We arrived in the evening and went to the El Cortez downtown, where we’d booked a cheap room. I was not prepared. The lights, the noise, the ping-ping-pinging, the fake sound of coins coming down a metal chute, the Ghostbusters theme tune inexplicably clanging out at regular intervals, the gamblers with their plastic buckets of change feeding the machines, the lack of windows and clocks. An image has stayed with me: a woman in a motorized wheelchair wears a credit card attached to her wrist with what looks like an old telephone cord. The card is stuck in the machine like a baby’s pacifier. She is aggressively pumping the arm of the slot machine as money is being sucked from her bank account. There appears to be no end to her losses.

After crossing the casino floor and walking up a couple of flights of stairs, we found our room. The leaking air conditioning unit had left a small puddle in the carpet. The window wouldn’t open and everything smelled of cigarette smoke. But it was the grim yellow lighting that slightly undid me. Normally, I can do crappy hotels — in fact I quite like them — but because this was Vegas, where you are supposed to have fun, I couldn’t do it. I left the room, ran down the stairs, walked through the casino, back to where we’d left the car and collapsed in a sobbing heap. We left the next morning and headed to Los Angeles.

Three years later, Jason got the idea to make a documentary in Vegas and got some backing from Channel 4. In the early 2000s, it was the fastest-growing city in the US. Homes were being built at record speed. Every month, thousands of people were showing up looking for work, mainly in construction and hospitality. Between 1970 and 2000, its population went from 270,000 to 1.3 million, and it looked set to continue rising. It was a boom time, a new kind of gold rush, and Jason wanted to see what this kind of explosive urban growth looked like. I ended up accompanying him on his shoot.

We arrived in early spring. Unlike our previous trip to Vegas, it was chilly when we landed — that night-time desert cold hit us as we stepped onto the airport tarmac. We found a cheap room in an America’s Best Value Inn & Suites. The apartment block was aiming for bland, corporate clientele, but judging from the shouting and the regular appearances by the police, they weren’t hitting their target demographic. In the grounds was a small swimming pool where kids would play in the daytime and where adults would gather to drink in the evenings. The parking lot of the nearby 7-Eleven was where the prostitutes and rent boys lined up under the streetlights. In the darker corners, people bought drugs.

Jason had placed an ad in the local newspapers asking for people who’d just arrived in Vegas to get in touch. He wanted to make sense of this place through the stories of those who were arriving to start a new life. One of the people who called us was a young woman who had escaped an abusive home and had hitchhiked to Vegas from a small town in California. She’d been picked up on the highway by a much older guy called Robert. She ended up moving in with him. They invited us over to their house for a drink so Jason could interview them. The young woman had just found a job in a bar off the Strip. They lived in one of those cream-colored L-shaped bungalows with metal siding, so familiar to me and my Canadian childhood. It was a tract house, a cookie-cutter home, straight out of a Robert Adams photograph. The streetlights, the sidewalks, the rows of tidy bungalows facing each other across a newly paved street — they all just ended where the desert began.

This extreme interface between the built-upon and the wild recalled a passage from Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Stephen Izenour’s 1966 book Learning from Las Vegas: “Beyond the town, the only transition between the Strip and the Mojave Desert is a zone of rusting beer cans.” Here there were no rusting beer cans. Here there was only air and the lemony-yellow glow of the streetlights in which the wings of tiny moths fluttered.

I did not collapse into a sobbing existential heap on this return trip to Vegas with Jason in 2005, because I was there to be part of his documenting of the city; I was not there to have fun. I was an observer, and through this act of mediation, I was able to see Vegas in a different light. We were not living in the post-modern town described in Learning from Las Vegas, nor were we engaging with the city ironically, as a joke, as a flimsy cardboard cut-out, a Pop Art construction, the wet dream of populist pleasure makers, or a simulacrum of a city. I could and still can appreciate the “messy vitality” of the Strip that the authors of Learning from Las Vegas exalt in, along with their enjoyment of the unselfconscious creation of a popular aesthetic. I was also aware that this city is a place where people live, work, write poems, worry about their greying hair, their lack of exercise and their kids’ college fees. And yet, I simply couldn’t — and still can’t — shake my view of Las Vegas as human folly, a mistake, an aberration, and most importantly an environmental catastrophe.

The spring and summer that Jason and I were living in Vegas coincided with the 100th anniversary of what some referred to as the “founding” of the city in 1905. Birthday celebrations had been brewing for months, culminating in the baking of what would be the largest cake in the world. The seven-layer, 130,000-pound vanilla cake measured 102 feet long, 52 feet wide and contained 23 million calories. On the day of the great cake slicing, Jason and I lined up outside Cashman Center, a large building which looked like a cross between a storage facility, convention center and a high school gym. We were with Matt, one of the people we had been filming with. He was a soft-spoken and thoughtful gambling addict who’d been cast out of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for falling in love with a non-Mormon. He was currently homeless and often slept in one of the storm sewers or in the Salvation Army shelter when they had a bed.

Thousands of people showed up for cake. Some clutched Tupperware containers, others cardboard boxes, suitcases, even giant plastic garbage bags to lug their chunks back to their kitchens, offices and rented rooms. The scene was like a demented children’s picnic directed by Tim Burton. The planners of this birthday celebration had wildly overestimated how many Las Vegans would want to queue up in 40-degree heat for free cake. On that evening’s news, I watched in horror as dump truck after dump truck brought mountains of leftovers to a local pig farm and shovelled it into pens for the animals to “pig out” on. If there were ever a film clip needed to illustrate overabundance and society-as-spectacle in the US, this would be it.

Consumption is one of the engines fueling the Vegas that many people come to the city to experience. The year Jason and I were there, the hotels, casinos and restaurants alone were creating over half a million tons of garbage a year — enough to fill an American football field 10 meters high every day.

Like all built environments in the American West, you cannot talk about Vegas without mentioning the element on which its existence depends: water. When I think about Nevada, my mind immediately moves towards that 100th longitudinal meridian first observed by John Wesley Powell in the 1870s. This east–west divide runs from the Canadian border in the north to the Gulf of Mexico in the south, through the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. Powell had been commissioned by the government to explore the western territories to see if it were viable to continue carving up and handing out 160-acre parcels for farming and homesteading in the West.

After years of traveling, Powell argued that due to its aridity, it was almost a separate country from the East. A lack of fresh water and rainfall would not sustain high levels of population or intensive agriculture. The government ignored him and, ever since, precious waterways across the West have been dammed, reshaped, exploited and poisoned in the service of progress, development and unsustainable human activity.

The vast Colorado River, the major waterway in the West and Southwest, became the irrigation source for cities and communities springing up in deserts and on arid lands. Its water was so in demand that in 1922 something called the Colorado River Compact was created, which essentially divided the river into two parts, allocating set amounts of river water to the seven basin states. In order for this to happen, the Colorado would need to be dammed. This is where the Hoover Dam comes in, and the creation of Lake Mead. This body of water is called a “lake” but really it acts as a reservoir and a site for recreation. In America Day by Day, Simone de Beauvoir describes it as

“a large sheet of fake blue water that clashes sharply with the pink rocks. This water is as out of place in the desert as a grove of orange trees on a moor, as a fresh stand of birch trees in reddish sand dunes. It’s an unreal landscape … and it has the deceptive colors of Gauguin.”

Lake Powell (note the ironic name), a reservoir 300 miles away in Utah, is supposed to provide the more northern states with water, but it functions as a holding tank for Lake Mead. No one really understands why we’ve ended up with this set-up. All we do know is that these enormous reservoirs are running out, and at least four million people rely on Lake Mead for their water. There is now a “bathtub ring” running around the rock walls of the lake, showing how much the water level has dropped in recent years.

There is another lake in Vegas that isn’t being drained at such an alarming rate. Lake Las Vegas in Henderson, a well-off southern suburb of Vegas, has its water replenished from Lake Mead. In 2020 it provided 1.2 billion gallons of water to the people of Vegas. Some of this went on golf courses, some for the canals in the Venetian and some went to private residences, like the mansion in Spanish Trails owned by a prince of Brunei, which used 12,327,000 gallons of water in 2020. All this for one single house in the desert.

