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I used to collect lottery tickets thrown into the gutter next to a convenience store in East Oakland. Because I lived across the street, I picked up abandoned tickets daily. I would carefully place them in photo albums, fascinated by a dozen different ticket designs competing for the attention of customers staring through plexiglass. Bright green dollar signs. Pots of gold. A Monopoly baron with a cane dancing down a yellow brick road. All scratched according to style, some were completely exposed by a coin or key. Others barely revealed mismatched numbers. The California lottery was a novelty when I was young, introduced in the mid-80s as a ballot measure to raise money for schools without raising taxes.1 The rolls of shiny, perforated scratcher cards were intended to transfer the increasing cost of public education to those most in need of a windfall.
From its inception, the California lottery board conducted extensive demographic research on game participants by querying winners about their backgrounds and buying habits. The bottom fifth of wage earners spent the most on the lottery, and in the early years games were so heavily weighted toward the state that the rules had to be adjusted to produce more winners.2 When I began to collect discarded tickets years later, I placed some cards face up and others flipped to show the text on the back, featuring rules and a miniature form requesting identifying information. The cashier would tuck these ticket-forms into the register drawer to collect reimbursement from the state and a retailer bonus, while regaling new customers with evidence that the location produced winners. For prizes over $600, a more extensive claim form was required, followed by a six-week waiting period that involved checking the payment against taxes, child support, welfare, and traffic fines before issuing a check.3 Upgrading tickets into data collection devices enabled the lottery to perform a variety of state revenue functions discretely printed in the "rules of the game."
The lottery ticket offers a window into the method guiding this special issue, which reorients our approach to biography through technical demands for disclosure that affect earnings and overexposure to policing. We may be tempted to disqualify functional forms of inscription as life writing. But the...