic: speculative finance bullshit proliferated thanks to “fintech” that reduced barriers to losing money on stocks, crypto, and NFTs; more traditional finance bullshit in the form of SPACs; the aggressive lobbying by the gambling industry to set up online casinos, influencer gamblers targeting children, app-based sports gambling, and closer ties between sports leagues and gambling outfits.

In 2022, Jay Caspian Kang wrote in his New York Times column that while he doubted this wave of sports betting legalization would lead to a "long-term epidemic of problem gambling” he was concerned that "he could “no longer really tell the difference between buying cryptocurrencies, betting on sports or trading stocks” because they’ve become part of a “mega gamble with payouts that could change your life.” Kang offers an agnostic version of Hedges’ theory at one point: we shouldn’t read too much into the firms behind this gambling boom because they’re simply “doing whatever it takes to maximize their user bases and profits” but at the same time one can’t shake the fear that it “it reflects a desperation in today’s youth” made worse by the pandemic. Is this true?

When arguing that gambling was an outgrowth of a culture gripped by despair, corporate predation, and addiction by design, Hedges painted a pretty dire picture in 2017. How do things look today? The opioid crisis has gotten worse. Opioid overdose deaths grew to 81,806 by 2022 before starting to decline to an estimated 75,091 deaths in 2024. Painkillers were a $24 billion global market in 2015 and grew to $81 billion in 2023—the global opioid market is now about $23 billion, the United States accounting for $14.5 billion. Annual expenditures for marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamines, and heroin grew from $100 billion (across the 2000s) to almost $150 billion (by 2016), with weed’s market ($52 billion) becoming as large as coke’s ($24 billion) and meth’s ($27 billion) combined, while heroin’s market ($43 billion) grew to be the largest behind weed. Alcohol abuse has grown from 14 million adults to 28 million. Legal sports gambling hit $119 billion in 2023 and an estimated $150 billion in 2024. Illegal sports betting—which legalization was supposed to end—has metasized into a $64 billion market (this does not include the much larger $337 billion illegal online gambling market). A recent study found that sports betting increases a household’s likelihood of bankruptcy by 30 percent. Lottery sales have grown from $70 billion to $113 billion for FY 2024. In 2009, lotteries provided more revenue than revenue than corporate income taxes in 11 states—in 2022, this was true of 10 states. A 2024 analysis by The Economist found that the poorest households spend about 33 times more on lottery tickets than the richest households. And while lotteries are totted as a way to finance state aid for low-income residents, a Boston Globe investigation showed this couldn’t be further from the truth in Massachusetts, the state with the highest per capita spending on lottery tickets.

I could go on and on like this but it’s clear there has been a long-term problem when it comes to gambling, both in terms of what is driving its proliferation and the impact of it. Hedges was in right in 2017 and is even more right now: a culture as committed to preying upon and immiserating its most vulnerable citizens as ours turns out to be a culture where people will retreat into various escapes/addictions, such as gambling or substance abuse. From that come a few interlinked points:

(1) Regressively taxing the consumption of poor individuals is an easier political project to pitch than progressive taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals. The former lack the wealth or power to do anything about social policies that will further disempower and eventually kill them. Or as tech venture capitalist Marc Andreessen put it “I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet.”

(2) Sans popular pressure or legal advocacy, there’s not much political interest in seriously holding corporations accountable for preying on, poisoning, or killing poor people beyond fines and offering more sustainably harmful products. Forever chemicals, whose toxicity has been known for decades, poisoned every corner of this planet before the Biden administration introduced America’s first national drinking water standard aimed at reducing exposure for upwards of 100 million people. Johnson & Johnson knew for decades that the asbestos in its baby powder products was causing cancer, using the courts to evade multi-billion dollar settlements while opening a new front on the war against this country’s threadbare consumer protection laws. (J&J also agreed to pay $5 billion of a $26 billion settlement over its role in fueling the opioid crisis).

(3) In the 12 years since “Addiction by Design” was published, things have changed a bit. In 2019, Kevin Litman-Navarro wrote about a nascent attempt by NBC Sports Washington to create an alternate broadcast that offered "predictive gaming" which enabled bets on every single aspect of the game (halftime score, turnover, dunks, etc.) "Predictive gaming is like fantasy football meets roulette, and if broadcasters adopt techniques perfected by casinos (and adopted by social media sites to keep people engaged, the future of sports gambling could make it a lot more addictive,” Litman-Navarro warned. In a 2023 talk, Schüll reflects on how online gambling would prove to be even more addictive than casino machines:

It's solitary. It's you and the machine. There's no person interrupting or putting a social temporality on the experience—it's you and the machine. It's extremely rapid feedback and, again, it's continuous without a set ending. It's potentially never-ending! You could just keep going—even now in sports-betting, because when a game ends you just switch over to another game on the same app or site. It could be ping-pong in Poland, table tennis in Amsterdam. All of this creates a much deeper psychological engagement than offline sports betting. It feels more like a traditional slot machine in that sense and it's harder to stop.

