[Not] The Gambling Industry I Was Promised

A short, but much-needed rant on the current state of the gambling industry.

This is not the legal, regulated gambling industry I was promised when I first started advocating for legalization in the 2000s.

Like the frog in the slowly boiling pot (yes, the metaphor’s biologically inaccurate, but the point stands), we’ve been gradually drowned in gambling products until we’re now seriously debating things that were non-negotiable truths just a few years ago:

• Is sports betting gambling?

• Is insider information/match-fixing actually bad?

• Should your sportsbook exist in the same drop-down menu as your 401(k)?

Forget legitimate debates, like 18 or 21; we are fast-approaching crisis-level in terms of exposure and normalization to gambling, and I feel like Elaine watching everyone in the diner eat their candy bars with a knife and fork: “What’s wrong with all you people!? Have you all gone mad?”

Legacy gambling operators, who have been patiently waiting in bumper-to-bumper traffic, have to throw their hands up in disgust as a bunch of companies led by 20-something wunderkinds zoom past them, weaving in and out of traffic and through the breakdown lane on ebikes.

I’ve always rolled my eyes at the “public health crisis” comments around legal gambling, but that’s because the alternative was objectively worse. But the difference between the legal and illegal markets needs to be more than two letters, platitudes about responsibility being at the center of everything, and a bunch of well-meaning but largely ineffectual regulations.

I was promised guardrails, and got a street takeover.

This is not sustainable, and in five years’ time, when the people responsible (the ones who pushed the envelope further and further) are swimming in their Scrooge McDuck vaults (likely virtual vaults filled with cryptocurrencies) we’ll be left to clean up the mess.

/rant.