We Are A Casino

Oct 17, 2023

With the lights out, it's less dangerous

Here we are now, entertain us

I feel stupid and contagious

Here we are now, entertain us

—Nirvana

Our attention. Yours. Mine. They stole it in the beginning when we were busy hoovering likes. Hijacked. Hijacked by technological cyclopses aka several men whose emotional maturity was arrested around ninth grade and whose entire business model is engineering the diminishment of our intellect. And here we are now in a world where almost every element of public discourse and social interaction has been gamified. We’re thisclose to replacing all language with the tap of a fingertip; a directional thumb; the shape of a heart; a yellow circle with two empty dots for eyes; plus, if you’re lucky when things are hard, a cartoon tear inside the circle to let you know someone else feels sad too.

Here we are now swapping out photographs of our own filtered faces with other nations’ flags like some digital camp’s twisted version of color war. All of this to say, even if it were appropriate for strangers to attempt a 'nuanced’ conversation about the unspeakable horrors of October 7th, or any fragment of the intractable political quagmire that surrounds them, right now it is as likely to occur on social media as I am to medal in canoe slalom at the Summer Olympics.

We would do well to remind ourselves, repeatedly if necessary, that this inability to have an actual conversation is entirely by design. Because the media isn’t really social, and despite how it was sold to us, how they’re still selling it to us, despite all the upgrades and even the brand new networks supposedly built by more evolved men, it was never intended to be.

It was meant to be a casino. Where our limbic brains are the mark. Hypnotized lizards yanking at slots/staring at our phones. A global Bellagio. And if you thought the house always won before, well.

I have no solution to any of that. It’s just what I’ve been thinking about between breakdowns over the last 11 days. The ideological prison we’ve made for ourselves, the memeification of meaning, the dehumanization of dialogue, and how, because of it, this moment of collective grief and rage and helplessness is made so much more isolating and impossible to grasp.

—

There is significant evidence in the fossil record that human beings were prey before we became predators. That we evolved toward living in groups as an adaptive defense against animals that were far bigger and more dangerous than we were. Tigers. Crocodiles. Hyenas the size of bears. The more eyes available at a given time to scan for these monster threats, the more likely early versions of us would be able to escape them. Long before fire, collective intelligence borne from cooperation was how our species survived.

Fast forward approximately two million years and here we are now, in a time of rage, extreme chaos, and paralyzing grief: That limbic response mechanism, the bottom of the brain stem people who continue to warn us against everything technology’s already wrought, is the very engine driving Facebook and TikTok and Twitter and Instagram and all so-called social media. No further proof than the entire last decade is needed to demonstrate that Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and certainly Elon Musk’s interest lies not in a ‘global conversation’ about anything, least of all politics or human suffering. It never has been. Their singular objective is for us never to log off.

Polarization.

Vanityfication.

Outrageification.

Gameification.

It’s us.

We are the game.

There are no windows, and there are no clocks, and we swipe our screens like they’re levers on slot machines way past knowing why our fingers keep touching the glass.

The price of admission is our attention, and it’s all that’s ever been needed or required.

People far more articulate with a much better grasp of complex history than I will ever hope to have can tell you how to stop terrorists who don’t believe in anything other than their delusion of a post-death paradise, terrorists who live in opulence somewhere else entirely while pretending to govern a people they’ve never given a second thought to using as shields from the bombs that respond to theirs. Other experts in foreign affairs and geopolitics may know which strategy, military or otherwise, will effectively defend a minority who’ve been persecuted and traumatized for millennia, without a whole other minority of persecuted people being made the casualties of that defense.

I can only tell you what I’ve learned from the twin teachings of my own fear and despair. When the world becomes too horrific, when the suffering becomes too much to bear, it helps to make lists. Lists of things that are still good and still beautiful and still true. Despite and sometimes even because of the pain. It helps to write them down. To turn in your bucket of change and walk away from the blinking lights. Scan the room and spot the predators lurking in the dark. Hungry tigers on a virtual veldt hunting nothing less than your whole heart.

Look. Up. Out. Into someone else’s eyes.

Until you remember.

Things that are still beautiful:

The shifting sky.