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Surely it is the part of a novelist to inform us whether we are in a hotel, a flat, or a half of the time cannot make heads or tails of what is going on; the other half he to throw himself down from a mountain peak and to kill her former lover would in Europe (France, Italy and Germany) on more than one occasion, attempting,​.
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Pieces of a Dream: A Story of Gambling

Social media was supposed to liberate us, but for many people it has proved addictive, punishing and toxic. What keeps us hooked? By Richard Seymour. Fri 23 Aug W e are swimming in writing. Social media platforms have created a machine for us to write to. The bait is that we are interacting with other people: our friends, colleagues, celebrities, politicians, royals, terrorists, porn actors — anyone we like.

We are not interacting with them, however, but with the machine.

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We write to it, and it passes on the message for us after keeping a record of the data. Part of what? A virtual laboratory. An addiction machine, which deploys crude techniques of manipulation redolent of the Skinner Box created by behaviourist BF Skinner to control the behaviour of pigeons and rats with rewards and punishments.

We are users, much as cocaine addicts are users.

6 Stories of Celebrities Gambling in Vegas

What is the incentive to engage in writing like this for hours each day? In a form of mass casualisation, writers no longer expect to be paid or given employment contracts. What do the platforms offer us, in lieu of a wage? What gets us hooked? Approval, attention, retweets, shares and likes. This is the Twittering Machine: not the infrastructure of fibre-optic cables, database servers, storage systems, software and code. It is the machinery of writers, writing and the feedback loop they inhabit. The Twittering Machine thrives on its speed, informality and interactivity.

The protocols of Twitter itself, for example, encourage people to post quickly and often. The system of followers, ing and threading encourages sprawling conversations to develop from initial tweets, favouring constant interaction. This is what people like about it, what makes it engaging: it is like texting, but in a public, collective context. The regular sweet spot sought after is a brief period of ecstatic collective frenzy around any given topic.

New girlfriend - and she's a gambler

As in the financial markets, volatility adds value. The more chaos, the better. W hether or not we think we are addicted, the machine treats us as addicts.


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Addiction is, quite deliberately, the template for our relationship to the Twittering Machine. Addiction is all about attention. For the social media bosses, this is axiomatic. If social media is an addiction machine, the addictive behaviour it is closest to is gambling: a rigged lottery. Every gambler trusts in a few abstract symbols — the dots on a dice, numerals, suits, red or black, the graphemes on a fruit machine — to tell them who they are.

In most cases, the answer is brutal and swift: you are a loser and you are going home with nothing. The true gambler takes a perverse joy in anteing up, putting their whole being at stake. On social media, you scratch out a few words, a few symbols, and press send, rolling the dice. The internet will tell you who you are and what your destiny is through arithmetic likes, shares and comments. The interesting question is what it is that is so addictive.

In principle, anyone can win big; in practice, not everyone is playing with the same odds. Our social media accounts are set up like enterprises competing for attention. If we are all authors now, we write not for money, but for the satisfaction of being read. Going viral, or trending, is the equivalent of a windfall. But sometimes, winning is the worst thing that can happen.

The temperate climate of likes and approval is apt to break, lightning-quick, into sudden storms of fury and disapproval. A study looked into the reasons why people who try to quit social media fail.


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The survey data came from a group of people who had signed up to quit Facebook for just 99 days. And many of those who successfully quit had access to another social networking site, like Twitter, so that they had simply displaced their addiction. Those who stayed away, however, were typically in a happier frame of mind and less interested in controlling how other people thought of them, thus implying that social media addiction is partly a self-medication for depression and partly a way of curating a better self in the eyes of others.

San Francisco love story: A hooker, her gambling man and a hanging - leondumoulin.nl

Indeed, these two factors may not be unrelated. For those who are curating a self, social media notifications work as a form of clickbait. But it is not only addictive. Whatever we write has to be calibrated for social approval. Not only do we aim for conformity among our peers but, to an extent, we only pay attention to what our peers write insofar as it allows us to write something in reply, for the likes. Perhaps this is what, among other things, gives rise to what is often derided as virtue-signalling, not to mention the ferocious rows, overreactions, wounded amour-propre and grandstanding that often characterise social media communities.

T he analogy between the gambler and the social-media junkie is hard to avoid. Because rewards are variable, they are uncertain: you have to pull the lever to see what you are going to get.

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Adam Alter adds that, with the invention of the like button, users are gambling every time they post. At the roulette table, the gambler could justify his perverse pleasure in risk-taking as a matter of honour in competition with peers. In recent decades, however, the favoured form has moved from the table to the slot machine.

And the slot machines — digital and complex — have come a long way from the days of the one-armed bandit. Now, the gambler experiences no macho showdowns, just an interactive screen offering multiple permutations of odds and stakes, deploying user-experience design techniques similar to video games to induce pleasure.

The machines have a range of devices to give users the appearance of regular wins to keep them playing. These are often losses disguised as wins, insofar as the payoff is less than the cost of playing. But the wins are not even the goal of playing. So when Howard says he wants a six-way parlay involving the Boston Celtics-Philadelphia 76ers playoff game, he needs all of these to be true:. The flip side is that he'll owe the same amount for however many points they fail to cover the spread by. These bets are an excellent way to make or lose your entire life savings at the very end of a game.

Every single one of Howard's problems could've been solved if his idiot brother-in-law didn't stop the bet of the century from paying off, which is why he has to make this second bet. With the proceeds of the opal's sale to KG, Howard decides to test his luck on a more conservative, though still risky, three-way parlay for Game 7 of the Celtics-Sixers series. For him to win, the following have to be true:.

Including the opening tip in any parlay signifies gambling addiction in the same way that having a baby signifies you were pregnant. It's the very first thing that happens in a game, lots of variables can screw with the result, and if it doesn't go in your favor, you lose the entire wager.