6000 Digits of Pi is part of an ongoing artistic research project examining the digital and physical litter that results from state-run lotteries.
Looking beyond the physical litter of lotteries (link here), I was interested to see how much digital litter was also being created by the frequency and repetition of these twice daily drawings.
Scraping video from both the NJ Lottery Livestream and YouTube page, I built a 77GB dataset of 7,034 recordings. The earliest video was from Jan 01, 2014 and the last one I pulled was the midday drawing on October 13, 2023. With twice daily drawings and no lottery on Christmas, there were a total of 7,128 drawings, of which the dataset was missing 94.
Save for a few moments of technical errors and the numbers that are called, each video is mostly indistinguishable from the next. And yet each video seems to average around 2,000 views. It's a really interesting illustration of "speech act theory."
According to their Annual Reports and Audits, in 2014 NJ's Pick 3 brought in $436,742,690 of revenue. It's important to consider who the state is collecting this $436.7 million from. Players that year won "more than $223 million," and when I watch the videos of drawings, I find it easy to imagine the feeling of hope and anticipation that they generate.
In 2024, Pick 3 had sales of $398.22 million. "Notwithstanding the strong performance of Powerball and Mega Millions, the Division of State Lottery is focused on the performance of Pick 3 and Pick 4, which have evidenced a long term trend of declining sales." "The performance on the daily games has led the Lottery to consider several innovative possibilities to attract the next generation of players, specifically focusing on New Jersey-only games."
In New Jersey, winners only have one year to claim their lottery winnings. The reason for maintaining a public record of multiple years worth of drawings is unclear. I think at this point, it's simply digital litter that no one cares enough to clean up. I am glad that they exist because it is an artifact that something happened, even if it meant that nothing happened for most of the people who cared about it.
