“Every now and then,” Rocky told me, “I was so exhausted that I actually wanted to lose, so that I could go home. If I’d get close to losing and win again, I’d think Oh great, now I’ve got to sit here until it’s gone.”

He recounted an earlier trip: seconds before his return flight home at an airport video poker machine near his departure gate, he had won a six-thousand-dollar jackpot. Although he boarded the plane and flew home, upon arrival at the midwestern airport he found he could not stand to be in possession of his winnings—they weighed on him as an

All that stuff that draws you in the beginning—the screen, the choice, the decisions, the skill—is stripped away, and you accept the certainty of chance: the proof is the zero at the end.”10

The phenomenon of dealing with a traumatic loss or its circumstances by reenacting that loss, or by putting oneself in situations where there is a high probability of loss occurring again, is one that Sigmund Freud strove to understand, most famously in his theory of “repetition compulsion.”3 The theory was inspired by a game that his toddler

As we saw in the last two chapters, machine gambling renders these dynamics safe by reducing them to something more mechanical, manageable, and predictable than life.

Isin suggests that “the subject at the center of governing practices [should be] less understood as a rational, calculating and competent subject who can evaluate alternatives with relative success to avoid or eliminate risks and more as someone who is anxious, under stress and increasingly insecure and asked to manage its neurosis”—

E. P. Thompson wrote of the new temporal relations that accompanied the transition to industrial society, in which working habits were restructured such that time was not something that passed, but something that was spent, as a sort of currency.

Its “rapid succession of events of anticipation and consummation,” as the Australian gambling scholar Jennifer Borrell writes, has the effect of continually collapsing an uncertain future into the present.41

This “starting over again,” this constant beginning that is discontinuous with all previous beginnings, meant that each act of labor or play was experienced as a nonchronological event “out of time.” Even as industrial work depended on clocks so that time could be precisely measured and segmented, that very mode of measurement and segmentation