How Big Gaming Is Swallowing Up the Big Game

"The outcome of the 60th Super Bowl won't be known for another few days, but here's one surefire prediction: The game will be a bonanza for the legalized sports-betting industry. The American Gaming Association, the trade group for betting interests, forecasts that $1.76 billion in legal bets will be placed on the big game-a projected 27 percent increase over last year's take."

"But under the new regime of betting administered via the digital protocols of surveillance capitalism, the gaming industry is also poised to engulf the scarcest commodity of online life: attention. By relentlessly "gamifying" the vast range of human experience, from the incremental progress of Congress to what Mr. Beast will say next to which people are likely to lose health care coverage, legalized gambling is poised to make even the most personal and idiosyncratic features of our lives fodder for transactional prognosticating and second-guessing."

"And this, in turn, threatens to transform much of our lived experience into monetized commodities, setting us on a joyless, eternally frustrated quest to realize maximum returns on things we shouldn't be treating as profit centers. In one online ad for the omni-betting, er, "predictions" app Kalshi, a young woman thrills to the prospect of making money on mundane forecasting propositions, because, as she explains,"

The Super Bowl is projected to be a major windfall for legalized sports betting, with the American Gaming Association forecasting $1.76 billion in legal wagers, a 27 percent increase from the prior year. Legalized gambling carries hidden social costs, including addiction, bankruptcy, alcohol abuse, and intimate partner violence. Digital betting platforms operating within surveillance-capitalist systems threaten to capture scarce online attention by gamifying broad swaths of experience. Everyday events — from legislative progress to influencers' actions and prospective health-care losses — become subjects for transactional forecasting, converting lived experience into monetized commodities and incentivizing a profit-driven approach to personal life.

Read at The Nation