Mainstreaming American Vice

Once unthinkable, the integration of gambling and adult content into mainstream culture reveals a transformed American ethos

A repeated question I get is whether a “vibe shift” in America means in the end of the Negative World. While I do think there’s been a reduction in overt hostility towards Christianity, we are still in a clearly post-Christian culture.

One example of this the mainstreaming of gambling. The New York Times ran an interesting recent article on the rise of in-game betting (gift link).

On mobile sports betting apps, nearly everything that was happening on the court was also a chance to win (or lose) money: Which team would score the next basket? By two points or three? How many points would the star player Shai Gilgeous-Alexander score in the fourth quarter? New bets, with new odds, popped up until the final whistle.

These bets — known as in-game or live betting — have become ubiquitous and are one of the fastest-growing areas of the sports gambling industry in the United States. They range from wagers on the result of a game while it is underway to what are known as microbets on events that are resolved quickly, sometimes in a matter of seconds, like the speed of a baseball pitch. Others are on outcomes of random events — for instance, will the halftime point total be an odd or even number? Once you are on the FanDuel or DraftKings mobile app, there are scrolls and scrolls of bets, worldwide, day or night.

…

This kind of betting is surging as public health experts warn that faster, continuous gambling can lead to greater financial losses and negative effects on health and relationships for some people. The sector has grown so quickly in the United States that it hasn’t been exhaustively studied, but early research has some public officials concerned. Some state and federal lawmakers have proposed bans on wagering during games because of these perceived harms.

“We authorized this type of gambling without discussing the public health implications of this unique product design,” said Brianne Doura-Schawohl, a representative of the Campaign for Fairer Gambling, a gambling reform organization. “Problem gambling experts have valid reasons to call into question the dangers of in-game wagering.”

…

The growth of live betting has also been good for the sportsbooks’ business partners. Leagues see it as a way to get fans to watch more games for longer periods, which drives up the price of media rights deals, by far the largest source of revenue for the National Football League and the National Basketball Association.

…

Some professional sports leagues now allow ads for sports betting companies to be integrated into the live action of a game broadcast — as opposed to just during a commercial break. Michael Kay, the New York Yankees play-by-play announcer, or the N.B.A. commentators Charles Barkley and Kenny Smith will offer odds or set up predictions and direct viewers to a sportsbook that sponsors the broadcast and takes the bets. The N.B.A. and Major League Baseball permit up to two of these integrations per game.

Streaming, too, has enabled new ways for fans to bet while they watch. Last year, the N.B.A. debuted an optional overlay on its livestreaming platform that displays in-game betting odds. Users can tap to click through to a prefilled bet slip in the DraftKings or FanDuel app. The N.F.L. has gone a step further, allowing its games to be streamed inside sportsbook apps (and still count toward the Nielsen audience ratings).

…

“I have clients who gamble in the shower; they gamble in bed in the morning,” said Harry Levant, a counselor and activist who has been in recovery from gambling addiction for a decade and serves as the director of gambling policy for the Public Health Advocacy Institute at Northeastern University School of Law. “These products are designed for people who need more and more action. Betting on Ping-Pong from Eastern Europe or every serve of tennis matches you can’t see — this is not a product built for recreation.” In Oregon, sports bettors wagered more than $100 million on in-game table tennis bets last year, second only to professional basketball in live betting.

Click over to read the whole thing.

The key point is not merely that this is legal, popular, and profitable. What’s even more notable is that prestigious, mainstream American institutions are very comfortable being directly involved in the gambling business.

Just 20-30 years ago gambling was considered a seedy business that was heavily mobbed up. This is one reason it would have been impossible for Donald Trump to get elected president prior to the Negative World. He had owned casinos, and it was inconceivable that America would have elected a casino owner as President. That would be almost like electing Michael Corleone. If you’ve ever read Trump’s 1980s business book The Art of the Deal, you’ll recall that he takes pains to claim that he is not associated with the mafia.

The biggest example of this shift is the major sports leagues themselves, who previously viewed gambling as one of the biggest threats to the integrity, and thus legitimacy of their product. They are now partners in the business and directly supporting it.

