Kids attention agency & the US slot machine industry mechanics

About that prime asset we all have, but are not taught to value.

I was fuming. My 8 year old son told me about the weekly Golden hour in school. Turns out every Friday afternoon the kids were allowed to watch youtube on their ipads. Not research something specific, not use it purposefully. No. They got ‘free time’ (which I am all for), but the opportunity to develop real agency in this free time was ruined. The agency was donated to the Youtube algorithm. All under the name of  “Golden hour”, implying ‘reward’ and ‘great time’. 

Thankfully, after my husband and I emailed our views on this, the school took note and said that Youtube from now on will only be allowed for research. The teacher said they just didn’t think of it in the first year of use and that our arguments made sense. It’s likely similar across other schools. We just don’t think to value our free attention and hence kids are not taught to exercise agency over it. As a society we often signal to kids that having free unstructured time is best spent with the algo stealing our attention agency. 

When we originally spoke about it, my son told me the school had reassured the kids that they won't be able to access any ‘bad stuff’ on youtube, which is a questionable assumption to say the least. He also told me he chose not to watch ‘stupid trampoline videos on youtube’ like some of his peers, but chose to do Lego and sketching instead. I chose to believe him. He has been made aware of the initiatives driving the attention economy, so he knows what’s at stake. 

What is actually at stake and how does he know? 

I was reading a book one day, Adam approached and told me “I am bored. What do I do now?” 

Me: ‘Wanna know what I am reading now? A book that talks about the US slot machine industry and how it manages to expand its profits using the stuff they learn about human nature and psychology. How it’s possible to get people to a point where some of them choose to always wear black whilst playing the slot machines. They do it so it’s not visible when they urinate themselves. This is because they cannot detach from the machines to go to the toilet.’’ He is naturally interested in how that's possible.

I discuss some passages from the deeply disturbing book by Natasha Dow Schüll ‘Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas’.

She claims that you cannot understand addiction without understanding that it's not about the money, it is instead about reproducing a reliable response and ‘merging with the machine’. You hit the button and you get the sound beep. The player enters a state of absorption where his actions disconnect him from the real world and the sense of difference between him and the machine is obliterated.

Schüll quotes one of her gambler informants saying, “I feel connected to the machine when I play, like it’s an extension of me, as if physically you couldn’t separate me from the machine.”

The industry provides a service to the gambler - the glorious feeling of having certainty in a world of uncertainty and change. From the book:

“I don’t care if it takes coins, or pays coins: the contract is that when I put a new coin in, get five new cards, and press those buttons, I am allowed to continue. So it isn’t really a gamble at all—in fact, it’s one of the few places I’m certain about anything … If you can’t rely on the machine, then you might as well be in the human world where you have no predictability either.”

The refined arts of attention design can be ramped up to a pretty high level:

“It is not uncommon for heavy users to stand at a machine for eight or even twelve hours at a stretch, developing blood clots and other medical conditions. Paramedics in Las Vegas dread getting calls from casinos, which usually turn out to be heart attacks. The problem is that when someone collapses, the other gamblers won’t get out of the way to let the paramedics do their job; they won’t leave their machines. Deafening fire alarms are similarly ignored; there have been incidents where rising floodwaters didn’t dislodge them.” This is being in the “zone”.

I will get to what all this has to do with ‘being bored’.

Game designers target “full immersion” through careful interface and surrounding design, ensuring that the player “plays to extinction”. This includes giving the player the illusion that he is gaining mastery and having favorite machines call the regular players by the name through the hallway. Player extinction also mates up with the Freudian idea of the death instict - a slower form of suicide - relief frustration and pain through compulsion to repeat something that overrides pleasure.

My son wonders why the government allows this. I say the government can’t be relied on to protect people from all pitfalls and industries and I tell him that the government happens to profit from the taxes of the gambling industry. General potential good intentions of the government can’t be relied upon to be enough for effective policy. Relying on the government to prevent you from being addicted to anything is a bad bet.

Your Attention is a prized commodity

I tell my son that the same research on human psychology and attention is used by the much bigger and more ‘accepted’ industry. An industry less obvious, but still has horrid long term effects we are now starting to get the stats from. 

It is the not-much-frowned-upon “attention industry” and the dark arts of “attention design”. The way this industry makes money is through harvesting as much of your attention and free time as possible. It actively uses most people’s inability to consciously direct it. They use the same research on impulses to escape and get in the zone as the gamblers in Vegas, to prevent you directing your attention somewhere else.

If you cannot figure out what to do with your bored time yourself, there are a whole lot of companies who will offer you an addictive, seemingly easy solution and make money out of you being hooked to it. 

Western economies are moving from goods to delivering services, many of which are experiences. This relies on techniques for attracting and holding attention. However, one shouldn’t assume the individual cost of this is going to be taken into account at design stage of the product. Before AI ramped everything up a notch, here are just some similarities with the slot machine industry:

1. Variable reward schedules: You never know when you'll get a "win" (a jackpot or a fun new post/notification), which leads to addictive checking behavior.

2. Feedback loops: The sights, sounds, and haptics of slot wins are designed to be pleasurable feedback cues reinforcing play. Similarly, likes, comments, red notification badges give our brains little hits of dopamine, conditioning us to keep using apps.

3. Frustration design: Casinos place ATMs conveniently to ease poker losing streak frustrations. Likewise Twitter/FB auto-refill your feed if you reach the end to eliminate "dead ends."

4. Big data & personalization: Just as player loyalty cards let casinos analyze to optimize gambling spend, so too do tech platforms leverage mass data surveillance to tune interfaces to maximize engagement based on personal profiles.

I learned a lot from the fascinating book “The World Beyond Your Head'' by Matthew Crawford. Whilst I don’t agree with everything there, the book is packed with gems like:

“ Silence is now offered as a luxury good. In the business-class lounge at Charles de Gaulle airport, what you hear is the occasional tinkling of a spoon against china. There are no advertisements on the walls, and no TVs. This silence, more than any other feature of the space, is what makes it feel genuinely luxurious. When you step inside and the automatic airtight doors whoosh shut behind you, the difference is nearly tactile, like slipping out of haircloth into satin.

The much-discussed decline of the middle class in recent decades, and the ever greater concentration of wealth in a shrinking elite, may have something to do with the ever more aggressive appropriations of the attentional commons that we have allowed to take place.”

And :

“While animals certainly have memory and the ability to learn, human beings are thought to be the only creatures who can deliberately recall something not cued by the environment. But we do this only in those stretches of time when the environment is not making urgent claims on our attention.

It is at these times that we try to find (or impose) coherence on our experience, retroactively. If we are currently facing a culturally and technologically induced trauma to our ability to suppress environmental input, that raises a big question: Is this distinctly human activity of coherence-finding at risk?”

My main takeaways from Crawford’s  book are:

• Without the ability to direct our attention where we choose, we become more receptive to those who would direct our attention where they will

• Distractibility is the new obesity

• To attend to anything in a sustained way requires actively excluding all the other things that grab at our attention.

• “Our changing technological environment generates a need for ever more stimulation. The content of the stimulation almost becomes irrelevant. Our distractibility seems to indicate that we are agnostic on the question of what is worth paying attention to—that is, what to value.” - Doesn’t this sound familiar to the Las Vegas gamblers?

• Crawford thinks we need to sharpen the conceptually murky right to privacy by supplementing it with a right not to be addressed. “This would apply not, of course, to those who address me face-to-face as individuals, but to those who never show their face, and treat my mind as a resource to be harvested by mechanized means.”

More relevant for child rearing and education from Crawford:

“It would seem this activity of narrative self-articulation gets under way, developmentally, with the capacity to ignore things. Further, because this self-articulation is something we are never finished with, an ability to ignore things would seem to remain important to the lifelong task of carving out and maintaining a space for rational agency for oneself, against the flux of environmental stimuli.”

So what can be done at the family level?

Of course I can’t count on anything changing in the near future in education, government or corporate spheres. 

What I can count on is only what comes naturally for me. 

To preserve my child’s autonomy of mind. 

To give him a shockproof bullshit detector and critical thinking ability. 

My kid plays Minecraft and will, later on, of course use youtube, when it's purposeful and consciously chosen for his chosen needs, which can be play. Not to fill his lack of instruction time. Not to be the first go-to thing when he has a moment of boredom.

My controversial opinion here: I think children don't need Tik Tok or Instagram. Like till 15 or maybe never. When was the last time a friend of yours said “I’ve been off instagram for a week and I feel worse for it”?

Yes we can agree with close friends' parents and exchange research about how it shouldn’t be allowed. Then you don’t have to deal with weird problems like 10 year old girls raiding the family budget for anti-aging creams. These are artificially created problems. For anyone still on the fence about feasibility of this, I strongly suggest reading the recent research from university of Chicago presenting data on how Instagram and TikTok are a collective trap. It shows most use it out of fear of FOMO rather than interest and are worse off than if the platforms didn't exist. Social media is not a normal consumer product. 

'Why can't I have TikTok dad?’ 

“Here is the reality son: TikTok is a virus app for people who don’t value their brain cells, their health, attention and focus. You think you are worried about AI doing all human work? Wait till you see what your value is if you can't read long form and your brain is hooked on short form TikTok like content. Your ability to create anything that society values is likely to approach 0.”

How about smartphones? Can someone tell me why they need one till 15+ ? Why not have a burner phone with maps till sufficient impulse control is attained and their own attention is highly valued as an asset? 

The smartphone is excellently tuned to meet your unexamined needs flawlessly and instantly. Every time you want an escape from engaging in thought, reality or real relaxation - just scroll. 

Scrolling in your free time without a self chosen purpose is just like pressing the button at the Vegas slot machine. 

Consciously choosing what to attend to is a skill. Adults should better model it’s value.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

~ Anna

Links to explore:

What We Learned in 2023 About Gen Z’s Mental Health Crisis

When Product Markets Become Collective Traps: The Case of Social Media - University of Chicago . Results imply the existence of a “social media trap” for a large share of consumers, whose utility from the platforms is negative but would have been even more negative if they didn’t use social media. Users would need to be paid $59 to deactivate TikTok and $47 to deactivate Instagram if others in their network were to continue using their accounts. Users would be willing to pay $28 and $10 to have others, including themselves, deactivate TikTok and Instagram, respectively.