Addictainment
The following is the main overarching argument of my Honors project that looked at crypto-livestreaming platform Kick.com. It's probably the closest I've come to a formalized construction of what I view as one of the tenets of the ideology of entertainment. Ingredients of hate speech, gambling, phobic discourses galore, sex, and depravity mix together into a roofied fervored cocktail known as Kick.
No other platform has mediatized a cocktail quite as potent as Kick , and Addictainment is the sensation and high one gets for downing the glass.
The first part is the main foundation of Addictainment, and the second part "A Societal Outlet for a Violent Entertainment" gets more into the feel of the murk at the bottom of the glass.
Conceptualizing Addictainment
Kick’s unique ideological milieu addicts users to only be able to consume and reproduce hate speech if there are slot machines and poker tables in the background. Entertainment is a flavour enhancer, which without its addition, a return to normal consumption takes on an ascetic tone. However, we need to understand technology as something that does not deterministically shape social relations and social institutions, we need to understand the way technology is utilized by those with power who instrumentalize them as a function of power (Mosco, 1998) Closer to a more mutually shaped relationship between technology and society (Quan-Haase, 2013, p.55). It is how the power relations between stakeholders, the platform, creators and audiences and how technology, entertainment, and content are instrumentalized for profit that is at stake here. Multiple forms of entertaining and amusing stimulants (auditory and visual) confluence together into the object of consumption. All consumption of the platforms circulated hegemonic ideologies necessitate a side of entertainment for palatability. Kick’s contribution to the historical development of entertainment platforms and their content is their amalgamation of ideology is its formation into Addictainment in a system of production, consumption, and circulation. Profit is accumulated by acquiring more audiences through the acquisition and radicalization of content creators, who reproduce the radicalization process onto their audience. Addictainment breeds profit as Kick curates a truly unique ideological product of content only they can offer in the mainstream entertainment media market.
I develop Addictainment to denote the addictive stimulations at play (gambling, drug use, online sociality), and how it is incorporated with entertainment as an inseparable component. Addictainment is the mediatization of gambling content into a palatable overstimulating consumable form, in the multi-modal medium of livestreaming on Kick. The ideal user is the transition of the regular entertainment consumer into the addictainment consumer, that is the road all flows of activity aim to lead its users astray into. Kick’s disseminated vision of gambling. The hypervisible and obviously intentional systemic influence of gambling. Gainsbury (2015) notes that existing studies fail to differentiate specific personal/behavioural risk factors between digital and non-digital problem gamblers. What is explicated is that Kick has a unique differentiation against digital and non-digital problem gamblers because of this idea of Addictainment. It is gambling combined into a mediatized consumable entertainment, in a medium which has a social and communal aspect.
Addictainment differentiates from an understanding of the addiction of gambling due to its contexts of production and contexts of consumption, both of which are linked to their role in creating a consumable mediatized object. The context of production is the way the entertainment is felt by the creator/livestreamer, the dominating power of gambling becoming a job, of shame becoming a job. The context of consumption is that of the viewer, who engages in a vicarious parasocial relationship, the emotional highs and lows of which make even regular parasocial relationships seem healthy in comparison to the heart rate and emotional stimulation audiences subject themselves willingly to. But after a certain threshold, ‘willingly’ goes out of the window. At a certain point of stimulation, the user builds a tolerance, and consuming the same level of addictainment doesn’t give a high as much as it puts you into a stasis, you’re in a consumptive trance wanting more. During the walkthrough, there was a feeling of boredom, entwined still with desperation for more stimulation, the chat and streamer both building a mood of waiting for something to happen. The rapid communication in the live chat felt slightly different from Twitch in that sense. In such a minuscule abstruse way that it is tough to even draw an articulated conclusion out of it. Even shorter, more instinctive, more desperate, there is a certain mental haze that all communication in the live chat seem’s filtered through—as everyone seems to be operating on a different level of invested effort and purpose in their communication.
