HOW MANY PEOPLE will the Trump administration deport this year? Will Gaza suffer from mass famine? These are serious questions with lives at stake.
They’re also betting propositions that two buzzy startups will let you gamble on.
The 2018 legalization of sports betting gave rise to a host of apps making it ever easier to gamble on games. Kalshi and Polymarket offer that service, but also much more. They’ll take your bets, for instance, on the presidential and midterm elections, the next Israeli bombing campaign, or whether Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg will get divorced.
Tarek Mansour, the CEO of Kalshi, laid it out simply at a conference held by Citadel Securities in October. “The long-term vision,” Mansour said, “is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.” It’s as dystopian as it sounds.
If you believe the hype, the promise of these companies isn’t in the money they take in as bookkeepers. They argue that the bets they collect offer a more accurate forecast of the future than traditional institutions. (In fact, they’ll tell you that you’re not betting at all but trading on futures contracts — a distinction that feels so tenuous it’s hard to justify with a full-throated explanation.)
The sheer moral corruption of making profit from other people’s suffering is bad enough in the arms industry, but at least the security dilemma of international relations provides a fig leaf of justification: Trusting in other countries’ idealism has been shown to be ineffective, so the most effective way of protecting your country against foreign aggression is to make it more expensive to attack it. To keep peace, one must be ready for war, such that this readiness might deterr either party from actually starting one.
Of course, that justification of military industry as defensive necessity doesn’t extend to imperialist wars of aggression (Ukraine, Palestine, Venezuela), which is where the moral corruption starts.
But to directly gamble on that suffering? That’s just blatantly fucked up.