Why The Jackpot?

The end of the world as we know it has a lot of names: The Apocalypse, the Last Days, the End Times, the Second Coming, Ragnorak, Götterdämmerung. In the world of science fiction, we have “The Jackpot,” coined by Robert Heinlein in his Galaxy story “The Year of the Jackpot” (1952), which concludes:

She looked up. “Potty, something funny is happening to the sunset.”

“No, darling. To the sun.”

“I’m frightened.”

“I’m here, dear.”

He glanced down at the journal, still open beside him. He did not need to add up the two figures and divide by two to reach the answer. Instead he clutched fiercely at her hand, knowing with an unexpected and overpowering burst of sorrow that this was The End.

Whether or not in homage, William Gibson adopted the term in his novel The Peripheral (2014). Here, publicist Wilf (projecting himself from the future onto the screen of a Wheelie Boy, a mobile video-conferencing robot sold, one imagines, in the toys section of Hefty Mart) explains the end of the world to Flynn (in the present, Wilf’s past):

So [Flynn had] gone out to the chair and sat in it with Wilf in the Wheelie Boy, and he’d started to explain what he called the jackpot.

And first of all that it was no one thing. That it was multicausal, with no particular beginning and no end. More a climate than an event, so not the way apocalypse stories liked to have a big event, after which everybody ran around with guns, looking like Burton and his posse, or else were eaten alive by something caused by the big event. Not like that.

It was androgenic, he said, and she knew from Ciencia Loca and National Geographic that that meant because of people. Not that they’d known what they were doing, had meant to make problems, but they’d caused it anyway.

So now, in her day, he said, they were headed into androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad shit, like she sort of already knew, figured everybody did, except for people who still said it wasn’t happening, and those people were mostly expecting the Second Coming anyway.

No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they’d changed things just by being there.

In Heinlein, The Jackpot — “The End,” caps in the original — hits because the sun blows up. But I think Gibson’s tangled “multicausal,” “multiplex” is more true to our experience than Heinlein’s linearity[1].

Given that The Jackpot is — by definition — the biggest story going, one might expect that our famously free press would attempt to disentwingle it, whether by covering those who are attempting to divert its course, or by offering “news you can use” as palliation for those left behind. No such luck. As Yasha Levine writes:

The stupid adage that has underpinned our information age — that Information Is Power — should be taken behind the woodshed and put out of its misery. Information isn’t power. It never was. Unless you have power, information is just information. And in our consumerist-entertainment society, information is just that: entertainment.

Think about the live interactive maps that all the major newspapers put up every time there’s a wildfire raging in California. They allow us to watch things burn in real time, to zoom in and see a fire’s progress from thousands of miles away. We have this God-like access to information and yet…it’s useless. It doesn’t do a thing to stop the political power of the industrial machine that’s cooking our planet and killing everything in its path. But it does help pass the time…It’s entertaining for the minute people use it and then move on to consume something else. Pick your favorite sub-genre of journalism and you’ll see it’s all the same.

Like Slow Food, the news flow should be nourishing rather than entertaining (“good, clean, and fair”). The Jackpot Blog is designed to slow the news flow down, so there’s time to think, not just react, and above all to feel, without having your attention grabbed and exploited at every twitch of the mouse. Oxytocin flows, you might say, as opposed to dopamine loops. (I’ll cover the more technical aspects of this design in posts to come.) After all, if the House doesn’t get you to play, it can’t “always win.” And isn’t that the real jackpot?

NOTE

[1] I’m not a player, so I have no judgment on this, but I’m not sure whether non-linearity would be true for investors or not; as the saying going, “’In a crisis, all correlations go to one.” Nevertheless, Wilf’s world is run or at least owned by the winners, those for whom the Jackpot was, without irony, exactlly that.