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Posting In The Age Of Chance [ARCHIVE PULL] · Never Post

0:02
Mike Rugnetta: I've been thinking often lately about how
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hard it is to think and how much incentive there is not to or
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really how much incentive there is to do any number of other
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things. To catch up in the million different little ways we
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have to catch up. To engage in the million different little
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ways we have to engage. The apps, processes, games, alerts,
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feeds, they all need our attention. And I've been
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thinking of how, maybe as recently as a few years ago, I
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could feel my attention being pulled in all these different
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directions.
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And today, it just is. I juggle all the little numbers and
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pixels and emails and badges, not passively, but habitually.
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My little army of digital demands floats around me, my own
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personal cloud. Knowing this archive poll about the
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relationship between being online and the calculation of
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probability, the concept of chance was coming up, I went
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back to addiction by design, Natasha Dow Schul's landmark
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work on the design of slot machines specifically in
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addictive technologies generally. In chapter four, in a
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section titled upping the ante, tolerance for technology, she
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writes about the video poker arms race where machine
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manufacturers figured out that players wouldn't just tolerate
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more complex games.
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They would acclimate to and eventually become bored by them.
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She writes, 50 play poker is 30 to 40 times faster and more
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likely to render a win than a game of single hand poker.
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Instead of seeing a royal flush once every eighty hours, a
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player sees one every two to three hours along with many
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smaller wins. Rather than overstimulating players, the
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intensified speed and reward frequency of such a game
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enhances the flow of play. You get a smoother ride, video poker
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expert Bob Dancer told me, repeating what is often said of
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multiline video slots.
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It's a bumpier ride with just one hand. When I hit a jackpot
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nowadays, said Randall of his multi hand video poker play, I
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don't even blink. I don't miss a beat. In the language of
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behaviorism, he has habituated to a higher magnitude of event
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frequencies, achieving a kind of tolerance or decreased
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responsiveness to the spikes of chance that happen during play.
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Recently, I read a piece by Jake Pearson published by ProPublica.
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It's called I deliberately bet like a problem gambler.
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DraftKings made me a VIP, and I think every single one of you
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should read it. The gist is exactly what the title states.
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Pearson talked to former gambling addicts and experts and
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asked, what would someone with a problem do in this scenario,
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that scenario, and so on? And whatever he was told, he would
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do it exactly.
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More often than not, his actions were rewarded even as he
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followed one bet with another, when his wagers would jump
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irresponsibly, when he would very clearly exhibit the signs
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of someone stuck, clawing every which way but out, exhibiting,
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as it were, a decreased responsiveness to the spikes of
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chance that happen during play. When I hit a jackpot nowadays,
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said Randall of his multi hand video poker play, I don't even
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blink. I don't miss a beat. I find now online scrolling,
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posting, reading, watching. I have to try to miss a beat.
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I have to build the beats in on purpose, consciously. I have to
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think about the beats. I have to will myself into a
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responsiveness to the spikes of chance that happen because of
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how hard it is to think, because of how much incentive there is
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to do any number of other things. That was a good one. A
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good video.
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Something funny. Something informative. Maybe we stop here.
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It felt when we first published this segment convenient that the
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ecosystem which shaped social media also shaped gambling apps.
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Like environmental pressures would, of course, lead these two
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things to develop similar characteristics to ensure
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individual survival.
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Now it is clear that they are cut from the same cloth and
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depend on one another in multiple and perhaps
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inextricable ways. There is no gambling without social media,
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and there is no social media, not anymore, without gambling.
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If you can, try to imagine a world without chance. A view of
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things absent the idea that each action you take and many of the
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events that occur around you are associated with probability.
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That there's some numerical weight indicating how likely an
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outcome is.
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And in a perfectly perceivable world, where the chance of any
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given outcome is always calculable and maybe even
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pliable. It's a tough exercise, banishing chance. How likely are
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you to get the job or have a kid or make the bus or get sick or
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get in a car accident or hit by lightning or get those concert
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tickets? Might your basement flood or the stock market soar
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or so on and so on and so on. Our relationship to and
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understandings of and the decisions we make in the world
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are deeply informed by probabilities.
