Same goes for drugs, tobacco, alcohol etc. oh look how that ended up. There's a reason why Prohibition has been repealed in every major country that tried it.
10 years ago I had some friends who were into online sports betting. It required getting a VPN, accessing offshore servers, signing up for sketchy websites, and linking an online bank account. It was enough hoops to jump through that the average person wouldn't bother. Back then I would have agreed with you: let the people play! But I'm only 33 and I've watched online gambling cripple peoples' lives in just the last few years. It's a huge problem and should be made illegal again. You should not be able to access it in one click from the App Store.
There is data from the past 10 years showing a direct spike in bankruptcies, divorces, foreclosures, suicide, and domestic violence (yes, really) as soon as DraftKings-style gambling is legalized in a state.
> despair, desperation and hopelessness
These are certainly factors, and yes we should have better mental health treatment and job opportunities in the US, etc.
But it's an incomplete picture of what's happening. There are billion-dollar companies with teams of advanced psychologists crafting the most addictive experience possible, and specifically targeting problem gamblers, with these new apps. It's industrialized and predatory. People with happy fulfilling lives and careers are still falling for it, not just hopeless impoverished people. Saying it's only about mental health and despair is framing it as an individual failing and ignoring the huge industry creating it this way.
The apps and the companies behind them really brought in a dangerous paradigm shift and the data is already here to show it.
Sorry, I thought this was a discussion about gambling, not Facebook and TikTok and YouTube and Whatnot and OpenAI and EA and Roblox and every other company that invents a problem (oh no, your hair isn’t shiny!) and uses psychological manipulation to sell you a solution. :-)
Jokes aside, the fact that this sort of predatory behaviour is showing up in multiple industries with broadly similar characteristics (giant corporations with immense wealth concentrations who are not part of the communities they serve and whose only interest is in sucking up all the money) suggests that there are some deeper problems here, and that focusing on the gambling industry is focusing on a red herring (or perhaps the most obvious canary to date, to stick with bird metaphors).
> Saying it's only about mental health and despair is framing it as an individual failing
Not at all! Despair is the outcome of a broken system.
You may not be aware of how rapidly and historically unprecedented gambling has spread in the US in the last few years. More than half of all men aged 18-49 participate in some form of online sports betting (https://futurism.com/future-society/men-aged-18-to-49-hooked...)