How Big Gaming Is Swallowing Up the Big Game
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/ February 6, 2026
How Big Gaming Is Swallowing Up the Big Game
The Super Bowl will showcase the lords of legalized betting, even as they’ve already colonized every other reach of human experience.
Matt Alston
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A typically tasteful online-betting ad
(Gabby Jones / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
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.
Legalized gambling of course involves all sorts of hidden costs, from addiction to bankruptcy to allied social ills like alcohol abuse and intimate partner violence. 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, her friends and she are constantly making predictions—without noting that anyone living life on those terms has to be a) perpetually exhausted; and b) unbelievably boring. Yet the alleged frisson of seeing a banal forecast come to life is what company cofounder Luana Lopes Lara says with a straight face is the dream of “making money out of what you know and your passions.” The company’s best-known slogan is likewise a desperate bid to upgrade glorified psephology into the height of intellectual ambition: “everybody is an expert on something.”
To get a more realistic read on how rampant and venal gamification is affecting our basic capacity to pay attention, it’s useful to revisit another recent media event that’s pretty much the opposite of the Super Bowl, in terms of overall cultural reach: the 83rd Golden …
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Current Issue
Society
/ February 6, 2026
How Big Gaming Is Swallowing Up the Big Game
The Super Bowl will showcase the lords of legalized betting, even as they’ve already colonized every other reach of human experience.
Matt Alston
Share
Copy Link
X (Twitter)
Bluesky Pocket
Ad Policy
A typically tasteful online-betting ad
(Gabby Jones / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
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.
Legalized gambling of course involves all sorts of hidden costs, from addiction to bankruptcy to allied social ills like alcohol abuse and intimate partner violence. 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, her friends and she are constantly making predictions—without noting that anyone living life on those terms has to be a) perpetually exhausted; and b) unbelievably boring. Yet the alleged frisson of seeing a banal forecast come to life is what company cofounder Luana Lopes Lara says with a straight face is the dream of “making money out of what you know and your passions.” The company’s best-known slogan is likewise a desperate bid to upgrade glorified psephology into the height of intellectual ambition: “everybody is an expert on something.”
To get a more realistic read on how rampant and venal gamification is affecting our basic capacity to pay attention, it’s useful to revisit another recent media event that’s pretty much the opposite of the Super Bowl, in terms of overall cultural reach: the 83rd Golden …
How Big Gaming Is Swallowing Up the Big Game
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How Big Gaming Is Swallowing Up the Big Game
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Current Issue
Society
/ February 6, 2026
How Big Gaming Is Swallowing Up the Big Game
The Super Bowl will showcase the lords of legalized betting, even as they’ve already colonized every other reach of human experience.
Matt Alston
Share
Copy Link
Facebook
X (Twitter)
Bluesky Pocket
Email
Ad Policy
A typically tasteful online-betting ad
(Gabby Jones / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
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.
Legalized gambling of course involves all sorts of hidden costs, from addiction to bankruptcy to allied social ills like alcohol abuse and intimate partner violence. 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, her friends and she are constantly making predictions—without noting that anyone living life on those terms has to be a) perpetually exhausted; and b) unbelievably boring. Yet the alleged frisson of seeing a banal forecast come to life is what company cofounder Luana Lopes Lara says with a straight face is the dream of “making money out of what you know and your passions.” The company’s best-known slogan is likewise a desperate bid to upgrade glorified psephology into the height of intellectual ambition: “everybody is an expert on something.”
To get a more realistic read on how rampant and venal gamification is affecting our basic capacity to pay attention, it’s useful to revisit another recent media event that’s pretty much the opposite of the Super Bowl, in terms of overall cultural reach: the 83rd Golden …
