How the World Became a Casino (With Natasha Schüll)
5/11/202649 min
The logic behind Polymarket, Kalshi and sports betting apps can be traced back to the inner workings of the slot machine. How did we get to a point where it’s legal for anyone to bet on anything? Be it the results of a baseball game or a land war in Europe, if you have access to a credit card and a computer you can try to predict the outcome of anything that’s happening in the world and win a little bit of money if you’re right. If we know that gambling can lead to high rates gambling addiction and financial ruin, why does it seem like our culture has suddenly embraced it? For years, anyone who has reported on our increasing addiction to technology has found their way to Natasha Natasha Dow Schüll’s book Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. The book is an ethnography of slot machines. It is based on many interviews with the people who make them and play them, a deep investigation of how they work, and how they fit into the larger context of casinos, Las Vegas, and gambling more broadly. Since it was published more than a decade ago, the logic of slot machines has extended far beyond Las Vegas. Every notification on our phone, trading platforms like Robinhood, the crypto craze, and now prediction markets, can be understood through the lens of slot machine design and Schüll work. That’s why I was incredibly happy she agreed to come on the podcast this week to discuss our current gambling-obsessed culture. https://www.natashadowschull.org YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/2kRAXeKhzNY Subscribe at 404media.co Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsNatasha Dow Schüll· Guest0:00
If you are constantly betting on this, how many times is a politician going to say a certain word, or how long will they shake someone's hand, you're not really listening fully to what they are saying. You're listening for those little words, and it's like, "Oh, ding, ding, ding."
Speaker 1· Host0:16
[upbeat music] Hello and welcome to the Four Four Media Podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds both online and IRL. Four Four Media is journalist founded and needs your support. To subscribe, go to fourfourmedia.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments, and they get early access to our interview series too. Get access to that content at fourfourmedia.co. This week we're joined by Natasha Schüll. Natasha is a professor and anthropologist at New York University. She is also the author of a book called Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. This book was published in twenty twelve. I stumbled into it while I was writing about social games and Facebook games while these were all the rage, and I stumbled into that book in the way that many journalists and researchers who want to study addiction and