Deal or No Deal

Adam, thanks for posting your presentation. It's really interesting and thoughtful. I'll have to postpone my comments for now, though.

I just wanted to bring up something that I was thinking about during my presentation but didn't mention in the interest of time. Have you all heard of this show, Deal or No Deal? The rules are on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deal_or_No_Deal_%28U.S._game_show%29. I saw it a few times while it was on TV, and I thought to myself, this is a) so appropriate after 9/11, and b) a great example of the chaos, speculation, and chance at the heart of capitalism, couched in the rhetoric of individual agency and good ol' American risk-taking. Basically, the contestant already possesses a suitcase that has a certain amount of money in it, and he or she has to eliminate the other suitcases (held by models, of course) one-by-one. Depending on which suitcases the contestant eliminates (whether it's a suitcase of $1 million or $1 or whatever in between), the nameless, faceless, "Banker" makes an offer to buy the suitcase that the contestant possesses. The contestants take a lot of time deliberating over which suitcase to eliminate, as if it actually makes a difference. There's also a lot of consultation of important people in the contestant's life about whether or not to take the Banker's offer, etc. There are also interludes in which we get video visits from soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan, and in the background stories of the contestants there's a lot of emphasis on how they're average Americans, etc.

My point is just that this show really encapsulates for me how you get this illusion of agency, calculability, rationality, when the system is actually structured by chance and speculation.