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FanDuel: A Tragedy for the Working Class [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-13
Recently FanDuel has been criticized for its potential monopoly. Both "Sens. Say DraftKings, FanDuel May Have Conspired to Crush Competition: ‘One Company’" by Margaret Fleming and "Two US senators seek antitrust probe of DraftKings, FanDuel" by Reuters have reported that FanDuel worked with DraftKings to essentially function as one company, breaking the law.
This approach overlooks the harm to the working class. By using insight from research on materialism and consumerism, we can show the distressing nature of FanDuel.
Consider how unfilled one feels if convinced by FanDuel advertisements. After all, it distorts the normal. In "The Overspent American" by Juliet B. Schor, Schor argues that "the more TV a person watches, the more he or she spends. The likely explanation for the link between television and spending is that what we see on TV inflates our sense of what's normal."
FanDuel's "More Hunches" establishes the normal by depicting the best sports watching experience. The man is sat comfortably at his couch with throw pillows and bowl of popcorn. Before him is his 60-inch flat-screen TV, positioned perfectly so that, even in this naturally lit living room, no glare disturbs the sports he is watching. Once he decides to use FanDuel, he smiles.
The normal is that an essential for enjoying sporting is betting on FanDuel. While people might want to align with Michel de Montaigne's assertion that "If man were wise, he would gauge the true worth of anything by its usefulness and appropriateness to his life," it is hard to define appropriate, when people are hard-pressed by advertisements that distort their views.
In defending FanDuel, the best one might say is it fosters community, given how it gets people together to try to win together. Unfortunately, though, the materialist values pervade and prevail.
I remember my co-workers were mad at each other because one copied the other's bet on FanDuel, only to lose. They started to not act like friends—not even like agreeable strangers. The reason?
Their relationship was destroyed by the pursuit of money. As Tim Kasser notes in "The High Price of Materialism," "When materialistic values dominate our society, we move farther and farther from what makes us civilized… We allow the pursuit of money to take precedence over equality, the human spirit, and respectful treatment of each other."
Because one co-worker saw that other as a source of knowledge, he stripped him of their core relationship, leading to sneering comments.
Had they won, it would still be bad. The motivation for money is likely to sadden them. From "The High Price of Materialism:" "[P]eople with strong materialistic values focus on rewards rather than fun, interest, and challenge. This is notable in their work, relationships, and leisure activities. Such an attitude sabotages feelings of flow and intrinsic motivation."
The FanDuel user cannot really win, if winning is remembered in a bad light. They are likely to see what they have done as done for the unwelcoming reasons. After all, as Kasser asserts, "those who believe in the importance of [materialistic pursuits] are unlikely to experience the deeper internal satisfactions that occur when they are intrinsically motivated."
Rarely, a FanDuel user will have a winning bet. Frequently, though, they will have bad experiences. Indeed, they are likely to have strained relations and unhappy memories and constant unfulfillment.
Two facets of our current times make this an urgent topic. One, an alarming amount of people do not seem to mind sports betting. A Pew Research Center article found that "a majority of adults (57%) say [the legalization of sports betting] is neither a good nor bad thing for society." Two, the working-class people in America are exhausted. CBS reports, "Three in Five Americans who log 50 to 59 hours per week feel overworked."
Considering this context, emphasizing the truly troubling problem with FanDuel is important. That FanDuel may have what constitutes a monopoly is concerning. Not because it violates laws that people neither care about nor know about, but because it further strengthens FanDuel's ability to push its app, robbing the working class of what it says it offers, of what they deserve the most: enjoyable leisure.
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