The House Always Wins
How gamification is hastening AI’s hostile takeover of social media
Picture any casino. The sea of one-armed bandits.
Scores of elderly zombies chainsmoking as they mindlessly pump coins into their digital masters.
Replace the slot machines with laptops.
Replace the coins with likes.
Replace that C-major jingle with the validation of all your followers.
This is the nature of modern social media and the gamification that’s been ripped from the dirty tricks used by casinos for decades.
It’s not found in the seedy back alleys in the trenchcoat of some scruffy drug dealer.
You don’t get it from a syringe, but it’s a drug like any other.
It’s a dopamine spike. Pure, uncut digital cocaine.
Your attention is the commodity of this new digital marketplace. Whether it’s ad-revenue or just your eyeballs on the screen, you’re exchanging your mental energy for a brief moment of perceived happiness.
When you contribute to these sites, whether you add content, you like, you comment or you rate, you are willingly contributing to a massive data set.
