The more advanced stages of machine gambling addiction are explained by Schüll with recourse to Freud’s idea of the death instinct. She quotes a gambler named Maria who says, “The only real control you can have over the end is to make it come faster.” This sounds like the peculiar, self-negating agency of suicide, and the analogy is apt (quite apart from the prevalence of actual suicide among gambling addicts, which is higher than for any other addiction).
