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 Globe Awards, which took place in late January. This year’s Globes ceremony proceeded in typical fashion, offering a downmarket preview of the March Academy Awards broadcast. There were some fine speeches, some heartfelt and pointed denunciations of ICE and the MAGA war on immigrants and dissidents, as well as a few comic grenades lobbed at CBS and Trump by emcee Nikki Glaser. There was some fun at the expense of the absent former host Ricky Gervais.

But in the midst of all this fairly standard Hollywood banter and gestures of protest, there was something new, and painfully omnipresent: the blockchain-based prediction app Polymarket, whose sponsorship blanketed the ceremony’s broadcast like a stock-car driver’s jacket or a cable-news ticker. Each time an award winner was announced, overlaid graphics swooped in just beforehand to register Polymarket’s predictions onscreen.

Polymarket, like Kalshi, is basically a gambling app. The differences between prediction-based assets stored on the blockchain and a sportsbook are nuanced, and important for regulatory purposes, but for the average Golden Globes viewer, the difference was moot. The chyrons infesting every moment of the Globes broadcast—“Best Podcast Odds Presented by Polymarket” is a real string of words that were displayed—looked and felt just like gambling odds. An award would be announced, the broadcast would show us, say, a 62 percent “probability” that Amy Poehler would win Best Podcast, and then Amy Poehler would win best podcast. Polymarket probability charts called the correct winner that evening with a 92 percent success rate—which meant that the drumroll-please moment that viewers tune into awards shows to see was deflated and made redundant 26 of 28 times.

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The moral, public health, and personal financial hazards we can correlate with widespread digital sports gambling are more or less clear since the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision reversing a federal ban on and leaving regulatory authority to the states. A predictable land rush in legal gambling ensued: Thirty-nine states so far (plus DC and Puerto Rico) have given anyone who is 21 or older who possesses internet access and a bank account the ability to empty said account into a sportsbook via a smartphone app.

The result has been to transform the daily rounds of life for many app users and addicts-in-the-making into a 24/7 version of the Golden Globes. If you’re an NBA bettor, you can be continually interrupted by push notifications letting you know you’ve incorrectly guessed Donovan Clingan’s steals total, or wrongly wagered that a hapless Nets team will cover the spread on a Wednesday night, as your swift journey to financial ruin speeds onward. Different bets have their own personalities, like the every-bit-as-dull-as-it-sounds baseball wager on a “No Run First Inning.” And naturally, the internet is a bottomless pit of bad betting ideas, like spamming live “flash” props across an entire sports game. One pro tip: don’t spend too much time fixating on Czech table tennis matches you cannot see; they’re apparently being fixed.

The trapdoors and dangers of becoming addicted to, and chasing, gambling highs are documented in some of the most forcefully admonishing idioms in the English language: Don’t throw good money after bad; the house always wins; know when to walk away, know when to run. The marketing strategies of the gambling industry understandably direct users away from such big-picture thinking, and stress, in the vein of Kalshi, the experiential bang for your endless regress of lost bucks. As the sports-betting leviathan FanDuel enthuses, it is there to Make Every Moment Mean More.” When the digital sportsbooks came to my home state, we were bombarded with the somehow dumber claim from FanDuel’s chief market rival DraftKings that “Life’s More Fun With Skin in the Game.” No one is pretending—and especially not promising—that untold riches are attainable through savvy bet placements in the way that the suckers in Vegas are lured into all-nighters at the blackjack table. The digital sportsbook and online gambling economy is saying instead: this is just a little treat. A way to make watching more fun.

Speaking for myself, watching was already fun. I’m thankful I’m neither addiction-prone nor wealthy enough to justify big bets and stomach big losses, but even so, I am not sure any of us needs the force-multipler of “winning money” to make watching sports fun. The Golden Globes revealed something that was hiding on every ESPN broadcast since that network’s offerings also became glorified extensions of the gaming industrial complex: handicapping and oddsmaking are all about betting on outcomes. By design, they take you away from the present moment. Whether you’re analyzing the past to find patterns for your next bet, ruminating a loss, or wondering how you’ll be able to cover your next foray into meaning-making financial ruin, you’ve left the here and now for ruminations and daydreams.

This means, for instance, that if you’ve got money riding on Timothée Chalamet’s Best Actor win, you now have the opportunity to become personally upset by his potential loss. Yes, it would be fun to win, but the promise of “skin in the game” turns out to be less of a fun magnifier than a funhouse mirror: it fundamentally distorts the experience it promised to simply amplify. And even if you’re not gambling on the outcome, the ambient circus noise of incessant online betting is still in your face.

