This piece came together from a conversation with about illegal streams and sports betting.
In June 2022, police in Gujarat, India uncovered a curious scam: a fake Indian cricket league staged on a dusty village farm, complete with floodlights, live viewers, and YouTube livestreams, designed to dupe Russian gamblers on the betting site 1xBet. Local farmers donned Indian Premier League–style jerseys and swapped sides between games while people placed bets from thousands of miles away. The umpires conducted the orchestra—communicating to the players how many runs needed to be scored every interval and signaling bogus runs and outs according to instructions relayed over Telegram by a fixer in Moscow. For weeks, the spectacle masqueraded as legitimate cricket, with $300,000 worth of bets placed until the police caught onto the motley crew led by a shopkeeper who was paid $240 for the whole scheme.
I understand the appeal of sports betting in an era where watching sports often involves tunneling through several illegal streams. Besides, the games themselves are less interactive compared to looking at your phone. Betting introduces a two-way engagement with sports. For broadcasters and sports leagues, betting is a way to make people care more about the outcome of multiple games instead of just the one team to which they are attached. It increases the addressable space available to a broadcaster. Increasingly, I suspect a larger percentage of the viewers of a live game are people betting against each other. Who else is skipping work to watch the 162 baseball games played per team every season?
Gambling, when observed in the milieu of a tribalistic society, transcends degeneracy and becomes what Clifford Geertz called “Deep Play” in his famous essay on Balinese cockfighting. For Geertz, the stakes were not money itself but what money revealed: “the migration of the Balinese status hierarchy into the body of the cockfight.” This sense of gambling as a cultural mirror is echoed by McLuhan in Understanding Media:
Alcohol and gambling have very different meanings in different cultures. In our intensely individualist and fragmented Western world, ‘booze’ is a social bond and a means of festive involvement. By contrast, in closely knit tribal society, ‘booze’ is destructive of all social pattern and is even used as a means to mystical experience.
In tribal societies, gambling, on the other hand, is a welcome avenue of entrepreneurial effort and individual initiative. Carried into an individualist society, the same gambling games and sweepstakes seem to threaten the whole social order. Gambling pushes individual initiative to the point of mocking the individualist social structure. The tribal virtue is the capitalist vice
Read together, Geertz and McLuhan suggest that the meaning of gambling shifts with the structure of society itself. In tribal settings, it affirms collective bonds and entrepreneurial initiative. In individualist societies, the same practice turns inside out. Gambling becomes entrepreneurial risk-taking stripped of its legitimizing narratives around productivity and the Protestant work ethic.
Market systems also depend on institutionalized forms of trust, which are eroded by the revelation of rigged bets, simulated games and other methods players use to gain an advantage. To adapt, markets continually invent new edges for bettors—new niches, more obscure sports, and finer-grained bettable units. As these edges multiply, they create conditions for Truman Show–like tournaments that exploit the asymmetry of knowledge between the bettor and the game.
In the case of the fake cricket league, the footage itself was grainy and the overall production way more amateurish than a Nathan Fielder HBO production, but people still bet on it. Gambling does not demand elaborate illusions or high-fidelity simulations. A minimum viable escaped reality is enough. What truly anchors the experience is not the realism of the spectacle but the stakes attached to it. The bet itself makes the world feel real. It is not far-fetched to imagine that people are already betting on AI-simulated games. The news has just not broken on it yet.
An AI simulation introduces even more bettable units that the creator of the game can control. In the case of an actual cricket game (or a real-life simulation of one), ball-level resolution is not easy. But, as a friend mentioned in conversation about the Bloomberg article, “Treating an over (six balls) as a ‘betting block’ is basically a kind of front-running and MEV on blockchains. With GenAI you could design ball-level bettable units with ease.” In such AI simulations, the creator has even greater control over outcomes, and sports betting becomes casino-level optimized to the point where the house always wins the familiar margin that ensures long-term profitability. Sports gambling morphs into an infinite set of slot machines, where you are betting on an instance of a simulated game while others are betting on their unique instances. It is the logic of LLMs applied to betting, where everyone has their personal instance of the information environment, except in this case there would be real-world stakes in the form of money exchanged.
Moralizing about betting aside, gambling reveals something about the nature of the universe we live in. As McLuhan puts it on the subject of games, of which gambling is a subset:
Like our vernacular tongues, all games are media of interpersonal communication, and they could have neither existence nor meaning except as extensions of our immediate inner lives. If we take a tennis racket in hand, or thirteen playing cards, we consent to being a part of a dynamic mechanism in an artificially contrived situation. Is this not the reason we enjoy those games most that mimic other situations in our work and social lives?
McLuhan’s point is that games externalize and rehearse the structures of the societies that produce them. If that’s true, then today’s betting systems—scaled up and entangled with simulations—are mirrors of how we live with machines. Sports betting, at its current scale, augmented with both real and AI-driven simulations, reveals a world in which we are engaged in infinite deep play with machines: large swarms of people acting collectively alongside artificial intelligences.
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I’ve been watching Star Trek, both The Next Generation and the newer Strange New Worlds. In both shows, explorers aboard spaceships use something called the Holodeck to simulate different realities. The Holodeck has multiple purposes—you can use it to simulate constrained environments like a boxing ring and also to simulate entire escaped realities. In several episodes, crew members simulate detective dramas such as Sherlock Holmes (murder mysteries themselves are games that defined the 20th century?). In all the episodes with this setup, the Holodeck inevitably causes problems for the entire ship, either because of the artificial intelligence within it going rogue or because the simulator puts a large load on the system.
They should have swapped out the Holodeck for gambling on a simulated sports stream long time ago.
