They're built on adtech, which people don't understand.

You have many adtech online dossiers that are basically a virtual you, that can be poked, prodded and studied for interests and behaviors.

for a very minimal look, maybe check out amazon "about you":

https://www.amazon.com/slc/hub?useAiMode=1

Our representatives both dem and republican (but slightly more Republican) have decided that the mountain of data that for profit companies have on is a benefit overall to the economy and we’re the guinea pigs for psychological experiments - the “American consumer” is the #1 commodity the US mines.

We are unethical for letting it get to the state it has. The voters define the phrase "money talks".

  The real problem is how we've let these companies infiltrate so much of our society so fast

All the hard work of the people who suffered and fought to achieve this wisdom only for it to be abandoned.

Generations making the same mistakes over and over even with boundless knowledge at our fingertips. Really showcases how important education and especially reverence for education is.

I wish the ads were restricted to ad-supported media instead of arriving in the mail. I don't know what better evidence I need to avoid them than by how fucking aggressive they are about finding new suckers and offering money to help grease the slide into gambling addiction.

Prediction markets seemed like a possible exception to the rule that anything to do with betting is always a scourge on the commons, but those companies quickly realized sports gambling is the best way to rake in cash, so they all converge on it.

I am one of the very few people in the United States who actually does still earnestly believe prediction markets do in principle serve an immense social good that can't be provided in any other way: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prediction-market-faq

Just, in practice, Polymarket and Kalshi are (unsurprisingl)y run by people who solely care about how much revenue they could ever possibly inhale.

And everything else about them is so unethical and so destructive to the commons I would support them being metaphorically razed to the ground.

Like, just the Kalshi and Polymarket Twitter accounts alone contribute more to disinformation (disinformation, not misinformation) than Alex Jones could ever dream of. And then all the accounts affiliated with them make it 1000x worse. And then they have so many other unbelievable scandals I'd have to write a wall of text to list them all. Tons of egregiously machiavellian, intelligence agency-tier tactics and operations.

The only prediction markets that seem to be mostly upside with minimal downside are the ones that do not accept real money.

This falls under the umbrella of "there's no ethical consumption under capitalism". Everything you do supports somebody who's doing something bad. There's really no way to avoid it. Heck, it was even a plot point on The Good Place.

The issue is that our economic system is coercive. You need a job. Now this doesn't excuse you from doing any job but you also need to live.

Take the big tech companies. They're essentially military contractors now. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc are functionally no different to RTX, Boeing or Lockheed Martin.

But should you treat someone who works on Android the same as someone who works out on AI systems for military targeting? Probably not. Also, Palantir is fundamentally more evil than any of these tech companies. So it's tricky.

I do agree that online gambling as a whole is deeply unethical. There is no positive byproduct of this. Your salary is paid by people losing money, probably through addiction. And yes, you can say people have free will but you're still preying on and growing addiction.

Is any form of entertainment or art a social good?

People can get "addicted" to practically any type of entertainment in that they spend a massive chunk of their time on it to the point it stifles their development.

Is sports gambling worse than f2p games? Are f2p games worse than regular video games? Is someone addicted to video games worse than someone addicted to reading fantasy novels? What about smutty novels?

I'm not sure is disagree with you but I think it is hard to start drawing these lines without saying you are now the arbiter of good art and bad art and you can ban some forms of art if you don't like them and have decided they are bad.

Now are you just banning things you don't like because you point to the societal harms as a fig leaf defense that could be applied to the art you do like as well?

Is it the % of people who show addictive tendencies to a piece of art/entertainment how we define if it is good or bad?

Is the morality of a form of entertainment defined by how many users show problematic consumption habits, such that in some populations an entertainment product is a moral good and in others it isn't? Is morality that flexible?

Many people enjoy gambling, and relatively few have a "problem", so "negative public good" is doing a lot of work there. DraftKings may indeed by unethical, but that doesn't mean that all or even most others are.