Chelsea Kai Roesch

“Casino Capitalism” focuses on the labor infrastructure of the digital gambling industry in the United States as the industry evolves from land-based casinos to digital platforms. This dissertation examines the human agents at each level of the digital gambling industry: “screen workers”—women who deal card games on live-streaming casinos—and cyberlibertarians whose ideological and economic investments in speculative financial markets align with the rise of the digital gambling industry. Through innovative participant-observer ethnographic methods and archival research, this project explores new frontiers in precarious forms of digital “women’s work,” live-streaming entertainment technologies, and new conditions of digital labor and play that are platform-mediated and globally distributed.