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We think of increasing and decreasing odds, of taking
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actions to encourage or discourage outcomes. We balance
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risks, rewards, costs, returns, and we hope always that the odds
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are in our favor. How else is there to live? Well, before
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probability, there was god, I guess. The divine.
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A force which decides in its infinite and often inscrutable
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wisdom how things happen and why. Before probability, it
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wasn't luck or not just luck, but divine intervention that
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determined the outcome of things. Forces beyond our
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understanding would intercede in the material world to make
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things just so for their purposes and maybe for ours if
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we were lucky. But outcomes weren't weighted. There was no
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probabilistic consideration until markets, economic markets,
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and eventually gambling.
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I promise we will eventually get to the Internet. In her book,
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The Age of Chance, Gerda Reith, a sociologist and professor of
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social sciences at Glasgow University who studies the role
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and impacts of gambling in Western culture, describes how
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the growth of mercantile capitalism around Europe in the
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seventeenth century created quote, an entrepreneurial risk
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taking milieu. Large sums of money were tied up in
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speculation, the first stocks and securities, as well as the
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goods of physical trade. People naturally sought to mitigate the
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many risks of ocean travel and this gave rise to the insurance
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industry. Insurance had existed for centuries, but in the
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seventeenth century, there arose the first type for marine
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shipments specifically that sought to calculate
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probabilities of loss.
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Quickly, Reith explains, the practice extended beyond
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maritime trade, leading to an industry of, quote, ambitious
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companies organizing a form of speculative insurance which
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could be purchased for anything. What happened, you might wonder,
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to fate, to predestination, to the will of a higher power? It
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is as though the idea, Reith writes, that fate or providence
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would oversee the unfolding of events could no longer provide
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sufficient assurance to those whose goods might be at stake in
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trading situations, end quote. The world suddenly looked
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dangerous and risky and the powerful had money to make by
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harnessing that risk. This attitude expanded.
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Numbers, numeracy, and enumeration proliferated in
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enlightenment Europe and a newly acquired calculative attitude as
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Reith calls it extended over all aspects of life. Pascal's wager,
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the idea that it's a better bet to lead a life free of sin even
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if you don't believe in God just in case there is eternal life
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after death, sparked what Reith calls a burst of interest in
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chance, after which began in earnest the study of
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probabilities. Though this genealogy leads us back to
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mercantilism, the eighteenth century thinkers who contributed
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most to the approaches and principles of probability
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focused their studies largely on games and gambling, which they
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saw, Reith writes, as the paradigmatic aleatory contract.
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Not least of the reasons why being the growth in mercantilism
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led to a growth in wealth, which led to a growth in disposable
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income that was wagered liberally at a moment of global
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transition. Quote, the craze for betting on anything was a means
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of applying money and hence value to opinions, which in an
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age of dramatic economic, political, and religious
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upheaval had become unstable.
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End quote. To study probabilities at this time was
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to study life as it was lived. This progression from a world
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without a view of chance to a world dominated by it mirrors my
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own progression online and in a few ways, the progression of the
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Internet itself. At first, I possessed only a remote sense of
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risk and none of probability using the Internet. I didn't
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consider how likely I might be in one scenario or another owing
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to some set of choices or another that I'd make friends.
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That I'd make and upload something that anybody outside
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of my immediate circle might find. That I as a person could
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become known even in a limited sort of way. And certainly, I
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never considered that I might make a living somehow. I didn't
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consider the chances I might stumble onto formative media or
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communities or experiences. These things happened or they
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didn't.
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Using the Internet for me for a while really was not unlike
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visiting the library or the CD store. Each of these abounded
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locale in which I felt safe to experiment in mediated
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experiences with minimal cost and basically no sense of risk.
