The Hell Zone

Of all the dark and occult and evil things I’ve read recently in my exploration of mind control and conspiracies and whatnot, I’m convinced that the closest we’ve come to creating a Hell on Earth that’s climate controlled and apparently benign, is the interior of a casino with video slots and video poker machines.

If you do anything at all with computer user interfaces, please read the book Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schüll (2012). It is one of the most revealing looks inside the creation of a built environment that’s designed to trap victims in a dissociative state where they’ll focus their entire attention on the pseudo-random number generator in the machine and not on anything going on in their real lives.

Perhaps I’m ambivalent about VR, rather than opposed, and I’m enthusiastic about AR, rather than neutral, because I see the potential for both to increase meaningful real-world social interactions, which is something all the social media companies claim their goal is as well, but I’m not so sure. There’s immense potential to trap people with a basic touchscreen, as video poker and slots prove.

My “evilometer” is now calibrated to the interior of a casino filled with video gambling machines, with every aspect of the environment carefully designed to manipulate and entrap and relieve victims of their money and their dignity. Reading about “the zone” makes me think of heroin addicts “nodding out”.

The one feature of video slots that will really bake your noodle, and not in a good way, if you didn’t already know about it, is that the majority of video slots, and all of the ones with progressive jackpots, use an algorithm called “virtual reel mapping” to map the results of a random number generator over a much smaller range (the virtual reel) to the symbols on the reel displayed on the screen (or to physical reels controlled by the algorithm) to trick the player into miscalculating the odds that they’ll actually win, and to do devious things like make near-misses more likely than you’d get by chance, to trick the player into the false belief that they “almost” won.

Somewhat amazingly, what’s also legal for video slot machine makers to do is something called “teaser strips”, where a virtual reel that’s loaded with winning combinations spins and then is replaced with the “real” reel strip when it stops. That reel strip can be virtually mapped differently for each reel. The only rule is that each reel’s outcome has to be the result of an independent RNG output.

So now I have the mental image of a Las Vegas casino filled with machines and zoned-out people pushing buttons on them as a really-existing Hell for the living, and the machines themselves are a metaphor for everything that for-profit companies do to misrepresent material reality and sap our precious free wills.