Weekly Scroll: Bro Economy Everywhere

Plus! Oral Traditions, Woke Chili, and Montoya

Welcome to the Weekly Scroll! We’ve had a surge of new subscribers, so if you’re new here’s the deal. I’m Jeremiah and Infinite Scroll is a blog about the culture, technology and politics of the social internet. Some posts are researched deep dives, some are essays about online politics, and every week there’s a Weekly Scroll roundup of the most interesting things on the social internet that week.

We’re all online now, so it behooves us to understand what the hell is happening in social media spaces. About two-thirds of posts here are free, with the final third paywalled. If you enjoy the blog, the best way to show your support is with a free or paid subscription.

Other news: I appeared this week on the Bulwark podcast with Tim Miller to talk about JD Vance and DOGE.

Onto the Weekly Scroll!

The Bro Economy Keeps Growing

We’ve talked several times here about the rise of the Bro Internet, and what we’re usually talking about is the podcast and YouTube influencers who are stereotypically masculine and adjacent to right wing politics without always being explicitly political. But one of the other major factors in the rise of the Bro Internet is the growth of male-coded gambling.

This gambling comes in three main forms - cryptocurrency speculation (particularly on meme coins), day trading (particularly on meme stocks), and sports betting. All three activities have seen meteoric increases in interest in the last five years: Crypto went mainstream, day trading went viral during the GameStop frenzy of 2021, and sports betting was only recently legalized in a number of states. These activities all target primarily male audiences. They’re all highly online activities. They’re all high-variance gambling. And they were especially primed to explode thanks to the pandemic - lots of men bored at home with nothing to do, but plenty of cash thanks to generous pandemic assistance handed out by the US government.

AI generated image of “The Bro Economy”

This has been a disaster for most of the ordinary people involved. Research from late last year shows that when states legalized sports betting, the populations in those states had their credit scores drop, saw savings and investments decline, and bankruptcies increased. That research is about sports betting, but I’d be stunned if the results didn’t generalize to people who gamble on meme stocks or meme coins.

Things aren’t slowing down either. Every other corner of the online Bro Economy has decided they also need to be in the business of sports betting. Crypto.com is now taking bets on sporting events. Stock-trading app RobinHood announced they would be taking bets on the Super Bowl (they were forced to delay that plan after getting a nastygram from the CFTC). Even prediction markets like Kalshi and Manifold Markets are now offering real-money sports betting.

I’m in a weird place with this issue. I usually have pretty libertarian instincts here - if someone wants to waste their own money or ruin their own life, that’s their business. I also was, at one point, a semi-professional gambler.¹ I love betting on stuff recreationally. But at the same time, the current system of largely laissez-faire bro-gambling is having a clear negative impact on society. It’s harming people. The vast majority of bettors and day traders will lose money, and sometimes the people pitching you are astonishingly transparent about how they’re going to rip you off.

I think what’s pernicious about these modern forms of gambling is how instantaneous and easy they are. All this stuff - prediction markets, sports betting, crypto, and day trading - can be done from a smartphone in 30 seconds or less. And the ads (especially for sports betting) are now everywhere. See an ad, impulsively click it, lose thousands of dollars before you even realize what you did.

I don’t have a great answer for what to do. If you value abstract freedoms, you may think the negative outcomes are worth sticking to your principles. If you value better outcomes, you have reinforce some nanny-state norms that may outlaw voluntary bets. There’s no perfect answer, but I continue to worry that the unchecked growth of sports betting into every corner of the internet is not a positive development.

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