Back in 2011, after eight years of drought, golf courses started waking up to the problem of keeping their lawns green. In a 2012 article called “Water Hazard” in Golf Course Management magazine, Mark Leslie talks of the water police who can fine you for misusing the precious commodity, and how even watering lawns at the wrong time of day can land you in trouble. He mentions the fact that the evapotranspiration rate in and around Las Vegas is probably the highest in the country and that golf courses in Vegas pay over a million dollars a year for their water. Golf courses are trying to minimize evaporation by making use of the correct nozzles on their irrigation systems and covering remaining bodies of water with something called Aquatain, “a silicone-based product from Australia”. Basically, using Aquatain is a bit like spraying liquid saran wrap onto your pond. According to the company who makes it, it is harmless to people and aquatic life.

Despite the pretence that “much of our waste gets recycled”, most of it ends up in landfill. All across Nevada, the stuff we no longer need or know what to do with has been sent into the desert to be incinerated, buried, left to rot, decompose or, in the case of plastics and forever chemicals, left there to sit out the end of time. It isn’t just the “normal” waste — the Styrofoam cups, chicken bones, water bottles and candy wrappers — that are exiled to the desert near Vegas: there is plenty of the more insidious stuff, the stuff which decomposes over hundreds if not thousands of years.

The Mojave Desert has been blown up, blasted and poisoned by the US military since the first aerial atomic bomb was detonated there in 1951 in a place called Frenchman Flat. There are two tourist reviews of Frenchman Flat: “Not the best hiking spot,” one reads. “Felt nauseous for some reason and now I’m slowly losing my hair. Would not recommend.” A more recent review reads, “Nice hiking spot, felt nauseous but later my muscles started to grow and I didn’t need to wear my glasses anymore. Only annoyance, my skin is getting greenish when I get angry.”

The famous Nevada Test Site, in which Frenchman Flat sits, is about an hour’s drive from the Vegas Strip and occupies an area slightly larger than Rhode Island. Over the span of 40 years, almost a thousand nuclear bombs were detonated here. This land belongs to the Western Shoshone — a fact often overlooked when people talk about the atomic programme in Nevada.

Between 1951 and 1992, nuclear testing on Shoshone lands created 620 kilotonnes of nuclear fallout. As a point of comparison, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 created 13 kilotonnes. In a 2020 Al Jazeera article, Ian Zabarte, the Principal Man of the Western Bands of the Shoshone Nation, lists the people he knows with cancer — some of whom are toddlers. “Every family is affected,” he writes. “I watched my uncle suffer from horrible cancer that ate away at his throat and my grandfather die of an auto-immune disease that is known to be caused by exposure to radiation. They say he had a heart attack, but when your skin falls off, that puts stress on your heart.”

Incriminating documents were discovered in 1978 in the state archives of Utah. These documents revealed that 18,000 sheep were grazing only a few miles to the north and east of the Nevada Test Site in the early Fifties. None of the ranchers or shepherds were alerted to any dangers before bombs were detonated, and their concerns since have mostly been dismissed. In 1979, The New York Times reported that, after grazing in Nevada, “the sheep were returned to Utah in the spring of 1953” where “ranchers noted that many were sick and dying. Ewes had spontaneous abortions and showed burnlike lesions on the face, neck and ears. The majority of lambs were born dead and stunted, and ewes died either during lambing or a few days later, according to the documents.” Two autopsies on sheep showed that the concentration of iodine-131 — a radioactive isotope — in their thyroid glands exceeded “by a factor of 250 to 1,000 the maximum permissible concentration of radioactive iodine for humans”. None of this was enough to convince the US Atomic Energy Commission that these illnesses and deaths were related to atomic testing.

During the Fifties, Vegas promoted what it called “Atomic Tourism”, with one casino owner declaring that the nuclear blasts were the best thing to happen to Las Vegas. Guests would stay up all night to wait for the spectacular desert sunrise and sip their final highball as nuclear bombs were detonated at dawn. Bikini-clad women jostled for the title of Miss Atomic Bomb. The winner modelled a bathing suit with ruffles up the front emulating the famous shape of a mushroom cloud. It is still possible to experience a simulacrum of all this in the National Atomic Testing Museum, where for a few dollars you can experience your very own imitation bomb blast or learn how to survive an atomic explosion by going beyond the basic “duck and cover” position.

Gone are the days when the Rat Pack and fellow cocktail drinkers would watch atomic testing from the roof of a casino as a form of entertainment, but we are still living in the Atomic Age. The fallout is all around us. Those who grew up downwind of the bomb blasts do not need any of this simulated for them because they are living with the cancers, the deaths and the birth defects. For most people today, the Atomic Age is less of a spectacle or a beauty pageant and more of a slow, poisonous drip, drip, drip.

It took my return to Vegas in 2006 for me to unpick my initial reaction to the place, to put it in the context of a kind of ground truth — the reaction one feels to a place based on observable, or sometimes invisible, information. In my case it manifested physically. Riding in a gondola in the Venetian is quantitatively but not qualitatively different from watching atomic blasts from a casino rooftop. They both spring from the human urge to consume and destroy. Sinking a mojito at the Wynne or playing the slots at the Bellagio is an act of participation in this destruction. Having fun in Vegas is a problem for me. None of it should be here. And that includes me.

***

This is an edited extract from Joanna Pocock’s Greyhound, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

One reason for our indifference is that the true scale of the theft has been hidden from us. Social media platforms have for years been speeding up our sense of time — effectively shortening our lives — and yet they do this in such a devious manner that we rarely realize what we’ve lost.

Every social media user has had their time pickpocketed. You may log on to quickly check your notifications, and before you know it, half an hour has gone by and you’re still on the platform, unable to account for where the time went. This phenomenon even has a name: the “30-minute ick factor”. It also has empirical support. Experiments have found that people using apps such as TikTok and Instagram start to underestimate the time they’ve spent on such platforms after just a few minutes of use, even when they’re explicitly told to keep track of time.

This is no accident. Sean Parker, Facebook’s founding president, said: “The thought process that went into building these applications… was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’” Unsurprisingly, Parker himself doesn’t use social media, saying it’s “too much of a time sink”.

To understand how Big Tech steals our time, we must first get our heads around time perception, or chronoception. Time doesn’t always feel like it’s moving at a constant pace. The weightier an experience is, the slower time will often feel. It’s why people tend to overestimate the duration of earthquakes, accidents, or any other scary situation.

Generally, an event feels longer in the moment if it heightens awareness. But we seldom think of time in the moment; rather, our sense of time tends to be retrospective. And our sense of retrospective time is determined by memory. The more we remember of a certain period, the longer that period feels, and the slower time seems to have passed.

Sometimes an experience can seem brief in the moment but long in memory, and vice versa. A classic example of this is the “holiday paradox”: while on vacation, time speeds by because you’re overwhelmed by new experiences. But in retrospect your vacation feels longer, because you made many strong memories, and each adds depth to the past. Conversely, when you’re waiting at a boring airport, constantly checking the clock, your hyperawareness of time causes it to pass slowly in the moment. But since the wait is uneventful, you don’t make strong memories of it, and thus, in retrospect, it seems brief.

The sinister thing about social media is that it speeds up your perception of time both in the moment and in retrospect. It does this by simultaneously impairing your awareness of the present and your memory of the past.

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Is liberal society making us ill?

By Gurwinder Bhogal

Try to recall what you saw on social media the last time you scrolled. You’ll notice you can barely remember any posts, even if you scrolled for hours. This phenomenon has been confirmed by studies that have found that social media impairs both short-term and long-term memory. A social media feed is like the Lethe, the mythical river in whose waters lost souls sought absolution, and received it in the form of oblivion.

But what explains this “Lethe effect”? Theoretically, a social media feed should heighten awareness and memory, and dilate time, because it selects for content that’s exciting, outrageous, and scary. And yet we seldom remember such content. The reason for this discrepancy is simple: when every post is alarming, your brain quickly becomes desensitized, and starts to interpret alarming content as routine. And routine, being passive and therefore immemorable, speeds up time.

There are other, more cunning ways that social media impairs awareness and memory. The use of “attention engineers” is one of them. These are people employed specifically to design interfaces to capture as much of your time and attention as possible.

To understand how attention engineers deliberately warp your time, we must look to the history of casino floor design. In the Seventies, a man named Bill Friedman turned from gambling addict to casino manager by studying the tricks used to manipulate him — and perfecting them. He eventually published his ideas in several books, which would become bibles of casino design.

Friedman’s philosophy seems to have been borrowed from the retail industry. Supermarkets have long been designed like mazes, with everyday items like milk and eggs deep in the heart of the store, so you must pass by countless other products to access them. The purpose of this layout is to evoke the Gruen effect: the moment when a shopper loses track of what they entered the store for, and begins aimlessly wandering and impulse-buying.

Friedman proposes a similar strategy: to arrange casinos like mazes, where even the paths to the toilets and exits would spiral and meander through rows of enticing games machines. Such an overwhelming environment would distract people from themselves, so they’d remain instinctual rather than intentional, and hence compliant rather than resistant.

Friedman rejected open-plan designs, instead advocating for casinos to be sectioned into cubicles so players could only see their immediate surroundings. This was partly to restrict their awareness, but also to create constant FOMO: players would hear excited hoots and cheers coming from a nearby cubicle, and go searching for the cause of the commotion. In doing so, they’d wander further into the maze.

The pathways in Friedman’s mazes had as few right-angle turns as possible. This is because sharp bends jolt pedestrians into awareness by forcing a change of direction. And when someone has to decide where to go, they’re liable to think about whether it’s time to leave. For this reason, Friedman advocated for curvilinear paths that had no discernible corners, beginnings, or ends, and could thus be perpetually navigated on autopilot. The intention behind this hugely successful design was to keep people unaware by maximizing immersion, distraction, and disorientation.

Friedman’s ideas revolutionized casinos around the world. And many of his tactics would later resurface in social media design, where they proved even more successful at hindering awareness. For instance, in the early days of social media, it was possible to reach the end of a feed. These ends acted much like right-angle turns, snapping the scroller out of autopilot. Soon, however, the feeds were made “curvilinear” by the infinite scroll and autoplay function — features which, we now know, impair awareness and memory by lulling people into passivity.

Meanwhile, social media platforms have become increasingly labyrinthine, with the aim of trapping people in them. Every webpage is littered with links, each a path to another maze. And many of these links are deliberately placed where they don’t belong: search results are sneakily scattered with recommendations unrelated to your search, and personal notifications often have generic news links hiding among them.

What makes social media even more disorienting than a casino is that our feeds are not just mazes in space, but also in time. The opposite of a maze is a route, and a route through time is a story. This is because stories are linear and syntagmatic — each moment of the tale semantically follows from the previous — and such collective meaningfulness anchors the whole thing in memory. This is why studies have consistently found that people are much better at memorizing information when it’s presented in narrative form.

The memorable and sequential nature of stories makes them good timekeepers. As such, the way we make sense of time is through emplotment: by turning time into stories. It’s why research finds that people who are similarly engaged in a story will tend to converge in their estimates of how much time has elapsed. If we can’t turn a duration into a story, we struggle to keep track of it.

Now here’s the issue: your social media feed resists emplotment because it’s the opposite of a story. It’s a chronological maze. It has no beginning, middle, or end, and each post is unrelated to the next, so that scrolling is like trying to read a book in a windstorm, the pages constantly flapping, randomly switching between scenes, so you can never connect the dots into a coherent and memorable narrative.

Thus, not only do you forget time while scrolling through posts, but you also forget the posts themselves. We have no problem recounting the plot of a good book we read or movie we saw last year, yet we can barely remember what we saw on social media yesterday.

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The Menendez brothers prey on empathy

By Gurwinder Bhogal

Despite not having much memory of your social media feed, you may have a vague sense that you at least enjoy scrolling. This, too, is likely a trick. Research suggests that people judge an experience as being more enjoyable if they believe they underestimated its duration. In other words, not only does time fly when we’re having fun, but we also believe we had fun if time flies. In this way, attention engineers reduce the likelihood that you’ll regret the time you waste online.

