Everything is Gambling: Prediction Markets are a Whole New Level of Evil

Gambling is everywhere. Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s lift on state-wide bans, the gaming market exploded at a frightening rate and is now utterly inescapable. A marketing blitz powered by a multi-billion-dollar industry made gambling not only omnipresent but more accessible than ever, thanks to apps and websites that lure in new customers with flashy deals. Last year, it was reported that viewers of the Stanley Cup finals ‘encountered an average of 3.5 marketing messages from betting firms every minute.’ Even non-sports fans cannot break free from the stifling glut of gambling ads, usually headlined by celebrities and former athletes who most certainly don’t spend every penny of their own disposable income betting on who scores which goal.

I personally believe that the ruthlessly efficient mainstreaming of gambling is a net negative for humanity, as evidenced by drastic increases in reports of gambling addictions, abuse against athletes, and targeting of vulnerable populations. So, of course the powers that be saw the state of the world and decided to find new ways to make gambling more evil. Step forward prediction markets.

A prediction market is essentially a combination of gambling and trading. Sites like Polymarket and Kalshi allow users to place bets on practically anything, and I do mean everything. You can wager on elections, the Oscars, who will win the Nobel Prize, whether or not Trump will say, ‘Drill, baby, drill’ in a speech, and whether Israel will bomb Iran. Polymarket, which operates on the same blockchain that is typically dominated by cryptocurrency, faced recent criticism over some suspicious bets placed on the site regarding the removal of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from office mere hours before it actually happened. Donald Trump Jr. is also an investor and unpaid board member in that company, as well as a paid advisor to Kalshi. Trump’s social media company, the Trump Media & Technology Group, recently announced it would start its own platform called Truth Predict.

Prediction markets allow users as young as 18 to place bets and they aren’t restricted in certain areas like sports betting, which is more heavily regulated under gaming laws. These companies seem to have largely skirted those rules by claiming they’re more like investment firms than gambling apps, despite the win/lose cash-out prizes they offer. They are regulated as financial products, despite the fact that they can look and feel indistinguishable from gambling. And they’re already creating havoc in the most tedious and destructive manners possible.

Last week, a journalist for The Times of Israel revealed that he had received multiple death threats from Polymarket users after one of his reports on a minor missile strike near Jerusalem lost some people their bets. They tried to force him to change his report so that they could cash out. Polymarket condemned the harassment and said that prediction markets ‘depend on the integrity of independent reporting’, but saw no qualms about people trying to make money from a war. According to the BBC, Kalshi had drawn in around $54 million in trades on whether or not Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei would be ‘out’ by March 1. The company ended up cancelling that particular market, perhaps feeling a little icky about getting people to bet on someone’s death.

Sadly, none of this has stopped major companies from making big-money deals with these markets. Major League Soccer announced a new partnership with Polymarket, a deal that seemed poorly times after multiple MLS players were banned for life after betting on their own games. Substack, not content with having all those hate speech lovers on its site, is another Polymarket partner, claiming that ‘journalism is better when it’s backed by live markets.’ As every decent person with a newsletter noted, getting journalists to engage in betting as part of their work is fundamentally unethical. Coaxing people to prioritize engagement and screwing over their readers in favour of truth is not conducive to good work. It was but the latest reason for many writers to leave Substack (like me - follow my newsletter on Ghost, please!)

To me, the notion of turning everything into a possible bet is so obviously a terrible idea that it shouldn’t even need an explanation. It’s genuinely evil to look at a genocide and think, ‘I bet $50 that a missile will his that location in the next 30 days.’ This is a formula designed to be as addictive as possible, to be accessible to everyone who doesn’t know anything about sports jargon or Wall Street trades but who likes the idea of a zero-thought route to instant riches. Like sports gambling, it’s a way to twist the world and our engagement with it into something exclusively greed-driven. There’s nothing altruistic about getting people to look at sports, politics, movies, or the weather and think about it solely as a stream of bets.

How could this not encourage the nastiest and seediest behaviour from users? .These markets claim that they’re working to make the process as clean as possible but that makes no sense when their entire business model is dependent on an attitude of abject sleaze. We have people sending death threats to journalists because they didn’t give the preferred report on a missile drop! And what is to stop insider trading of any kind? We’re already seeing sportspeople across the board and at every level fiddling with the system. When money is on the line, we know that many users find ways to justify abusive behaviour, from gambling bets to political campaigns. There are already so few safeguards in place to prevent what has been made hilariously easy to execute. And we know Trump and his team are happy to indulge. How does this end in any way other than total tragedy?

The sad thing is that this is the same old cycle of nonsense with a fresh coat of paint, the same one we’ve been through several times this decade already. What differentiates prediction markets from the cryptocurrency boom, or the push to make us all buy NFTs, or the insistence that the metaverse would make us all rich? The economy was broken and it’s been replaced with something even worse, an endless chase of speculation, gambling, and get-your-bag narcissism that, from the beginning, was designed to screw over the 99% in favour of the mega-wealthy. Turning a literal war into a thing one can bet on would be the kind of detail in a dystopian novel that readers would find too outlandish. Now, it’s just a thing that happens. We’re being trained to view every aspect of our lives as something that can be won or lost. And we all know what the result would be for most of us if it were put onto the market.