The machine zone is the dark side of “ flow,” a psychological state proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. In fact, it feels like words failing because it is at the edge of human experience, bleeding over into a cybernetic realm best expressed in data and code.

Why these words, these metaphors? We don’t cognitively grasp the state we fall into-we only feel its grip on us-the way we’ve merged circuits with the inanimate. The zone is like a magnet, it just pulls you in and holds you there.” They said things like, “You’re in a trance, you’re on autopilot. It’s the pleasure of the repeat, the security of the loop. Something similar, but not exactly the same happens. It’s a response to a fine-tuned feedback loop.

They know they’re not going to hit the jackpot and go home. As Roman Mars put it in a recent episode of his awesome podcast, 99% Invisible, on Schüll’s research: “It’s not about winning it’s about getting into the zone.” What she discovered is that most people playing the machines aren’t there to make money. Schüll spent more than a decade going to Las Vegas and talking with gamblers and casino operators about slot machines, which have exploded in profitability during the digital era as game designers have optimized them to keep people playing. It’s something much more technologically specific that MIT anthropologist Natasha Schüll calls “ the machine zone.” “It’s Not About Winning, It’s About Getting Into the Zone” My own intuition is that this is not love.

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