Polymarket, Kalshi and the vast sports-betting empire have crammed the energy of your problem gambler friend into every facet of our waking lives—meaning that even onlookers who abstain from trading predictions now have live in the vape cloud of these bad vibes. The condition has gotten so endemic that it’s migrated to our news feeds: CNN now features a Kalshi handicapping geegaw alongside most of its online news updates.

This economic damage that untrammeled gamification wreaks on individual bank accounts is a crisis, but the aesthetic and environmental effect of outcome-capitalization is nearly as dire. Broadcasts and websites are littered with overs and unders and betting recommendations, while parlays (low-value combinations of multiple picks) are proposed during NFL pregames. ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt even covers “bad beats”—when a seemingly strong bet suddenly comes up a loser at the last minute—each week on SportsCenter like they’re top ten lists.

In a monologue on his Instagram, MSNOW’s Chris Hayes discussed the surprising event of learning that his appearance on a talk show —and what he might discuss on that show—had become a prediction ticket on Kalshi, with hundreds of thousands of dollars invested on various possible outcomes. The catch was that he found this out after recording the show, but before the show had aired. The outcome was not predictable, in other words; it was certain. Without participants’ knowing this in advance, Kalshi “predictions” about Hayes’s interview were a sucker bet—and that’s been the perennial danger attached to sports betting. The addictive quality of winning and the mental fallacies lead bettors to ignore probability in the chase of the gambler’s high. Sportsbooks make it their goal to emphasize the high of guessing outcomes with prospective cash returns—and minimize the probability that you actually know anything about what you’re betting on. Kalshi and Polymarket finesse this shakedown of habitual users by pretending that their markets aren’t guesses but instead snapshots of the truth—which is why it’s beyond ludicrous for a major news network like CNN to treat gaming predictions as though they possessed anything resembling news value.

Indeed, instead of simply offering viewers a product—here’s a football game, sponsored by advertisements, please enjoy— networks and the sports media have decided to follow along with both of these lies we’re telling ourselves. Not only is your biased opinion about what you’re watching correct, they insist: It’s worth money. From your superior vantage on the course of events, you surely won’t mind if we segment every possible moment you experience into assets for us to monetize.

If that refrain sounds familiar, it’s because it’s clearly downstream from any number of prior digital delusions packaged by the market-libertarian edgelords of Silicon Valley. It’s both gamification and gigification in one fell swoop: If turning your hobby into a side hustle for a few extra bucks (if you’re lucky) is not enough, your attention and your opinion are also a resource ready for rapid cognitive harvesting.

Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan leans on a “knowledge of the commons” notion to argue that prediction markets aren’t just speculative but useful and accurate pictures of what’s going to happen. You aren’t betting on the future; you’re signaling and conveying the reality of the present moment. Kalshi’s CEO Tarek Mansour likewise suggests that the erection of a Total Addressable Market will advance the end-game of his company: to “financialize everything, and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.”

But here’s the thing: The future is actually uncertain. The great pleasure of watching live sports or an awards show has been that events are actually unfolding in real time before you. Outside of presidential debates, they’re the last vestige of the way we used to experience all entertainment. Making sure not to miss David Letterman or Conan O’Brien’s late-night talk shows, or taping episodes of ABC’s Lost in the pre-streaming age are bygone experiences. The collective experience that fell under the heading of “you’re enjoying this unfold alongside other people” has long since been stripped from our lives, as the attention-harvesters lording over the Internet and social media have made virtually every user experience on-demand and precision-tuned to our preferences. It’s a good guess that the reason comic-book movies still do gangbusters on opening weekends despite declining longer-term interest in the genre is because their fans don’t want to wait too long and have the film and its plot details spoiled. In other words, they want to experience the thing collectively, in the closest approximation of real time available.

Hayes writes in his 2025 study of online attention capture, The Sirens’ Call, that the great promise of our present age has been “unparalleled access to every single last bit of human knowledge at every moment.” The side effect, he claims, “is a collective civic mental life that permanently teeters on the edge of madness.” As we’re about to be reminded on Super Bowl Sunday, sports fandom is already itself a kind of madness—but now the attention we give the live event is a resource to be not merely mined but fracked. Attention harvesting is an extraction economy, and after its speculative masters perforate that deep well of our biases and preferences, they aren’t just hoarding these resources—they’re poisoning them.