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After which, I would exit and I would return to the arcade, my
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friend's basement, the gazebo in the center of town where we hung
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out for some reason, and in which I have these weirdly
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strong memories of playing with my friend Frank's dad's Apple
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Newton, which almost certainly did not connect to the Internet.
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This relationship to a fenced in online, an online with its
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commensurate offline, persisted through and even after I left
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college. One defined, I think, by a small amount of risk, a
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paucity of chance, and a significant amount of choice.
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Agency even, maybe. But to the degree it ever really was, which
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is arguable, the Internet no longer feels like that fenced in
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place. And Chance has more fully colonized it at the cost of that
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agency as platforms continually refine their approaches for
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managing and distributing luck to serve their ends and not
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those of, well, people. Choice hasn't been obliterated online,
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but it has been subjugated by a set of technologies that seek to
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know and through knowing guide and ultimately control outcomes
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online, mostly steering those outcomes towards tech companies
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economic and political ends. Along the way, we, the grease in
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the gears of the machine, are rewarded with darling jackpots.
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Perhaps a video of a capybara. This reflects and is reflected
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in a larger societal shift where chance not only brackets our
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view of the world, but factors into it more literally, more
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directly, and more practically than it ever has before. It's
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not just harder to get lucky online in whatever sense,
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finding what you're looking for, making a living, being
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entertained. It's harder to get lucky generally in the world
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even if it feels like getting lucky is all there is. Adam
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Conover put it this way in a recent YouTube video.
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Adam Conover: Why have we allowed entire segments of
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American life from sports to finance to entertainment turn
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into just another form of gambling?
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Mike Rugnetta: In 2014, artist and software developer Darius
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Kasimi gave a talk at xoxofest that I think about all the time,
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still over a decade later. Xoxo was nominally a conference about
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how one makes it, whatever that means, economically,
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emotionally, as an independent creator. Darius at the time was
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most well known for his army of bots. Many, many small coding
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projects unleashed onto the social web each with their own
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narrow purpose. The description of his talk reads, in how I won
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the lottery, Darius explains how he became a successful lottery
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player and with hard work and a little luck, how you can too.
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The first half of his talk is a sort of ironic recipe for
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success, advising the audience on sharing one's methods for
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playing the lottery and building a community around that
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practice. At the ten minute mark of a twenty minute video, he
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says...
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Darius Kasimi: So to sum things up, I didn't know what I was
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doing. I didn't. But I kept buying lottery tickets anyway
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and playing numbers that just appealed to me. But in addition
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to making things that I liked, I reached out to fellow lottery
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number creators and general fans of the lottery, and I ended up
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building a community. And so in the end, I learned the real
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formula for success.
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Keep buying those lottery tickets. Keep making those
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connections, and you'll win the lottery too. Thank you.
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Mike Rugnetta: The joke of course is that anyone who gives
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you advice about how they made it is describing how to get
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lucky. They're recounting all of the methods they used to win the
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lottery. Darius goes on to describe his process in earnest
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which entailed making many small projects released often. He says
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this is akin to buying lottery tickets and that beyond a few
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baseline qualities, most of the success or not of his work and
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probably yours is up to Chance. He describes the surprise
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success of a Kickstarter project, not his own, like this.
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Darius Kasimi: I also think it could have been due to the
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single right person, maybe a TV producer at NBC, seeing a tweet
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about it because their flight was running late and they
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glanced at their phone. Maybe a butterfly flapped its wings in
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the rainforest. Maybe it's because billions of years ago,
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two distant galaxies collided, and the resulting conflagration
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fused particles into never before seen elements that got
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violently ejected into our part of the universe, setting in
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motion a chain of mysterious and unthinkable cosmic events that
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eventually resulted in the coolest.
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Mike Rugnetta: This may sound obvious now to say that it's all
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about luck, but I found it really refreshing in 2014. A
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couple years before this around twenty eleven, twenty twelve, I
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was at this marketing conference where important and successful
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people like producers advice, people who worked in advertising
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and television got on stage and told this big group of people
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the tech utopian tale. If you post it, they will come. Just
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make something good. The Internet is a democratizing
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force.
