Zyn Arcade

Screens are wholesome; vices are IRL

Among my scattered hazy memories of the months leading up to the pandemic, one that’s still vivid is Uncut Gems, which came out on Christmas day 2019 and ended up being the last movie I’d see in a theater for a long time. Although the film’s production made it feel like it could have been set in the present, it took place seven years prior, in 2012, as timestamped by the Celtics-Sixers playoff series that frames its events and provides the central plot device. Uncut Gems is a movie about sports gambling—something in our culture that has changed a lot in the last five years. Unlike horse racing or poker, Hollywood always represented sports gambling as a lowlife pastime, the territory of true degenerates, and Uncut Gems perfects this caricature, populating its seedy Midtown underworld with a sideshow of NYC misfits who assist Adam Sandler’s protagonist in prying loose his already tenuous grip on the ordinary, respectable part of his life. When the movie came out, sports betting was already quite popular in both its traditional and app-based forms (the Supreme Court had just opened the door to widespread legal sports betting a year prior, in 2018), but Uncut Gems seemed to introduce the pastime to a broader audience who didn’t have any inkling of its distinctive emotional texture, or even know how how a parlay works. Though popular, sports gambling in 2019 still seemed relatively unfamiliar—an esoteric subculture on the brink of rapid gentrification.

Today, of course, sports betting is mainstream, an acceptable topic of polite conversation that saturates sports media (visually and conceptually), spills beyond it into the general discourse, and clutters the physical landscape in the form of ads. It is a cultural force: legal, backed by big money, scrubbed of the grime in which it was historically smeared, still fundamentally degenerate but now sanitized and sanctioned by our corporate overlords—the most powerful form of permission you can get in contemporary America. Comedian Stavros Halkias delivers a brief but insightful monologue on the How Long Gone podcast (starting around 27:30) in which he complains that while app-based sports gambling can still bankrupt you—they withdraw the money straight from your bank account, in fact—the thrill of potentially getting killed by your creditors is gone. It goes without saying that that’s good, and that you do not want to be the main character in Uncut Gems, but his point is that technology has drained yet another domain of its animating romance, eliminating the mess and friction and personality and social context while streamlining the interfaces, connecting directly to your bank accounts, and powerwashing the moral qualms away with marketing dollars, thereby expanding the user base. In other words: If someone figures out how to make an entertaining movie about a dude submitting FanDuel bets on his couch, I’ll be impressed.

Stavros also points out that gambling and vaping have followed a similar trajectory—that DraftKings is the Elf Bar of sports betting, each rebranding old vices to reach new markets. I thought of this observation earlier this summer, when Max Read coined the term Zynternet to describe the increasingly visible online presence of frat culture, as pioneered by the Barstool empire and probably best embodied by its founder Dave Portnoy. Read attributes the phenomenon to two main forces, Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter and the rise of sports betting, “which has flooded media properties that cater to Zynternet demographics with cash, either as advertisers or often as owners.” I’m not sure if Read intended it, but Zynternet is an excellent term because it captures a prevailing 21st-century aesthetic that Stavros also hints at: the dematerialization of culture; the tactile and visible replaced by the amorphous and invisible; the brand sanitization of literal and figurative dirt. Instead of Joe Camel, we have Zyn, which makes you more productive at work and no one even sees tucked under your lip. The ultimate symbol of this may be Las Vegas itself: a city-sized monument to gambling, the physical imprint of the normie’s belief that they can beat the odds, and the antipode to the dysfunctional East Coast version of gambling—that of Uncut Gems, Bad Lieutenant, Atlantic City (the song and the place)—the desert utopia where we figured out how to overlay every dubious activity with a glittering facade. Now we gamble everywhere else, encouraged by similar facades, and visit Las Vegas to look at a big spherical screen—which is as wholesome as it gets, we seem to have agreed.

---

Become a paid subscriber to access more essays (about half of Kneeling Bus posts, and many of the best ones, are for paid subscribers only), or just because you appreciate this newsletter and want to support it.

Reads:

• The farewell column from NYT restaurant critic Pete Wells, in which he laments how digital technology is turning restaurants into “vending machines with chairs.” (h/t Raihan)

• Joshua P. Hill on the dehumanization of the homeless, now legally codified, and the need to resist that perspective. “What we permit to happen within us is, in many ways, what becomes permissable in society at large.”

• How the kidney-shaped pool, invented by Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, influenced the rise of skate culture.