Many years ago, I was working at an early (way too early) video-on-demand company in San Francisco and took advantage of cheap flights and accommodation to spend a few days holidaying in Las Vegas.
It almost seems redundant to describe a city that we are so familiar with, thanks to the proliferating presence of US popular culture — or propaganda, as I suppose we now must call it, thanks to the country’s naked swing to the right.
But for those who haven’t been there, the tourist part of Las Vegas is much more interesting in real life. The architecture alone is fascinating, enormously expensive yet still gimcrack, with expressions of global influences reduced to a kind of massive concrete merchandising.
A 1967 essay by Joan Didion probably captures this best: she describes Vegas as “the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification”.
When I got back to my office in Silicon Valley, my colleagues all excitedly asked me: “How did you do?” I found this a puzzling question until I realised they were asking if I’d won or lost. They didn’t believe me when I told them it hadn’t even occurred to me to gamble. I was just there to soak up the crazy buildings, the Elvis clichés and the unearthly perpetual daytime of the place.
All of which is to say, I have never really understood why people gamble, but I do understand the impulse to create fantasy environments in the desert of the real.
It was Warren Buffett, I believe, who described gambling as a tax on ignorance. It’s too easy, though, to call gambling a stupidity tax, and a little too close to what I believe is still known as victim-blaming. Having said that, some of the details in a recent report from Old Mutual Corporate’s Business Intelligence unit do suggest that South Africans are victims of inimical circumstances in some cases.
The report says 40% of working South Africans now gamble frequently and that many are doing so to bridge monthly shortfalls.
“At a national level, Stats SA estimates that more than half, as much as 55%, of what is classified as recreational spending is directed towards gambling activities,” says Keri-Lee Edmond, head of the Business Intelligence unit.
But the bigger concern is what’s driving that spend. “Our research shows that for many South Africans, this is no longer just about recreation or entertainment. Individuals are gambling to meet daily needs and expenses, pay off debt or in an attempt to secure higher incomes. Statistically, we know this is not a sustainable way to improve financial outcomes.”
“Not sustainable.” Edmond has a gift for understatement, not just numbers. In “South Africans gamble with their future”, the FM tells us that it “disproportionately affects lower-income earners, who may spend 10%-20% of their income on betting, compared with 1%-2% for higher-income earners. Some even use social grants to gamble. And it’s apparently producing a fraying of the social fabric, as there is a rise in domestic violence and suicides, as well as associations with child neglect and children going hungry as parents chase losses.”
Though gambling is more pronounced among younger and lower-income employees, it’s not confined to these groups. “Gambling activity is evident across income bands and demographics, reflecting debt-driven pressure and the rising cost of living,” says Edmond. “Under these conditions, gambling is increasingly becoming part of how people manage their money day to day, with scarce income being directed towards high-risk avenues in an attempt to cover expenses and keep up with financial obligations.”
The FM article reveals that South Africans wagered more than R1.1-trillion in the 2023/2024 financial year, with about two-thirds of these bets placed on sports events or horse racing, most of it through online platforms. This was a whopping 40% higher than the turnover generated in 2022.
A Stats SA article about numbers released by the National Gambling Board says gross gambling revenue in South Africa was R59.3bn in the 2023/2024 financial year, representing a 25.7% rise from R47.2bn in 2022/2023. This was also a sharp increase from R34.4bn in 2021/2022 and R23.3bn in 2020/2021.
The board says online betting, not the casino industry, is driving this. “Casinos were once the most popular form of gambling, boasting 84% of market share in 2009/2010, while betting accounted for 10%. Over time, betting expanded its influence, finally dethroning casinos during the pandemic to become the dominant form of gambling. Its rise has continued unabated.”
As is often the case, things can and do get worse. Founded in 2020 in New York City by a 22‑year‑old named Shayne Coplan (at least two red flags there already), Polymarket is a blockchain-based prediction market platform that lets users bet on the outcome of real‑world events across sport, popular culture, politics, weather, economics, war, and other areas, or to “put money behind beliefs”.
According to Britannica Money, “what started as a pandemic-era experiment in crowdsourced forecasting has evolved into one of the world’s most active platforms for event-based speculation — one that has reportedly placed Coplan among the world’s youngest self-made billionaires. The premise was simple. By requiring participants to quite literally ‘put their money where their mouth is’, Polymarket turned opinions into financially backed forecasts that reflected crowd-implied probabilities.”
Pretty words, but an ugly reality. Polymarket users bet on all sorts of things, including death, misery and destruction. For example, a Polymarket contract on whether the US would strike Iran by February 28 2026 reportedly reached about $529m in trading volume, making it one of the largest markets in the platform’s history. Commentators have highlighted how concentrated, suspiciously well‑timed bets looked like insider trading, with at least one wallet profiting by over $1m in less than 24 hours when the strike occurred.
The Guardian’s AI reporter, Aisha Down (disappointingly, not an actual AI reporter, but a reporter who covers AI), writes that “in July 2024, shortly before Donald Trump was re-elected in the US, Polymarket had reported about $400m total traded on its platforms that year. It now can trade upward of that in a single day. It calls itself a ‘prediction market’ — a way to gather data on the future by offering the public a way to bet on it. But longtime users say it increasingly resembles a casino — where everything, from Trump’s fury to the second coming of Jesus Christ, can be monetised. So where they can, players in this powerful ‘casino’ have started trying to shape the world to secure a payday.”
The latest ridiculous example of how Polymarket gamblers influence the real world comes from Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, where authorities are investigating suspicious temperature spikes recorded in early April, after two evening readings suddenly jumped by several degrees. This spike triggered nearly $1.4m in Polymarket wagers over two days. Meteorologists suspect the airport sensor was deliberately heated, possibly with a portable device, and have filed a complaint with police.
A New York Times article relates that “as the stakes have risen, so has the temptation to tamper with the instruments used to generate weather readings in hopes of engineering a lucrative outcome. Experts warn that this could have dangerous ripple effects, like degrading the information that underpins safe air travel.”
In another example, Polymarket gamblers threatened an Israeli journalist and demanded that he change his news copy so they could win a bet over whether Iran had struck Israel on a given day. Fans of Polymarket say mainstream media is missing the narrative and, as one Forbes columnist wrote, prediction markets are a “truth signal” that moves faster than polls, pundits or official reports.
At the same time, as Down points out, “the platform’s verdicts on what ‘really’ happened are decided by an opaque group of crypto token holders, raising the spectre that a handful of anonymous, financially interested actors can define truth for bigger financial markets and media that treat Polymarket’s prices as a faster, cleaner signal than conventional reporting”.
This sort of gambling seems a long way from the casinos and all-you-can-eat buffets of Las Vegas. It also feels dangerously different to the sports betting that is wreaking havoc with South Africa’s social fabric.
If we were to update Didion’s idea of Vegas as an allegory for American venality and immediate gratification, Polymarket is an allegory for the power discrepancies of the digital empire, and the corruption it brings with that. It’s one thing betting on your own life, but when you’re playing with the lives of others we really have come to a dark cul-de-sac in society’s evolution.
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