104. Addiction by Design by Natasha Dow Schüll

This book is about slot machines. It is creepy.

By way of this book, we can arrive at a new psychological idea which Natasha Dow Schüll calls "the machine zone", but I prefer to call "dark flow". The word flow is already used in psychology to refer to Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's concept of optimal experience, in which time distorts, the sense of self disappears, and the subconscious and conscious mind work in harmony.

Dark flow is similar to flow, but... for want of a better term, it's evil. Whereas flow allows us to both enjoy our lives to the fullest and grow as a person, dark flow entails the same kind of perfect absorption but with the goal of self-destruction. Both the aim and the result are an obliteration of one's life. It's like a disease that swallows all of a person's time, money, and thought; the subject craves the sense of release from reality that the flow process provides, and ultimately acquiesces to, or even seeks, the destruction of their life that follows. Death metaphors are very common in participants' descriptions of this phenomenon and their state of mind.

While reading this book, I had something of a recognition of this feeling of escape, driven by a pathological desire for more flow in a fantasy world. I've had this feeling playing (and anticipating playing) computer games. I happen to have played them a fair bit as a teenager, and so the psychology of it is subjectively familiar to me. The fact that I wish to avoid their negative consequences is why I perceive technologies such as slot machines to be outright unholy.

Apart from revealing a potential dark side to the otherwise much-lauded concept of flow, this book's relevance concerns its appearance in an era of addictive digital technology, particularly such that is available to and targeted at children. The analogy between a slot machine and a smartphone is hardly far-fetched.

Enjoy the episode.

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RELATED EPISODES

10. Flow by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi

Episodes I have done on computer games are somewhat relevant, but they generally do not look at the phenomenon of addiction, which would be most pertinent to this episode's content.

In future I intend to record more episodes on the pitfalls and strange psychology of digital technology.