Addictainment is similar to arrested development in the sense that it maintains its largest users and creators at a certain level of growth, of mental agency and forte. But combined with gambling, it devolves into a stimulus junkie, where one undergoes a process of arrested decay. Addictainment is this process of arrested decay one undergoes under the thumb of entertainment. The environment of this arrested decay is fostered and facilitated by Stake through Kick. The ceiling of growth is degenerative and financial, the extent to which ideal users travel through the pipeline of non-gamblers to gamblers locks them into a growing process of regression. The regressive act itself is the process of growth. Negotiations of resistance against this growth find themselves fading, as higher frequencies of use and gambling are degenerative in mental agency and forte as it is the process of spiralling into addiction. Which just creates more content and more work on behalf of the creator for their patron Kick. The hardest workers are the most addicted as they hedonistically and harmful continue to stream.
What is important, and deeply sad, is the sense of sympathy and pity one feels throughout the walkthrough method. No one is doing great, to say the least. What is tragic is that the most depressing form of entertainment is still entertaining. Being entertained connotes less of a good or bad, less about what form the content takes, but the act of being enraptured and stimulated by the spectacle at hand. And a tragic spectacle, carries a range of emotions so diverse, simultaneously high and low in mood, such an ambiguous and muddled mess of emotions, creates such an immersive takeaway. A car crash one can’t turn their eyes away from. And it's multimodal, the ultimate stimulation. Assisted by a throbbing, constantly updated live chat with messages constantly pinging mimetic reactions, aided by auditory stimulation. Sustained by the multidimensional visual element of seeing a video camera of the creator, the content being discussed, as well as any other visual element a creator would like to include.
Addictainment has 3 core parts that lend to its dominating protean nature: Its political economic understanding as a powerful instrumentalized tool for profit and exploitation in the circuit of production, consumption, and circulation; its ability to proliferate and exploit communities and digital social acts of communication, fostering and feeding on hedonism and shameful consumption; its alienating and radicalizing effect on those who consume and produce it, the alienating neoliberal and phobic pipeline those involved in the contexts of production and consumption shape and are shaped by. The roofied cocktail of gambling entertainment, hate speech, and radicalization intertwined into consumable addictainment. The contractual triad of work-home-play feeds this process as well. And it results in the consumptive experience of Kick as a societal outlet for a violent form of entertainment.
A Societal Outlet for a Violent Entertainment
We see the ways that the consumptive experience users have on Kick mark the platform as a societal outlet for a violent form of entertainment. Company loves misery in the live chats on Kick. Watching someone bet hands/spins upwards of millions is a level of voyeurism so distinctly technologically recent. And when it all crumbles, it is akin to watching a lifelike voodoo doll get stabbed by pins and needles. There is an element of a subconscious feeling that this is someone who deserves punishment. A content creator who, when viewed from a class lens, is exploiting their own audience for their own profit—turning followers into heavy gamblers just like themselves. These creators are also funded via a form of patronage by the platform to continue gambling, to continue to be visible and entertaining in their work. The consumptive experience when the stream begins to turn tragic is the ponderment of ‘will this be the fulfillment of fate,’ tinging the tone and mood with a fatal determinist taste. I draw this from the walkthrough experience of seeing live chat reactions over the course of hours as streamers lose a couple million on Stake; and the back-and-forth dialogue that happens between content creator and the formless live chat. Needing a certain abstraction, addictainment functions as a societal outlet for a violent entertainment. The violence of which is deeply real for the creator gambling on stream. And in a self-harming vicarious way for the audience.