And to extend our third point, Schüll adds that while her book ended with the gambling industry expressing anxiety about its slot machine clientele aging out, online gambling has given them access to incredibly young blood that will make for lifelong customers (an anxiety familiar to the tobacco industry as it fought to stop older smokers from quitting, then aggressively targeted young people with “smokeless” products to cultivate a new generation of lifelong smokers).

Weaponized pleasure and hedonic engineering are not new concepts when it comes to consumer products, nor is the idea that something can be ubiquitous yet designed in a way that slowly kills its consumers as profitably as possible. In fact, the usual response to this is “regrettable substitution” where the toxic compound or hazardous product is banned, but replaced with something nearly identical. Despite this, people will debate whether the supposed benefits (taxes, recreation, etc.), especially when it comes to gambling. I think it clearly causes more harm than its worth, however! And not just for gambling—which, again, is intentionally designed to be as addictive as possible with finely tuned physical environments as well as digital technologies and has served as a laboratory for tools of surveillance + social control—but for the multitude of industries and spheres of life that have been touched by gambling and its tech innovations.

Gambling isn’t just concerning because it is powered by and advances noxious technologies, but because it is transforming how we engage with life. Nate Silver argues in his book “On the Edge” that risk-taking and a progressional gambler’s mindset are increasingly defining how decisions are made across our society:

The River is a sprawling ecosystem of like-minded people that includes everyone from low-stakes poker pros just trying to grind out a living to crypto kings and venture-capital billionaires. It is a way of thinking and a mode of life. People don’t know very much about the River, but they should. Most Riverians aren’t rich and powerful. But rich and powerful people are disproportionately likely to be Riverians compared to the rest of the population.

“Upriver” live the rationalists and effective altruists who rub shoulders with crypto and artificial intelligence evangelists. “Midriver” is where Silicon Valley and Wall Street investors seek returns at great cost to the rest of society. “Downriver” we find “lots of tourists and lots of gambling” as people flock to casino floors and sports books. And just further out we come across the “Archipelago” where “pretty much anything goes” —it’s here that the “weakest of the herd” are picked off by online poker, as well as sports betting and crypto speculation (and crypto casinos).

Silver doesn’t attempt to obfuscate the externalities of a world dominated by The River, but his bias is clear (this is his “tribe” and the book tends to celebrate it). Here he dips his toe into the AI risk debate (can we create superintelligent machines and what will they do with us) with a potential future called “Hyper-Commodified Casino Capitalism:

“The world becomes more casino-like: gamified, commodified, quantified, monitored and manipulated, and more elaborately tiered between the haves and have-nots. People with a canny perception of risk might thrive, but most people won’t. GDP growth might be high, but the gains will be unevenly distributed. Agency will be more unequal still; a few large companies, aided by their AIs, will have more power than democratically elected governments. Most people won’t have fulfilling, meaningful jobs, and many will hand their decision-making over to AIs that purport to have their best interest in mind but instead trap them in a loop of button-clicking compulsions. Are these AIs making people happy? Well, they’re making people content, for that’s what the algorithms will optimize for. Happiness is hard to measure. The soul of humanity dies a slow and unmourned death at some point in the mid-2050s.”

Silver offers this as a possible dystopia, but frankly it seems like one of the best-case outcomes available to us considering the ascendance of Silicon Valley’s reactionaries. The world that lies waiting for us will not come to pass because of gambling, though gambling is actively ruining the one we currently live in.

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On CES

What does all of this have to do with CES? As long as I’ve been aware of CES, it has been related to me as a place where vendors use products that may or may not be real to peacock for investors ($$$), journalists (coverage), and other firms (deals). Sacrifice a virgin while dancing in the moonlight and you’re a superstitious nut. Sacrifice a pile of money while dancing in a windowless casino and you’re what Silicon Valley’s accelerationists call “hyperstitious”—able to “transmute lies into truths” by an obscure alchemical science known as wealth.

And so: entrepreneurs and investors enter into a dance where half-baked ideas or narrow use cases are given new life (scale) with a sufficient infusion of capital; journalists are lied to, seduced, distracted, or otherwise deputized in an extravagant masturbatory ritual performed with ironic self-awareness. “Don’t you see that while A is obviously never happening, B would be a genuine improvement?” I'm assured by financiers and writers who’ve come to the conference every year seriously wondering where their promised robot servants and sentient assistants are!