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It circumvents gatekeepers and people are looking for things
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that are good. And maybe, maybe, in a very narrow sense, that was
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kinda true at the time. It aligned with my experiences up
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until that point at least. There were no influencers yet, really.
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The number of people making money from YouTube was...
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Mean, it wasn't small, but it wasn't as many people as it is
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now. Big audiences moved more fluidly and it still felt like
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there was some divide between online and not even if again
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there wasn't. It felt at least like you weren't making things
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for everyone, you were making things for the internet. So
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maybe it did for a moment feel like you could make something
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good on purpose and people would see it. This was after all one
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of the promises of the early internet.
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But that promise faded and as it did, people held on to it
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tighter and tighter. Almost like giving up that idea of an open
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level playing field was somehow giving up on the internet itself
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or giving up on ourselves. So being there at xoxo, hearing
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Darius, hearing someone successful whose work I enjoy
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say that at a certain point it's all chance, kind of like the
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rest of the world, felt really clarifying. Darius even joked in
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2024 about how many people were moved by his lottery talk.
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Darius Kasimi: You laughed. You cried. And for the first time in
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your life, you question the very foundation of your reality. But
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we all know that my talk changed your lives.
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Mike Rugnetta: The The intervening dozen or so years
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since that original talk, the primacy of chance in our
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experiences online has only become more explicit and in both
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directions. The amount of chance involved in a good audience
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finding your work and the amount of chance involved in audiences
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finding good work have both increased by design. By eroding
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agency, platforms can increase mystery, which is maddening and
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exciting and puzzling and surprising. It is above all
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things engaging. And so, it's hard to tear ourselves away from
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it.
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I'm gonna let Adam Conover list for you four characteristics
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that make an activity addictive. We've edited this slightly from
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how it appears in the video, because in the original, he
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gives away the answer to a question that I wanna ask once
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you've heard the list. Okay. Here it is.
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Adam Conover: Four factors make a behavior especially addictive.
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First, when it's antisocial and solitary so you can get lost in
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the flow. Second, when it offers continuous fast feedback that
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reinforces the behavior. Third, when it's unpredictable so you
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never know when the reward will come. And fourth, when the
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activity never really ends or resolves.
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Mike Rugnetta: What specific behavior do you think Adam just
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described? To recap, it's antisocial, solitary, and flow
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state inducing. There's continuous fast feedback. There
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is the unpredictable delivery of reward, and the activity is
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potentially infinite. He's describing gambling,
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specifically mobile app sports gambling, but he could have just
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as easily been describing scrolling or even posting.
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The abstract qualities of each have come to so closely resemble
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one another that they begin to feel like different skins over
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similar base experiences. This is, as is well documented,
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purposeful. Consider the pull to refresh feature common to social
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media apps, Catherine Price wrote for the BBC in 2018, where
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dragging the screen downwards prompts the screen to refresh.
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Not only is the action itself similar to pulling the lever on
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a slot machine, but it takes advantage of our attraction to
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unpredictability. Sometimes when we check social media, there's
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something exciting waiting for us, a reward.
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Sometimes there's not. It's the unpredictability that keeps us
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coming back, end quote. Unpredictability defines the
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experience of audience and creator alike online at the
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moment. We're all buying lottery tickets. We're all placing
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bricks, casting nets, whatever metaphor you like and hoping to
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hit it big.
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Often, if not always at this point, with the help or
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hindrance of the algorithm. Where maybe we were once able to
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undertake a calculative attitude towards our activities and
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actions online, we now contend with... Well, a force which
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decides in its infinite and often inscrutable wisdom how
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things happen and why. This is a relatively new development on
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the social internet but has been a hallmark of gambling,
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especially slot machines, for ages. In her landmark book
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Addiction by Design Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, Natasha
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Dow Shull talks of the tension between the cold hard
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calculations of slot machines, the deeply rational nature of
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computers, which they are at base, as it meets the seeming
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irrationality of their output which is random but can feel
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almost magical.
