Today's blog posting can be relatively short and sweet. Well, maybe not all that "sweet." How about relatively short and sour?
Jonathan V. Last, a journalist and editor of The Bulwark, an online newsletter that reports on politics and culture in America, wrote a Substack blog posting on September 24, 2024, that was titled as follows: "Robot Gamblers Are Making People Poor." That blog posting is worth reading in its entirety, though I am providing you with the gist, right here. In short, here is what Last has to say:
Robots have taken over online gambling and they’re transferring wealth from uneducated poor people to corporations and wealthy hustlers. This is not something society should allow.
Start with poker.
I linked to a Bloomberg story yesterday about a Russian bot operation that grew to devour the world of online poker. It’s really long and maybe you didn’t read it, so the relevant points are:
- If you play online poker, there’s a good chance the “people” you’re playing against are bots.
- These bots are significantly better at poker than most of the best professionals.
- So your money gets siphoned in two directions: The bots (who are controlled by a third party) win most of your money while the online poker site takes a percentage of all the action (this is called the rake).
How prevalent is this dynamic? Vitaly Lunkin, a professional poker player, told Bloomberg, “I believe there is no clean game online.”
Sounds bad, right? Normal people who don’t know better show up to play poker online and discover that they can’t win because they’re getting pantsed by robots.
But the full story is actually worse.
As the bots began taking over, online poker sites noticed that IRL human players quickly got turned off by losing so much, so quickly. This hurt the poker sites, because remember: They make their money from the rake. They need people playing.
So these poker sites started hiring the companies that built the bots—as consultants. These consultants were then paid to optimize the behavior of the robots so that human players would be allowed to win just often enough to keep them playing.
In other words: The online poker websites paid the robots’ owners to slow down the rate of siphoning so that the human marks wouldn’t realize they were getting scammed.
The word you’re reaching for is “predatory.”
I frequently inveigh against life in the "online world." One major reason to limit our involvement with anything that comes to us "online," including "politics," is that the world that has been created online is emphatically not a "common world" like the "Human World" that we have created within the "World of Nature" - a human world that we still might think of as "real life."
The online world is a world that is of, by, and for the giant corporations, and of, by, and for their private owners (think Elon Musk) who make it seem like it's part of the "public sphere." It's not.
As Jonathan Last is telling us, that online world is rigged!
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