Betting it All on Gambling

“It’s the individual gambler that Silicon Valley can make the most use of. Casinos need marks. Crypto needs bag holders. Prediction markets need dumb money. And L.L.M.s need information.” Max Read in NYT Mag (Gift Article): How Everything Became Gambling. “What underwrites this emerging industry — besides an excellent business model and billions of dollars of revenue from suckers and billions of dollars of investment from the smart-money set — is a shared vision of a world built around gambling and the calculated risks that accompany it. The influencers, livestreamers, podcasters and aggregators (not to mention rappers and comedians and athletes) who have reoriented their output around the imperatives of betting capital not only work in service of what you might call the speculative sector but operate according to its logic as well. What is social media, after all, but a venue where you can wager your reputation and stake high-risk claims — and, perhaps, trigger a lavish (if infrequent) payout? All while enjoying the addictive satisfactions of endless nondeterministic push-button stimulus. Gambling, in other words, is not simply paying for the culture. It is the culture.”