The Las Vegas strip is alien. Its buildings are at once too fanciful and too utilitarian to be of this world, hulking rectangular prisms designed for the masses yet draped in the trappings of opulence and the fantastic. Its incongruity promises further strangeness, luring thousands to the city each year in the hopes of finding an escape from everyday tedium.
But what makes Las Vegas so interesting — if anything — is how it is just like the rest of America but more so. Though it casts itself as a bulwark of hedonism, an oasis of social rebellion where vacationers can escape the ennui and conformity of their everyday lives, there’s nothing countercultural about it. Rather, Las Vegas takes contemporary capitalism to its logical extreme, unleashing the social forces that underlie every American city and embodying them in ersatz monuments.
Las Vegas has taken to heart the famous lesson attributed — probably falsely — to Marx that to teach a man to fish is to ruin a wonderful business opportunity. It is a city of yearning, awash in dopamine and desire, where the economically powerful capitalize on managed dissatisfaction. There is no moment when blackjack players feel they have gotten all they came for, as there is always the anticipation of what one more hand might bring. The same is true of the city’s other primary industry: the business of sex. The city’s dancers and strip clubs don’t sell sexual satisfaction so much as stoke inexhaustible desire. Even casino architecture promotes dissatisfaction: The common spaces never fully achieve closure, instead gently twisting out of sight, always suggesting that something more can be had if one would venture a little further.
At the same time, the spaces are designed to refresh and rejuvenate, to psychologically prepare gamblers to play just one more round. The ploy works: After hours of wandering through the casinos watching pensioners slowly pour their savings into the slot machines’ flashing abyss, it becomes clear that some sort of psychological brake is being overridden. If mutually voluntary interactions are supposed to leave both parties better off, as neoclassical economists would have us believe, then this is a clear and enraging counterexample.
Casino owners tend to write off these all-day, paycheck-liquidating customers as “problem gamblers,” framing them as a small group of cognitively abnormal individuals unfit for “gaming” and in need of psychological assistance. The implication is that most gambling is done by “healthy gamblers” who represent the normal majority. However, while “problem gamblers” may not be representative of the general public, they are very much representative of what allows Las Vegas casinos to thrive. In Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, Natasha Dow Schüll reports that though “problem gamblers” amount to only a small subset of the general population, they account for between 30 percent to 60 percent of casino profits.
Further, Schüll debunks the myth that there is a clear cutoff between those who are healthy and those who “have a problem,” pointing out that almost all regular gamblers sit on a spectrum of reckless gambling. By fostering an artificial dichotomy between “normal” and “problem” gamblers, she argues, casinos render invisible their exploitation of existing addicts and their efforts to create new ones through the proliferation of the sorts of stimulation that can lure people into giving up everything.
Casinos feature what researchers call “playground designs” — spaces designed to energize, stimulate, and promote exploration — and a growing body of empirical evidence suggests that they measurably increase the amount people gamble. The architectural manipulation is so brazen that it is perversely accepted as natural: Of course commercial space is engineered to make us spend. And why wouldn’t there be privately owned, multi-million-dollar edifices built to control our behavior? When we imagine social control, the jump is almost inevitably made to dystopias of mass coercion and centralized authority. In Las Vegas, however we see its true form: spaces, structures, and spectacles controlled by the few to extract wealth from the many. What does social control really look like? It looks like a casino.
But what makes Las Vegas so interesting — if anything — is how it is just like the rest of America but more so. Though it casts itself as a bulwark of hedonism, an oasis of social rebellion where vacationers can escape the ennui and conformity of their everyday lives, there’s nothing countercultural about it. Rather, Las Vegas takes contemporary capitalism to its logical extreme, unleashing the social forces that underlie every American city and embodying them in ersatz monuments.
Las Vegas has taken to heart the famous lesson attributed — probably falsely — to Marx that to teach a man to fish is to ruin a wonderful business opportunity. It is a city of yearning, awash in dopamine and desire, where the economically powerful capitalize on managed dissatisfaction. There is no moment when blackjack players feel they have gotten all they came for, as there is always the anticipation of what one more hand might bring. The same is true of the city’s other primary industry: the business of sex. The city’s dancers and strip clubs don’t sell sexual satisfaction so much as stoke inexhaustible desire. Even casino architecture promotes dissatisfaction: The common spaces never fully achieve closure, instead gently twisting out of sight, always suggesting that something more can be had if one would venture a little further.
At the same time, the spaces are designed to refresh and rejuvenate, to psychologically prepare gamblers to play just one more round. The ploy works: After hours of wandering through the casinos watching pensioners slowly pour their savings into the slot machines’ flashing abyss, it becomes clear that some sort of psychological brake is being overridden. If mutually voluntary interactions are supposed to leave both parties better off, as neoclassical economists would have us believe, then this is a clear and enraging counterexample.
Casino owners tend to write off these all-day, paycheck-liquidating customers as “problem gamblers,” framing them as a small group of cognitively abnormal individuals unfit for “gaming” and in need of psychological assistance. The implication is that most gambling is done by “healthy gamblers” who represent the normal majority. However, while “problem gamblers” may not be representative of the general public, they are very much representative of what allows Las Vegas casinos to thrive. In Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, Natasha Dow Schüll reports that though “problem gamblers” amount to only a small subset of the general population, they account for between 30 percent to 60 percent of casino profits.
Further, Schüll debunks the myth that there is a clear cutoff between those who are healthy and those who “have a problem,” pointing out that almost all regular gamblers sit on a spectrum of reckless gambling. By fostering an artificial dichotomy between “normal” and “problem” gamblers, she argues, casinos render invisible their exploitation of existing addicts and their efforts to create new ones through the proliferation of the sorts of stimulation that can lure people into giving up everything.
Casinos feature what researchers call “playground designs” — spaces designed to energize, stimulate, and promote exploration — and a growing body of empirical evidence suggests that they measurably increase the amount people gamble. The architectural manipulation is so brazen that it is perversely accepted as natural: Of course commercial space is engineered to make us spend. And why wouldn’t there be privately owned, multi-million-dollar edifices built to control our behavior? When we imagine social control, the jump is almost inevitably made to dystopias of mass coercion and centralized authority. In Las Vegas, however we see its true form: spaces, structures, and spectacles controlled by the few to extract wealth from the many. What does social control really look like? It looks like a casino.
by Jesse Elias Spafford, New Inquiry | Read more:
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