Paul Rouse: How the bookies have used surveillance capitalism to change our relationship with sport

The bookies' success is rooted in the presentation of losing money through gambling as a form of entertainment, or enhanced enjoyment.

The bookies' success is rooted in the presentation of losing money through gambling as a form of entertainment, or enhanced enjoyment.

If you want to understand how it works that money flows out of your pocket and adds to the vast treasures of transnational bookmakers, you have to take a step back and remember how much the world has changed in the last two decades.

It is a self-evident truth that the internet has changed how people live with each other. And we are only in the early stages of the change that it is bringing to every aspect of our lives.

The extent to which so much of people’s lives is now lived online is a revolutionary change in the human experience, a transformative process.

It has led to the concentration of a new power in the hands of a small group of people. This is not a matter of imagining a conspiracy, it is instead a statement of fact.

There are people who have grown extraordinarily rich on the back of this new techonology. Some of them are Irish. And some of them have made their money through bringing the use of this technology to bear on sport and, in particular, on gambling.

The American academic Shoshana Zuboff has written an extraordinary book which explains what is happening: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. This book was first published in 2019 and its subtitle reads: “The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power.”

In short, the book is about how tech giants use our data not only to predict our behaviour, but to change it.

So what is “surveillance capitalism”? According to Zuboff — who coined the term — surveillance capitalism takes your experiences and actions and the words you speak and write, and uses them as free raw material by converting them into information which can be bought and sold.

In practice, that means that if you go for a walk in the park, on engage in online browsing and communications, or even talk to someone while having dinner, tech companies can translate your behaviour into behavioural data in order to build a profile of you as a consumer.

The value of this behavioural data lies in its predictive power. Basically, the data can be fed into computational products that will predict your future behaviour.

This is a machine learning system and the predictions that come from it are sold to business customers who use it to sell you products — holidays, clothes, books, anything.

It is a process that was invented by Google for online targeted ads. As Zuboff has written: “During the first years of discovery and invention from 2000 to 2004, Google’s revenues increased by 3,590%. Right from the start it was understood that the only way to protect these revenues was to hide the operations that produce them, keeping “users” in the dark with practices designed to be undetectable and indecipherable… Surveillance capitalists know everything about us, but we know little about them. Their knowledge is used for others’ interests, not our own.”

But this is not just a matter of selling you stuff that you might want, it is also about changing how you behave. The ambition is not just to work out people’s behaviour, but also to manipulate it for commercial gain. A data scientist from one company told Zuboff: “We can engineer the context around a particular behaviour and force change that way... We are learning how to write the music, and then we let the music make them dance.”

This surveillance capitalism was taken on by Facebook and Amazon — and from there all across the modern economy to include basically every “smart” product and “personalised” service that you are offered online.

It is a way of acting that lies at the heart of the overwhelming success of Paddy Power.

There’s a thing about the Paddy Power brand that is rooted in the intelligence of its marketing. Its innovative, clever media campaigns are usually eye-catching and have sometimes been genuinely funny.

This obviously helps to create both the type of controversies and wider interest that make people talk about Paddy Power. And this brings the sort of brand recognition that is fundamental to the success of a company.

But it also helps to disguise the ruthless, intrusive, manipulative way that Paddy Power uses surveillance capitalism to drive its profits. At its most basic, as Aaron Rogan writes in his new book Punters: How Paddy Power Bet Billions and Changed Gambling Forever, Paddy Power’s “business model was supercharged by the advent of the internet and high-powered data-harvesting tools to nudge gamblers to bet on products designed to trigger psychological urges that caused concern they were leading people into addiction…”

As Rogan shows, Paddy Power — and other gambling companies — use a computer monitoring system that works out how profitable a new customer will be to the business. And it does this within just a few bets.

It uses the information from these bets to push incentives towards customers to encourage them to gamble more. Those gamblers who are seen to be most unafraid to lose in their betting habits are pushed towards casino games, that “guarantee returns for Paddy Power”.

Those gamblers who are the very best at losing money are filtered into a way of gambling where they are referred to by Paddy Power as VIPs.

By contrast, as Rogan writes, “a tiny minority are effectively banned from placing bets because they display intelligence that suggests they might win.”

Paddy Power, a company whose value is estimated at more than €30bn, is presented as an Irish business success story on an international scale. But to imagine Paddy Power as a plucky underdog taking on the world is wilfully naïve.

It is a success that is rooted in the presentation of losing money through gambling as a form of entertainment, or enhanced enjoyment.

The basic fact is that addictive gambling has destroyed lives and has done so repeatedly. At its most brutal, it has led to suicide, but it has also loosed a trail of destruction on a grand scale.

How the system works to snare an individual has previously been told in Declan Lynch and Tony O’Reilly’s book Tony 10: The Astonishing Story of the Postman who Gambled €10,000,000 … and Lost it All.

It is true that there are many who can control their gambling, who can use it to add another dimension to their enjoyment of sport. But there is also no denying the way gambling has changed, the way gambling companies have cultivated a phenomenon so insidious, so all-pervasive that its mental scourge is beyond cruel. That people can now gamble on so many things from the phone in their pockets and can ruin themselves at any hour of the day or night is a simple fact. It is equally a fact that gambling companies use surveillance capitalism to assist in that ruination.

The brilliance of Aaron Rogan’s book on Paddy Power and how it goes about its business is that on page after page it demonstrates the reach of modern bookmakers into the minds and lives of their customers. It demonstrates also the manner in which they seek to use their knowledge of those lives to shape behaviour. In the process, nothing could demonstrate so brutally their relentless pursuit of profit and its human cost.

- Paul Rouse is professor of history at University College Dublin.