Slot players seek a dissociative self-forgetting state, not entertainment or winnings.

Evidence

Schüll learned that addictive players seek neither entertainment nor the mythical jackpot of cash. Instead, they chase what Harvard Medical School addiction researcher Howard Shaffer calls “the capacity of the drug or gamble to shift subjective experience,” pursuing an experiential state that Schüll calls the “machine zone,” a state of self-forgetting in which one is carried along by an irresistible momentum that feels like one is “played by the machine.” The machine zone achieves a sense of complete immersion that recalls Klein’s description of Facebook’s design principles—engrossing, immersive, immediate—and is associated with a loss of self-awareness, automatic behavior, and a total rhythmic absorption carried along on a wave of compulsion. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1434

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the ‘machine zone’ concept as an experiential state of self-forgetting that slot players actually chase.
• XREF: The ‘machine zone’ dissociative immersion connects to the reader’s Deep Listening material on absorptive states and to surveillance-capital interface design described earlier in this book. — connects to: Gamblers pursue a loss-of-self attentional state that machine design deliberately engineers — Annual Review of Anthropology contributors (⚠ verify author line), The Political Economy of Attention, 41

Broader Connections

• Gamblers pursue a loss-of-self attentional state that machine design deliberately engineers #corroborates (0.95) — Annual Review of Anthropology contributors (⚠ verify author line), The Political Economy of Attention, 41