I’ll admit it—when I first heard of prediction markets, I thought they were hilarious. They sounded like a disaster waiting to happen, carrying the potential for insider trading cases even worse than those in their spiritual predecessor of cryptocurrency. Given the shocking lack of professionalism from our current government, any platform that allowed users to bet on everything from temperature data to military operations would surely be frequented by those actually in control of such things the moment the monetary incentive became large enough.
Well, now that moment has come to pass. We live in a world where a military official made around 400,000 USD betting on the end of Maduro’s regime and where another bright soul made thousands off of tampering with temperature sensors. Prediction market cheating has already gone beyond my wildest dreams. I’m almost sad to see how many of them are getting hit with lawsuits—if left unregulated, I’m sure they would brew a unique form of data leak comparable in hilarity to the War Thunder leaks and even more compromising to national security.
Can you imagine that brave new world? Where heads of state place bets on their own actions? Where news outlets scramble to uncover those same bets? Can you imagine the tactical feints that would open up? The mind games? The conspiracies? The Death Note of it all? It would be horrible, yes. But it sounds so outlandish, so distant, that you have to laugh.
That sentiment is also what makes them so dangerous.
Now, plenty of people have already spoken about the financial and informational issues with prediction markets. You can go read any number of those articles if that’s what you want. But you came to the Sword & Shield, bastion of student journalism that it is, so you’re looking for a random teenager has been musing about in xyr spare time.
Well, here it is: by opening up everything to speculation, prediction markets also encourage people to emotionally dissociate from extremely pertinent events and/or facets of existence. This occurs because of the inherent nature of monetary speculation, as well as the veil of absurdism it extends over the entirety of human existence. It turns everything into a joke, and what a society is allowed to joke about is a strong indicator of whose lives a society holds the most empathy for, who we can relate to, whose lives and stories we value and pay attention to.
There’s a common saying that humor is tragedy plus time, with the time part being necessary so that there’s adequate distance between those laughing at the joke and the people actually affected by the subject matter. Predication markets create that same distance via a healthy dose of absurdity. It doesn’t sound real, so it doesn’t feel real, so we don’t think about it like it’s real, so we don’t act like it’s real. We don’t think about the people behind the stories, we just think about the joke, and then we don’t think about anything at all.
You can bet on a missing person’s case. Isn’t that so weird? Isn’t that funny? Look, thirty percent of bettors think she’ll be found by the end of the summer, but most think it’ll go cold. Isn’t that just hilarious? When do you think this government will collapse? Don’t worry, it’s not yours. You don’t even know where this is on the map. Even odds by the end of the fall. You don’t know anyone who lives there, but it doesn’t matter. It’s not like any of this matters. Isn’t that funny? Do you think this politician will be assassinated? He’s too liberal for the area. Before next year, surely. Don’t think about what that would mean. Wouldn’t it just be hilarious if you guessed right? Is this state going to ban abortion? Bets are shifting after the last State Senate meeting. They might try for a death penalty, but that’s still long odds. Isn’t that funny? You can bet on all of these things. Are you laughing yet? Isn’t it so funny?
Do you understand the problem yet?
