ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the expansion of a global gambling industry and its relation to the neoliberal state. It considers the convergence between the operation of commercial gambling with the wider system of finance capitalism in which it is embedded. The chapter explores the role of technology in the acceleration of the gambling economy, with respect to mobile, social and machine-based games in particular. It argues that intersections between technology, industry and the state are generating increasingly intensified forms of gambling and driving the spread of aleatory environments. The chapter focuses on to document the development of biomedical discourses of 'disordered' gambling that have accompanied this expansion and that present excessive gambling as a cognitive deficit, founded on irrationality and loss of control. It also argues that such a focus on individual risk and pathology works as a form of governance and also detracts attention from the wider structural conditions that promote aleatory environments in the first place.