Even if you do regret it, social media excels at making you return. Friedman’s cubicles were designed to spark FOMO by letting you hear the cheers of excited players without allowing you to see the cause — unless you entered. Similarly, social media push notifications periodically tease you with what you’re missing out on, and the only way for you to find out more is to re-enter the maze. The result of having your day punctuated by these notifications is that your attention is constantly intercutting between the real world and the virtual one, so you can never fully settle in either.

This creates problems of its own. When attention is constantly switching between concurrent tasks, it imposes a “switch-cost effect” that can make people lose track of time. By constantly interrupting you, social media platforms can therefore impair your awareness and shorten your days even when you’re not on them, so that you end up scrolling through the real world as shallowly as the virtual one.

Now that we understand this, we can try to do something about it. Fortunately, there are ways to actively slow down how we experience time. One way is to quit social media — or at least restrict your usage. Research suggests that abstaining from social media can lead to immediate time dilation, particularly for compulsive users. Further, a study of 35,000 people found that quitting social media tended to slightly improve perceived mental health after just a few weeks.

However, that same study also found that the time people saved by quitting social media was often just spent browsing other apps, which are increasingly emulating the time-warping features of social media. Take chatbots, for instance. They are inherently mazelike; not only do they frequently hallucinate red herrings, but they’re also prone to “verbosity compensation”, which means they often ramble and equivocate in their responses, raising more questions with every answer, and creating a kind of verbal Gruen effect. They also have a tendency to validate users’ delusions, leading them further down deceptive and dangerous rabbit-holes.

Chatbots are also becoming curvilinear, increasingly ending their answers with a question or an offer for further help to create a kind of conversational infinite scroll. And now Meta plans to train its chatbots to message you unprompted — the AI equivalent of Friedman’s cubicles. These developments pose problems because there is emerging evidence that chatbots, when used carelessly, can impair awareness and memory just like social media.

The deeper problem, then, is not social media or chatbots. It’s curvilinear mazes. If we can avoid following smooth spirals to nowhere, and instead take sharp turns to clear destinations, we can stay aware and keep track of time. We could even learn to use social media and chatbots — two incredibly useful technologies — in ways that enrich our lives rather than impoverish them.

We now know the ways social media platforms speed up time. If we can adopt the opposite techniques, we might just be able to slow time. What the human brain needs to make strong memories are salient stimuli — surprises, stories, (strong) sentiments, and selections. Social media gives you the illusion of these things, but it is actually their killer. Instead, we must seek out each of these in the real world.

One way of doing this is to always choose the life experience that’s most likely to lead to a good story: reading books instead of scrolling social media; going on adventures instead of staying at home. Focus too on the sentiments these stories inspire. The simplest way to strengthen a feeling is to savor experiences. So stop idly scrolling through life as if it’s a feed, and learn to focus your attention on the here and now. A review of 47 research articles found that well-practiced mindfulness is associated with slowed subjective time.

The more you avoid living on autopilot, the more of life you’ll remember, and the longer it will feel. So make a habit of resisting habit, and instead, choose a life of choices. Whenever you find yourself doing something — for instance, habitually checking your phone — ask yourself why you’re doing it, and whether there are better alternatives. If there are, or if you don’t know why you’re doing it, do something else.

This brings us to perhaps the greatest time dilator of all: surprise. We tend to remember novel experiences much more than repeated ones. It’s why time seems to speed up as we age: as we grow older, fewer of our experiences are new, so fewer stick in memory. It’s also why old people tend to remember their early lives better than their adult lives. The power of new experiences to stick out to us would explain why studies have consistently found evidence for the “oddball effect”, a phenomenon where a surprising stimulus presented among predictable stimuli is perceived to last longer. Recent research has found that the stimulus that immediately follows the surprising stimulus is also perceived to last longer, suggesting that novel experiences slow time by heightening awareness.

So there you have it. To make life feel longer, choose experiences that are novel over familiar, intentional over habitual, narrative over disjointed, and emotional over neutral. Above all, don’t let online algorithms set the pace of your life, as they’re not operating in your interests.

Seneca once said: “Life is short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future.” Social media makes you do all three. But you have the choice to do the opposite, and to expand time, for living long is not just about maximizing the days in your life, but also the life in your days. This moment is one your future selves will wish they could have back. Don’t waste it scrolling through posts you won’t even remember tomorrow.