Machine life: An ethnography of gambling and compulsion in Las Vegas.

摘要

This thesis examines the lives of compulsive machine gamblers in Las Vegas, Nevada, as a way to understand how life becomes intertwined with, and articulated through, modern technologies. I follow gamblers as they move through a landscape of elicited and managed risk, encountering machines of chance engineered to prompt their impulses, and diagnostic and therapeutic apparatuses crafted to diminish their impulses (Gamblers Anonymous meetings, internet recovery sites, medical regimens, drug trials). These different machines engage a range of psychodynamic and existential predicaments, becoming the technological media through which gamblers may escape, rehearse, multiply, and sometimes, provisionally resolve such predicaments. I argue that ambivalent subjective investiture in technologies has today become a critical element in the functioning of those technologies.; I combine this detailed ethnography of gamblers' lifeworlds and machine encounters with empirically grounded, in-depth anthropological analyses of the design principles of gaming industry technology engineers and the therapeutic practices of self-help and professional addiction clinics. Although the goals of game design and clinical settings are seemingly at odds---to coax play, and to diminish it---the entertainment industry and the recovery industry are similarly oriented to the human being as a system of rewards that can be triggered or deactivated, and both work to develop technologies to provoke, shape, and direct the behavior of this system. In this sense, therapeutic techniques such as impulse management and pharmacological regimens are continuous with the gaming devices whose effects they aim to counter.; Like gaming engineers and recovery professionals, gamblers themselves act as "technicians of attachment," drawing upon a range of tools and techniques to bind, direct, and monitor their worldly attachments. They express their problematic attachments through a diffuse matrix of explanatory codes. I examine the code of addiction in particular detail, arguing that it has become the preferred vehicle for articulating the problem of human attachment in its diverse technological formats. I conclude with a set of speculations on a possible ethics of cyborg culture---how one might imagine and invent more livable attachments in an increasingly technologized field of existence.