Hacking Las Vegas

As an urban hacker, Vegas is a nice place to hang out. You can find a constellation of fragments of space that are not immediately productive, and which lend themselves to other modes of being. The Situationists felt that the resort town was a potential site of inspiration for what an alternative future might feel like (though they were not counting on these places to actually be the future of urban space). With so much space dedicated to leisure, these commodified paradises would begin to resemble the veritable playground of a city that thinkers like Constant Nieuwenhuys imagined humanity could inhabit if they succeeded in propagating their desires beyond the limits of society's constraining organization of production. This was precisely the point of experiencing places like resorts and the lust-ridden red-light districts of older cities: these places threatened to push desires past the point that could be provided for by a capitalist productive apparatus. The urban drifter, if s/he was meticulous about experiencing the city contrary to its intended and designed flows and order, might be able to experience the pleasures of urban life in a way that would disintegrate these from the integrated spectacle that would use these controlled and contextualized desires to fuel capitalist circulation. Las Vegas is a great place to experiment with the disintegration of desires. Since the city hosts many features designed to give you a taste of pleasure or desire, in order to induce you to spend money in the casinos and shops, it is a site of many free pleasures. If you're a hacker, you can surf from one fragment to the next, using them contrary to their capitalist-integrated operating instructions. Rather than spending money in the casinos, one can drift from hotel pool to hotel pool, or use headphones drown out the terrible music of the Bellagio fountain with their own auditory symphony, or drift through the perfumed casino floors and the people-mover equipped bridges over the canals of Venice. Las Vegas's urbanism assumes compliance with the desire to play the bigshot, to make it big, to win, to leave rich. A more intelligent visitor will realize that one is already rich in this city of amenities, and experience the city horizontally, on a plateau of desire constructed by big capital.