Sportsbooks aren’t the only businesses to benefit. Data companies supply the real-time information that facilitates the bets, and professional sports leagues have equity stakes in those data companies. The leagues and broadcasters also see in-game betting as a way to boost fan engagement and viewership — and, ultimately, profits.

But this also includes the media. Yes, the networks that broadcast the games, but even the New York Times Company itself, via a subsidiary.

The symbiosis among gambling companies, leagues and media outlets has accelerated the embedding of gambling into the American sports experience, from banners in stadiums to ESPN’s operating its own sportsbook. The Athletic, which is owned by The Times, has an advertising partnership with BetMGM, another U.S.-based sportsbook, and publishes its odds with links to make bets.

Keep in mind that the Times eliminated its own sports department and now outsources sports reporting to the Athletic. Articles from the Athletic run in the Times print edition.

I also noted before how former NFL superstar quarterbacks Peyton and Eli Manning signed up to be gambling pitch men. These are two people that embodied the clean-cut, All-American Boy archetype. They were already rich and had no need of more money. They surely would have avoided getting involved in the gambling business if they thought it would damage their brand. But they calculated, correctly, that it would not. There is no more moral taint associated with it.

We also see that people who attended Harvard now also find the gambling industry as a place to deploy their prestigious degrees.

One morning, Andrew Puopolo, a Harvard-trained data scientist who was an early employee of Simplebet and now works for DraftKings, stood behind a lectern and clicked through a slide show. Like other digital platforms, sportsbooks are keeping track of you.

“We want people betting on the most important moments of every game,” he said. The next step will be to personalize the data scrape. So if the company can determine that “this user likes to bet on the Yankee games in the late innings,” a personalized push notification might be in order, he added.

Basically, there’s virtually no sanctum of culture that gambling has not yet penetrated at some level.

Another example of the post-Christian world is the fact that the CEO of OnlyFans - the Patreon of porn - was a guest for the Financial Times’ prestigious Lunch with the FT column.

[Keily] Blair, a former privacy lawyer born in Dublin, joined OnlyFans in 2022 shortly after its ill-judged attempt to ban porn from its site to focus on its “safe for work” content from sports stars and celebrities. Since becoming chief executive the following year, she has overseen a remarkable growth — more than doubling the number of creator accounts under her tenure to 4.6mn — that has set the site firmly in the cultural zeitgeist. 

…

Blair has a bracing frankness about discussing the porn delivered over OnlyFans — albeit preferring to call it “adult content” — admitting that before her tenure “there was a stage where we overcorrected, and maybe overemphasised the yoga and the tennis and everything else [on the platform].”

Now, Blair sees OnlyFans’ success as part of a broader shift in attitude, and a greater sense of acceptance among younger digital natives. “People can be quite uncomfortable talking about sex, and can be quite uncomfortable talking about our content. I don’t think that’s healthy,” she says, with only the faintest hint of an Irish accent.

…

Despite being one of the biggest UK tech successes, OnlyFans employs just 46 people in a co-working space in London. It generated $7.2bn from “fans” last year — more than five times what the $40bn US social media group Reddit makes a year — albeit only a fifth of that goes to the platform in revenue given its 80/20 split with creators. 

Since the site was founded in 2016 by Essex-born entrepreneur Tim Stokely, OnlyFans has paid out more than $25bn to creators. Blair claims that the company gives more tax to the UK government than the entire British fishing industry.

There’s no need to post much more of this one.

I don’t think we should overstate the case on this one. The FT does include controversial people in this column. Also, there was a certain legitimacy bestowed on Hugh Hefner and Playboy as well. Jimmy Carter agreed to an interview with them, for example.

But OnlyFans dispenses with the literary pretenses of Playboy. It’s essentially a form of virtual prostitution. It’s also, apparently, now a legitimate business much like any other “creator economy” platform.

It may well be that regulation or legislation ebbs and flows on matters like these, but these two stories do show the sea change that has happened in our culture in the Negative World. I’m not sure we would have seen either of these developments even ten or fifteen years ago.

The Negative World is not just about religious properly so-called. It has profound implications for all aspects of our society.

Cover image is AI generated