It’s not just DraftKings and Polymarket — the logic of gambling undergirds everything coming out of Silicon Valley.
ADDICTION BY DESIGN: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas – Natasha Dow Schüll
Slot machines, revamped by evermore compelling digital and video technology, have unseated traditional casino games as the gambling industry’s revenue mainstay. Drawing on fifteen years of field research in Las Vegas, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll explores the dark side of machine gambling—a solitary, rapid, continuous form of play that has less to do with the competitive thrill of winning than with the pull of “the machine zone,” as gamblers call the trancelike state they enter.
We are all going to regret Kalshi and Polymarket.
Gambling should be like cigarettes: Legal but inaccessible.
Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want
Did the tech industry get high on its own supply?
We Haven’t Seen the Worst of What Gambling and Prediction Markets Will Do to America
I don’t think people have thought hard enough about how bad this could get.
You don't have to gamble for gambling to ruin your life
How gambling is eroding empathy, destroying relationships, and changing our culture — even for people who never bet.
What happened to Steam Machines?
Three PC builders on why they're not gambling on SteamOS.
Is Big Tech's AI Gamble Starting to Look Riskier? - Slashdot
The Washington Post looks at giant tech companies "feeding every available dollar into the cash-incinerating maw of AI machines." They warn "Tech superstars that once had oodles of cash left over at the end of each year are now flipping into the red..." [While optimists expect] huge corporate p...
#760: Gambling the future into existence
Plus: Cosmo for conservatives, AI;DR and being "agentic"
Secret History of Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley, disruption, and the end of uncertainty
This paper reflects on the relationship between high-tech disruption narratives and uncertainty. My main argument is that an economic sociology of the future is incomplete without addressing the ‘d...
From Pill Mills to Prop Bets: Prediction Markets and Mobile Sports Betting Apps Are Fueling America’s Next Addiction Crisis
Against the gamblification of the world.
Silicon Valley über alles
Every day, computers are making people easier to use
The Rise of the Silicon Valley Small Business
What you need to know about the next big startup archetype
More Everything Forever
This "smart and wonderfully readable" (New York Times) exposé shows why Silicon Valley’s heartless, baseless, and foolish obsessions—with escaping death...
In case you didn't think Polymarket was sketchy enough. It paid influencers to use a fake site (poiymarket) to make fake bets that would then look like they won, and then to post viral videos to social media pretending they had won money. wsj.com/business/media/polymarket-soc…
They Looked Like They Were Getting Rich on Polymarket—but None of It Was Real
www.wsj.com