Las Vegas as microcosm/shadow capital of America

From The Money and the Power by Denton/Morriss:

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 "Shadow Capital:  The city was never, in truth, some perverse Atlantis apart from the main....When Las Vegas became the greatest business success story of the twentieth century, it was because the rest of America made it so with capital as well as customers.  When Las Vegas grew into a kind of shadow capital  in the last decades of the century,it was because the rest of America made it so by embracing the ethic of greed and exploitation

By the millennium the national surrender of democracy to oligarchy in the United States--the submission to house rules, as they might put it on the Strip-- had simply come into the open, where it had long been in Las Vegas.city h  It has been difficult, to see the city honestly in that context.  What  a sad, grim reflection Las Vegas gives back to us. America has yet to come to term to its own hidden history, let alone the city’s..”
  p. 392,The Money and the Power, click for context;  review here

In The Matrix, humans are used as a "crop."  Humans have soused machines, and become dependent on them, that now  humans are used by the Machines, who have them plugged in to their system (feeding a dream world directly into their brains), while ironically  the system itself now  gets its energy from humans: they are batteries.

Is Las Vegas The Matrix?  Or at least its capital/capitol?

See also:
casting shadows on the city

And do listen to/watch  some 1990s U2 Popmart Tour..which subversively kicked off in Las Vegas.