What was actually being offered at CES? This year, it was what Jared Newman called “AI gaslighting” as firms previewed plans to trick consumers into thinking long-offered features were new innovations made possible by “AI.” I saw a humanoid robots disclose “I am a text-based generative AI chatbot” before posing with audience members and answering questions as part of a transparent gimmick, crypto bros spin sleek trading platforms as financial AI agents, and salespeople use “AI” to refer to ecosystems of luxury surveillance devices. Newman saw TV makers rebrand extant personalized recommendation and actor recognition systems as cutting-edge “AI”, PCs that let you optimize graphics settings with chatbots instead of singular buttons, and hardware (like smart glasses) that simply grafted large language models onto their products. Newman offers a somewhat upbeat explanation for this:

Hardware makers want to demonstrate that they’re part of the AI revolution, but they don’t make the AI themselves and are bound by the limits of what large language models can do (which is still far from what we’ve been promised they can do). Outside of a few stray announcements, such as Nvidia’s $3,000 desktop AI computer for programmers, much of what happened at CES will have little direct bearing on where AI goes from here.

…

Device makers, in other words, are trying to take credit for the wrong thing. I left CES feeling upbeat about the state of consumer electronics, but with a strange feeling that I had to ignore a vast amount of its messaging to get there.

I don’t think we can easily ignore the “vast amount” of gaslighting though there is something to Newman’s point about this being a “hardware” show amidst a “software” frenzy. Still, CES claims it there were an estimated 141,000 attendees, 4500 exhibitors, and 6000 "global media, content creators, and industry analysts.” We should be concerned if even a small fraction of this exhibition was vaporware—which it tends to be—and even more so if a significant portion of it is overtaken with snake oil salesmen insisting their products are now AI-powered—which it seemed to be.

I, and many others, have written extensively about the danger that our delusions about “AI” pose. It threatens to narrow our institutional imagination to the dreams of monopolistic firms and flood the zone with propaganda to reinforce these nightmarish visions, rehabilitate reactionary ideologies that pine for the ancien régime, and serves to enrich some of the least among us: white South Africans who don’t seem to have gotten over the end of apartheid. The concern about the Subprime AI crisis, as Ed Zitron puts it, is that it will not only misallocate resources in a bubble that’ll burst and leave behind immiserated masses, dessicated public institutions, and an increasingly withered capacity for political action not aligned with Wall Street/Silicon Valley’s interests BUT that it’ll empower masters of the universe like Peter Thiel who seem interested in building the worst possible future for all but themselves.

Take John Ganz’s read of a recent Financial Times op-ed by Thiel:

Does Thiel believe, along with Girard, that the scapegoat mechanism no longer works, or just that we need new myths and scapegoats? Is he really a Christian or a pagan worshipping at the altar of technological Moloch? When the Silicon Valley occultists commune with the spirits are they talking to God or the Devil? It seems like as the alternative to violence spinning out of control, he wants to focus it on a few enemies, he wants the new regime to produce scapegoats. I think he doesn’t want it to look too savage and primitive. It has to have some semblance of order, otherwise, it will be too clear what’s going on—like the text, it needs to be a little esoteric. It has to have the appurtenances of justice and truth and be given a Christian covering, the possibility of forgiveness and mercy.

If you are creeped out by now that’s the point: this is all meant to be a little scary. He likes the whiff of incense and the air of hocus pocus. The founder of Palantir wants to imagine himself as a sorcerer. It is meant to sound impressive and, yes, stupefying. But he is not just mystifying but also himself mystified: fetishizing the world of commodities and their production as a religion. Being in the position to forgive is being in a position of power. And perhaps the ultimate one. Another question we might put to all these characters: Who do you think you are? God?

An honest look at Palo Alto’s past (eugenics, environmental ruin, and surveillance) and present (“less a fascism of blood and soil than a nihilistic capitalism of the bottom line” as Quinn Slobodian puts it) suggests the world we’re racing towards will be dominated by bantustans, though I’m sure the Riverians won’t have much qualms about putting casinos inside of them. The sooner we free ourselves of delusions about Silicon Valley’s supposed right-wing turn, the sooner we can articulate the futures we do or don’t want (and the technologies involved in both) and speak a bit more bravely about the gap between the stakes and our willingness to act. Quickly approaching is the day when we will see the embrace of a genocidal telos (“exterminism”) that’ll seek to sacrifice the environment, genetically and socially engineer humanity, and liquidate the uncooperative elements. All of the ingredients are already there. Now we wait for the Great Work that will bring together the brigands laying waste to our world for one last orgy of violence. Will it be those that seek to purify capitalism of its democratic flaw and colored defects? Or those that promise us it will give birth to yet another stillborn god?