Education Bookcast

This book is about slot machines. It is creepy. By way of this book, we can arrive at a new psychological idea which Natasha Dow Schüll calls "the machine zone", but I prefer to call "dark flow". The word flow is already used in psychology to refer to Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's concept of optimal experience, in which time distorts, the sense of self disappears, and the subconscious and conscious mind work in harmony. Dark flow is similar to flow, but... for want of a better term, it's evil. Whereas flow allows us to both enjoy our lives to the fullest and grow as a person, dark flow entails the same kind of perfect absorption but with the goal of self-destruction. Both the aim and the result are an obliteration of one's life. It's like a disease that swallows all of a person's time, money, and thought; the subject craves the sense of release from reality that the flow process provides, and ultimately acquiesces to, or even seeks, the destruction of their life that follows. Death metaphors are very common in pa