The greatest predictive potential of emotional attachments to media consumption patterns is not just feelings of love, beauty, enjoyment, but also hate (Gilbert, 2020). Kick is ripe for hate watching: consuming media of/about content and creators for whom the consumer maintains a harsh dislike. Whether it is for their phobic discourses, or simply out of an economic jealously that they get to live a hedonistic life of mountainous amounts of degenerate gambling. This enacted violence functions as a form of self-harm as well, as the live chat buzzes with ‘that was my weeks/months/years salary’ ‘would have blown my brains out after that degen gamble’. Each message like that is a user edging an emotional process of self-shame, testing the untenable waters to imagine how it would make them feel. Making yourself feel the guilt of how that first loss—which felt inconsequential and entertaining at the time—has now led you astray into a dark wood, vicariously yet shamefully watching live streamers who are in much deeper holes than you, their nails digging even deeper. It is harmful in a much more loathing internalized way when we think of vicarious consumption in regard to parasocial relationships. When it is addictainment, the live chatter sees themselves to an extent in the content creator gambling their earnings away. Hate watching is prescribed to the creator, but when they vicariously embody the creator in their consumption, that hate lights up the self as well. Viewing the actions of the live streamer as their possible actions if the users' degeneracy continues. But seeing them get away with it, as viewers with incomes nowhere near the live streamer live with the negative economic and mental effects of their hobby at a degree more relevant to them.
The Kick Streamer epitomizes a modern mediatized version of Foucault’s use of the Chain Gang and prisoners in public works. The group of prisoners who are paraded around society as a public spectacle, performing servitude work while simultaneously performing their identity of criminality to the public. The metal links the gambling addiction, the heavy ball the patron Kick.
These convicts, distinguished by their ‘infamous dress’ and shaven heads, ‘were brought before the public. The sport of the idle and the vicious, they often become incensed, and naturally took violent revenge upon the aggressors. To prevent them from returning injuries which might be inflicted on them, shells were attached, to be dragged along while they performed their degrading service, under the eyes of keepers armed with swords, blunderbusses and other weapons of destruction. (Foucault, 1997, p.7).
‘Injuries,’ ‘attached shells,’ and ‘swords and blunderbusses’ take on a financial tone. Injuries as debt, shells as long contractual obligations to live in the triad of work-home-play, swords and blunderbusses as de-platforming, strikes, hate raids, and contract terminations. The incensed spectacle society resembling the anger and vitriol of a live chat gone antagonistic. At its most harmful degree, the job of being a dedicated problem gambler on Kick is a degrading service. Both to faults of their own in devolving into a situation where that is what their life resembles, but also to the platform for allowing and actively fostering a place for it to be possible. Possible, and extremely public.
Kick Streamers represent a societal outlet for the disappearance of torture as a public spectacle. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault (1977) traces the disappearance of public torture:
Punishment had gradually ceased to be a spectacle. And whatever theatrical elements it still retained were now downgraded, as if the functions of this penal ceremony were gradually ceasing to be understood, as if this rite that ‘concluded the crime’ was suspected of being in some way undesirable to it. It was as if the punishment was thought to equal, if not to exceed, in savagery the crime itself, to accustom the spectators to a ferocity from which one wished to divert them, to show them the frequency of crime, to make the executioner resemble a criminal, judges murders, to reverse roles at the last moment, to make the tortured criminal and object of pity or admiration. (p.9)
Punishment here is in the eye of the consuming beholder. And the multimodal medium of livestreaming is theatrical in its mediatization. In the absence of a societal outlet for a violent entertainment, the savagery of the crimes and the feral audience turns to crimes of a financial nature. Which has the potentials to be fuelled by class resentment, and the overall pervasive influence capital has on lives globally. The livestreamer is both executioner and criminal in a process of both financial and mental murder and suicide. The platform which facilitates this is the public square through which audiences congregate. The social aspect of this is a self-judgment placed in contestation with a judgement of the criminal other. Your perceived superiority or inferiority with/against the social community at play. We want the criminal to know their criminality. Users almost want the gambler to lose—if they’re among the popular—they’re almost the only ones who can. The craving for the spectacle. Of both ravenous joy and subordinated punishment.
Conclusion
Kick is a digital city of hedonistic entertainment consumption and production. The most radicalized visible case of unregulated digital entertainment. Entertainment to spit vitriol and spin slots simultaneously via the frictionless possibilities of digital technology. There’s a link between the rise of Kick and the idea of iGaming. iGaming is the intent to have gambling be mass-adopted by all digital users. Intending everyone to have frictionless access to apps, phones, and platforms with access to online casinos, online sports betting, live dealing, and all forms of online gambling experiences (Servers.com, 2023). To put a casino into the hands of everyone with a phone makes the ability to gamble almost synonymous with using technology. Kick engages with this process by intruding on users' processes of consuming digital content.
At this stage, it would be a fair assessment to say that Kick is not truly a competitor for the traditional chokehold in the medium of livestreaming against Twitch. It is, however, an ideological competitor, satisfying a different type of entertainment need for a different type of person. This specific type of entertainment need is of the phobic-hate speech-hedonistic gambling type. It is, most likely, a larger competitor for other gambling companies than it is in the traditional media model. The perceived success of the platform's profit models transcends a comparison to other digital media platforms due to Kick’s unique operating model. By understanding it under the theoretical entertainment model I’ve presented, we understand that the way it is consumed and used should have our understanding of Kick shifted away from looking at it as a media company. To truly enact a solution to the case of Kick, to regulate it, requires a shifting of its understanding to one of a mendacious gambling addictainment machine. It fundamentally changes users who enter into it and travel along the pipeline of new user, frequent user, new gambler, culminating in their (regressive) evolution into a dedicated problem gambler—leaving them decrepitly poorer, with a hate-filled heart numbed by the multi-modal entertainment. Along with hate-filled producing spewing phobic discourses at a speed only possible in the medium of live chat.
I view Kisk as a competitor and a disruptor in a much more macro sense. Their symbiotic relationship between financier and financier, which is concealed in a black box not available for the public’s eyes to peer, represents a possible new growing threat in regards to both the weaponization of entertainment. Stake is the real house, while Kick is the shield aiming to represent itself as the main. The house always wins. While also highlighting the possible further frequency that we will be seeing more companies that are self-sufficient in their operating models utilize an addictive element for profit. It is the combination of a weaponized consumable (mediatized) form of entertainment, in combination with an addictive experience. The widespread belief in the importance of free speech and deregulation, as well as the neoliberal sentiments embedded within a capitalist society, will not result in its current format. The governing model is one of negligible unenforced operation. Willing inaction is still a governing model of behavior. It cries out for regulation. Kick is cloud infrastructure at its worst, and a platform/agent who embodies the criminal characteristics of the cloud is not easy to catch. Only getting the individual rain droplets that come out of it, but never the cloud itself. As gambling content, hate speech, and right-wing content continue to proliferate. Exacerbated and made palatable through the medium of multi-modal entertainment, the problematization at hand will only continue to rise. No actual regulatory change enacted against Kick will stick or dissuade future instances unless there undergoes a systemic economic and—more importantly—cultural change. Kick’s profit model is also too cautious to be caught out, safely reliant on a long precedent of shady casino practices utilizing international law to circumvent national rules.
As gambling continues to proliferate and rise, especially into a culture where mass entertainment consumption becomes so prevalent and common, Kick, I feel, should be looked at as one of the inciting examples of a shift towards a more visible degenerate platform, where the veneer of what traditional media companies offer is not obfuscated. Allowing the entertainment to wrap its tendrils around everyone in its orbit. It is paramount that we see that media and entertainment can harm more than just a propagandizing effect. Undergoing acts under the guise of transparency and disclosure does not solve the heating of heroin spoons. Kick and Stake are exactly what a neoliberal entertainment-saturated society desires: a symptom, not a cause.
It is its blatancy that is unprecedented, its hypervisible degeneracy. And it is the way the multimodal medium of livestreaming has allowed mediatized objects of entertainment to carry a more intense form of persuasion, and perhaps a deterministic effect once users/audiences agencies have been inhibited by the addictive element that comes with a high radicalized frequency of gambling use.
Kick’s roofied mediatized cocktail of entertainment, hate speech, and radicalization demonstrates the path unregulated entertainment has ahead as technologies continue to get more accessible, and entertainment becomes even more entrenched into every sphere of life. The harmful spectacle that is more alluring, more enticing to consume. Only once sipped does one find out that it is the end of the line, swallowing the alienating and radicalizing habits that the platform, creators, and audiences negotiate and influence eachother into performing. This is the process of Addictainment, the societal outlet for a violent entertainment.
