The strongest portion of On the Edge¹ is its opening section, where Silver (an expert gambler) explains, in detail, the mechanics of the Las Vegas casino business.² In particular, he makes two interesting observations about slot machines.

One: they're not games of chance. The outcome of each spin is determined by a random number generator inside the machine the moment you press the button. The spinning reels and blinking lights you see are just an elaborate display of the already-determined result. Casino operators have precise control over how much money their machines are going to pay out, and in what rhythm, over the course of hundreds and thousands of spins.

Two: they’re wildly profitable. On Las Vegas slots, players are expected to loose around $8 of every $100 wagered, eight times the equivalent figure on table games like Blackjack or Roulette. And unlike those games, slot machines operate at breakneck speed 24/7 and require no employees to deal cards, pay out wins and collect cash.

This is why modern casinos are to a large degree slot machine operators before anything else. The hotel rooms, bars, restaurants, boxing matches, roulette wheels, poker rooms, flashing lights and the palatial architecture are all part of an elaborate dance designed to attract players where the casino really wants them: seated in front of a slot machine.

The people who tend to take those seats are quite different from the predominantly male, thrill-seeking, jet-setting image of the gambler depicted in popular works like Michael Clayton or Uncut Gems. As Natasha Dow Schüll, a pre-eminent scholar on the subject whom Silver interviews shows, machine gamblers are often female, live locally and repeatedly gamble small amounts of money between work shifts, errands and caring responsibilities, often for years. They don't look for big payoffs, but a predictable, private way to forget their surroundings and temporarily loose themselves in “the machine zone”.³

Casinos recognise this and employ a myriad of techniques drawn from every conceivable creative discipline to encourage this kind of repeated, low-stakes, but nevertheless compulsive play. This ranges from bespoke seating furniture, complimentary food and drinks and specially-composed background music to carefully-adjusted payout schedules, player-customisable game mechanics and high-end animation designed to mask losses and amplify wins. The goal of these interventions is to retain players, keep them playing spin after spin, and slowly but inevitably extract their resources until nothing is left. It’s difficult to think of another entertainment product that's quite like that: so all-encompassing, built on such an asymmetrical power relationship between operator and consumer, so addictive, and so directly exploitative.

In Silver’s telling, the rise of the slot machine was enabled by a particular stream of mathematics, behavioural psychology and statistics-driven decision making that originated in universities around the middle of the 20th century, before meandering down to large companies, political campaigns (think, Obama ‘08), professional sports teams (think, Moneyball) and finally reaching the gambling industry and the crypto world.

This is no doubt true, but I think it’s hard not to notice a quickening flow going the other direction: Casino ideas have crept out from the gaming floor, filtered through a million business school curriculums and are now cropping up all around our digitally-mediated economy.

Social media apps are the most ubiquitous example. Just like habitual machine gamblers, social media users by-and-large aren’t looking for thrills, but a familiar, safe way to “zone out”, and the prototypical vertical video feed (bearing no small resemblance to a slot machine reel) delivers it. Companies pour enormous ressources into recommendation algorithms and high-performance user interfaces to keep people spinning the wheel over and over again, day after day, surrendering surplus value in small increments in the form of ad revenue and marketable data, or increasingly in the form of direct cash payments.

Video games employ casino design techniques like intermittent rewards, audiovisual clues and habit-forming player rewards schemes to encourage repeat play and continous small-denomination spending.

Dating apps (I’m told) have similar dynamics, encouraging users to swipe again and again for small, intermittent rewards (mediated by another company-controlled algorithm) and slowly extracting via subscriptions and extracting value over time via subscriptions and one-off payments. The average “payer”⁴ on Hinge spent around $30 per month in 2024, up 13% from 2023.⁵

And it's not just consumer products: Gig economy companies use their information advantage and the same psychological tricks — your next delivery trip could be a winner! — to “prod [workers] into working longer and harder” until they’re used up.

Finally, gambling proper is also having a well-documented renaissance, fuelled in large part by the legalisation of sports betting. One in five Americans has an account with an online bookmaker, including nearly 40% of working-age men. By Silver’s estimate, Americans wagered nearly four percent of U.S. gross domestic product via smartphone apps, casinos, lotteries and other forms of legalised gambling in 2022 alone.

In 2012, Dow Schüll described casino gamblers as “[resembling] the docile bodies of factory workers, soldiers, prisoners, or students”. However, unlike the 20th-century images of those figures, they “are not the self-conscious, self-censoring, vigilant subjects of disciplinary spaces; instead, they are uninhibited, self-abandoning, and immersed in tiny, private playing worlds”.⁶

A little over a decade later, it seems like that description could apply to just about anybody. The slot-machinification of so many daily affordances and the rapid spread of online gambling mark to me the outlines of a genuine social current whose description (more than its valorisation in later chapters) is On the Edge’s most valuable contribution.