







Gambling is an industry built on addiction and misery. We’re fighting to phase out all pokies and ban gambling industry advertising and political donations.
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.

Gambling - Platform | The Australian Greens
Gambling costs Victoria billions every year – in financial costs, family breakdowns, losing jobs and mental health impacts.

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.
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.

How Everything Became Gambling
It’s not just DraftKings and Polymarket — the logic of gambling undergirds everything coming out of Silicon Valley.

The Player and the Played
In an age when capitalism feels like an unwinnable game, extreme reactionary ideas and politics are on the rise. The Hunger Games, Game of Thrones, Squid Gam...

Video Game Monetization | The Paper Pilot
The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology
Exploitative Game Design: Beyond the F2P Debate
The past few months have seen a torrent of articles about Free-to-Play business models, often discussed alongside issues of ethics in games (for example: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). These pieces have addressed the effect on addiction-prone players or children, the possibility of corrupting artistic intent, the sheer amount of money being spent, and other advantages and dangers of F2P. While all of this is relevant, I fear that we’re focusing too much on F2P and glossing over the wider ethical issues in game design.
We are all going to regret Kalshi and Polymarket.
Gambling should be like cigarettes: Legal but inaccessible.

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.

Opinion | How to Win a War on Drugs (Published 2017)
Portugal treats addiction as a disease, not a crime.

More Than a Quarter of Americans Gamble Online Daily, But Frequent Gamblers Likely to Self-Impose Br
As millions of Americans log on to track their college basketball pools, more than half (58%) of adults who gamble online daily say that they have intentionally taken a break or limited the amount of time they spend gambling, new poll data from the American Psychiatric Association (APA) shows.

Radical markets: uprooting capitalism and democracy for a just society
Many blame today's economic inequality, stagnation, and political instability on the free market. The solution is to rein in the market, right? Radical Markets turns this thinking on its head. With a new foreword by Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin and virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier as well as a new afterword by Eric Posner and Glen Weyl, this provocative book reveals bold new ways to organize markets for the good of everyone. It shows how the emancipatory force of genuinely open, free, and competitive markets can reawaken the dormant nineteenth-century spirit of liberal reform and lead to greater equality, prosperity, and cooperation. Only by radically expanding the scope of markets can we reduce inequality, restore robust economic growth, and resolve political conflicts. But to do that, we must replace our most sacred institutions with truly free and open competition Radical Markets shows how

Generative AI runs on gambling addiction — just one more prompt, bro!
You’ll have noticed how previously normal people start acting like addicts to their favourite generative AI and shout at you like you’re trying to take their cocaine away. Matthias Döpm…

#760: Gambling the future into existence
Plus: Cosmo for conservatives, AI;DR and being "agentic"

The Game of Oligarchy | Brewster Kahle's Blog
I just invented and played a game today with my family, and it worked great– it was fun and we learned an important lesson. Similar to the game “Monopoly” which shows that one person ends up monopolizing even though you think the rules are “fair,” the game of Oligarchy shows that the “free market” leads inexorably to one person getting all the money and everyone else going broke. And fast.