You might have woken up this morning with the intention of doing it ‘all different’ today: you set a 20-minute screen-time limit for Instagram to 20 min, turned off push notifications, and intended to read 10 pages of your book. By the end of the day, you did so well that you rewarded yourself with a little bit of screen time before bed, only to find yourself, an hour later, doomscrolling through the slot machine that is your phone and realising you had once again been sucked into the trance of your feed.
This state of self-forgetfulness closely resembles the ‘machine zone,’ a term used to describe the state of slot-machine gamblers who lose all sense of time and physical presence, fully absorbed with their game. While the slot machine was the first device designed to deliberately capture and hold human attention, its constant, repetitive switching between certainty and uncertainty has extended to the swiping, scrolling, and clicking in everyday life today. Especially since the arrival of the infinite scroll, content has become endless, and attention increasingly scarce. In response, capturing attention has been stripped down to its most primal form: triggering dopamine through stimuli, surprise, outrage, and arousal — keeping you in a loop of chasing rewards, over and over and over again. Within the rise of economic uncertainty and constrained pathways to adulthood, younger generations often experience life itself like a gamble. Meanwhile, the ecosystem based on likes, clicks, and virality promises limitless success and money. But for those who do not hit the influencer jackpot, behaviour is shaped to keep them spinning the slot machine reels, endlessly waiting for what might come next…
You May Also Like is a multi-media installation that positions the slot machine as a blueprint for the dopamine-driven relationship between humans and machines, starting from the personal struggle of trying to break with my phone addiction. Stylized as an infinite scroll, it invites you to step into the machine zone and question the reward feedback loops that increasingly shape our life.