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This disconnect is programmed into the machines. A tight
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balance is engineered giving players a sense that there's
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some deep process at work, that success or reward can feel
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close, purposeful, calculable, even if it is by design some
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combination of very remote and very random. Slot machines are
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designed to, quote, accentuate the illusion of control, and
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they are so successful at doing this that even the people who
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designed them, quote, describe a turning off of knowledge when
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playing, during which their calculative rationality falls
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away. Knowledge becomes irrelevant, one of them says to
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Scholl. In playing, gamblers seek not stimulation,
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participation, and the gratification of agency, but
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uninterrupted flow, immersion, and self erasure.
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Gamblers and scrollers alike describe scenarios where the
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balance of process and reward is such that it can feel impossible
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to stop even if you're having a bad time. In a video on sports
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betting, Drew Gooden describes how the AI powered alerts from
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mobile sports betting apps target gamblers, encouraging
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them to make ill advised bets which then lock them into
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watching a game they don't even enjoy.
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Drew Gooden: Of course, they wanna shove betting apps down
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everyone's throats. It gives people more of a reason to watch
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the games, especially bad ones. While most people would turn off
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a 20 blowout in the fourth quarter, you're still glued to
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the screen because you need CeeDee Lamb to get 12 more yards
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for your parlay to hit. They've figured out a way to make every
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moment matter even if it doesn't.
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Mike Rugnetta: This is me in bed, not wanting to scroll, not
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wanting to stop scrolling, scrolling. This is me in my life
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at my desk every day not wanting to post, not wanting to not
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post, and here we are posting. I love it. I hate it. In a recent
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video, Hank Green compares this experience not to gambling, but
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to hyper palatable foods, which also he says, play games with
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our agency.
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Hank Green: We have a great metaphor in food. And what have
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we learned from food? Companies will do everything they can to
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make things that are very appealing, even addictive. We
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have less control than we imagine that we have, and giving
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your agency away a little bit can be fun and rewarding. But
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giving it away completely isn't just damaging to you and your
29:01
ability to flourish it's kinda cringe.
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Like, nobody brags about the start of their second hour on
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TikTok.
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Mike Rugnetta: It's not, as Hank explains, that the Internet or
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even platforms are bad. It's that they're powerful. They're
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the house, and the house doesn't lose. It can't or else there
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wouldn't be a house. So their power can be and often is
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abused.
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These experiences become a microcosm of contemporary life
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in The United States, especially where guarantees are few and far
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between and there's no necessary link between cause and effect,
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societally speaking. Especially not now. Contemporary life is
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defined by almost a reliance on chance. It's why social media
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thrives. It's why there's an epidemic of gambling addiction
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fueled, it seems, by mobile apps.
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It's why scams and grifts abound. Our current social
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pressures create environments where the gamble is the most
30:13
sure bet, and sometimes it feels the only one. How do you think
30:33
about chance online? I'm especially curious to hear from
30:36
professional content creators. How do you think about improving
30:40
your odds when posting or do you not?
30:44
How do you feel about your agency online? Send us an email,
30:50
call us, leave a voicemail or a voice memo. All the ways you can
30:53
get ahold of us are in the show notes and we may respond to you
30:57
in a future mailbag episode. That is the archival episode we
31:29
have for you today. If you'd like to listen to the original
31:32
upload with news and interstitials, you can find the
31:35
link in the show notes.
31:37
Never Post is primarily listener funded. So if you enjoyed this
31:42
segment, please consider becoming a member at neverpo.st.
31:45
You can gain access to an ad free member feed while helping
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us keep the show going. Never Post's producers are Audrey
31:53
Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious doctor first name
31:56
last name. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow.
31:58
Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer, and the show's host,
32:02
that's me, is Mike Rugnetta. Never Post is a production of
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Charts and Leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia.