The biggest lottery
The thing about the lottery is the house always wins. Whether it's the mega millions, scratch-offs, or Vegas, taking your chances on gambling mostly means throwing your money away. And we know that; just about everyone knows it. But people play for fun, or out of desperation, or some mix of the two. But what happens when lotteries evolve? What happens when they get more complex, and harder to see?
When I was teaching high school, I had a student named Will. It was my first year as a teacher, and he was one of those kids who made it clear he didn’t want to be there. Smart, funny, and not that tall; he liked me alright, but he didn’t like school much. Just didn’t interest him, plus there was some stuff going on at home. But he could’ve gotten a B in English, no problem. He just didn’t particularly care. I’ll never forget one day, when I was talking to him for a minute after class, and he insisted that none of this mattered because he was going to the NBA.
Now I said this boy wasn’t that tall. He was maybe 5’7” on a good day, and skinny too. I’d guess 120 pounds at most. I also happened to help coach the JV basketball team that year, and he was not on that team. He also wasn’t on varsity. But he was bought into the lottery. There were a million other factors, like there are for every kid, but a big one is that he had really deluded himself into thinking he could somehow, super-humanly, make it in the NBA. Will never made varsity.
Not all lotteries are as clear as pro sports. Millions of kids funneling into thousands and thousands of D1 college spots, and then into just a couple hundred professional athletes, in most leagues. A lot of people put in a lot of work, and only a handful get the top prize. But what about other systems? What about, say, social media?
The biggest social media apps have millions, even billions of users. And while more and more people are trying to make careers online, as streamers or influencers or content creators, only a handful win out. But unlike sports, tons of participants keep on going, keep on playing year after year, thinking they’ll win a prize. And although a lot of users get some benefits, some small boost to their career or the ability to better stay in touch with friends or family, most of us increasingly appear to suffer some harm to our mental health, or some degree of addictive behavior. Even many who get some prize, some stream of income or modicum of clout, find social media to be an unreliable side-hustle, and one where keeping your integrity can be difficult. It’s easy to start chasing virality, but the algorithm is unforgiving. So although some users win big, and thousands win small, millions and millions lose out. And yet, there is one winner who never loses. One who does better than all of us. The house.
In the social media lottery, the house always wins. Meta, TikTok, Google. These giants are the real winners in the social media market, and they’re bringing in billions. Off of us. Off of their users. We are the product in the social media business, and we are the engine. Our time and attention are the commodity they seek, and more and more people are ever more deeply invested in providing them with what they want. When we seek internet points, when we sink in hours of our time, all that effort enriches the house. And so many people go about building their online careers without ever knowing that the house always wins.
In 2013 a dystopian novel came out: The Circle by Dave Eggers. A movie was later produced. The premise was that a company had developed a portable live-streaming device, in essence. It doesn’t sound far-fetched now, but when I read it a decade ago it sounded just futuristic enough. Little by slowly, the company got more and more people to wear these live-streaming devices. Of course police should wear them, politicians naturally should be live-streaming at all times for accountability, and well your spouse probably should be too. After all, they have cheated once before. If I recall, most of society was wearing them in a matter of years.
The company is, of course, nefarious, but that isn't the point here. What fascinates me is how the book was so accurate, on the one hand, and missing something so crucial on the other. It was stunningly accurate on the rise of live streaming, and of our lives being captured on video in general. More and more people are becoming streamers, spending much of their lives in front of a camera recording themselves for hours. At the same time, phones are out everywhere, all the time. Any activity that’s even mildly exciting is being recorded, in some cases by hundreds or thousands of people. Concerts, clubs, sports events, even simply existing in places like downtown Manhattan – you’re probably on camera. And not a security camera (although that too) but someone’s phone, recording you and sending you out onto social media.
But, The Circle missed something. People aren’t doing this for accountability. No one is particularly interested in recording their lives for the sake of being honest. In fact, a whole lot of it is dishonest. Skits, manufactured content, and most insidiously the ways that people morph and act because of the ever-present camera. No, we’re not recording ourselves all the time to be transparent, we’re doing it to entertain. And, ultimately, a whole lot of people are doing it to profit, to win that lottery.
More and more people are selling their images, their privacy, their time and energy to the house, to corporate giants who register us human beings as a number, an online data point. And we see those who win because with winning comes status and visibility and various degrees of celebrity. But we don’t see those who lose out, the millions of failed influencers dotting the landscape of TikTok and Instagram. Of course, it’s not quite as simple as winning and losing. Lots of people are content to succeed in their niches, or to have small accounts and interact with their friends, but I’m talking about the growing legions of young people, and others, who aim for stardom in the streaming world, or on YouTube, or as some sort of influencer and simply don’t make it. The 5'7” kids going for the NBA who will never play in college. There are millions of young people aspiring to a job where there just aren’t that many slots. Our societal capacity for celebrity may have expanded over recent years, but by definition it won’t grow enough to include all of us.
There’s no one solution here. We must build towards a world where people don’t need to sell their privacy and their time to survive. But there’s an even broader cultural phenomenon around celebrity, and a discussion that must be had around how capitalism has gotten us to fall in love with little dopamine hits, often at the expense of deeper happiness. I’m reminded, often, of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The authoritarian government in his book didn't control the population primarily through the use of force. Instead it was drugs, fun games, distractions. They didn’t need much of the intense repression seen in 1984 or many other dystopian classics. Pleasure did 90% of the work.
Today there is repression, oppression, militarized policing and more. But the allure of fame, the dopamine hits available at all times, the games and videos and the whole lottery of capitalism do a lot of the work. Maybe you’ll be the next billionaire, the next celebrity, the next Michael Jordan. Millions hold this fantasy close despite being further and further away from the lofty oligarchs who increasingly separate themselves from the rest of us. Millions hold it close despite social mobility declining substantially. Despite it all the lottery remains powerful, maybe even growing stronger as the lives of the rich and famous are streamed directly into our hands — it’s hard to quantify the lottery’s impact. But as long as we’re playing, the house will keep winning. It’s time to break free. It’s time to imagine a world where access to a good life is a guarantee, not a roll of the dice.
I just cracked Yanis Varoufakis most recent book Technofeudalism, and my gut is he follows your observations in detail. Might be of interest to your readers. Thanks for your insights.
Malcolm Harris' book Kids These Days has some parallel ideas. He describes how education is increasingly designed to push kids into competition with one another, and especially how high stakes testing and shrinking spots at elite universities (relative to a growing population) mean the vast majority of people won't make those top spots, and work harder and harder to even have a chance.
I think that it's also important to point out that many capitalists rely on the false claim that the good life is guaranteed if only you work hard enough. One the one hand, it's important to keep people from despairing, but on the other it's equally important to point out that so many things are unachievable to the vast majority of people, and that's actually a good thing! Rather than aspiring to be planet and community-killing millionaires or billionaires, we should be guiding kids to aspire to a healthy and mutually supportive part of a community (which takes so many more roles than what we pay highly).