“Will the IPC classify Gaza as experiencing famine this year?” read the wager from this past summer. The bet was eventually settled in the affirmative after the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) did indeed declare famine in Gaza on Aug. 22. The more overtly cynical Polymarket, a rival of Kalshi that’s backed by right-wing multibillionaire Peter Thiel, allows for even more obscene wagering, permitting users to bet on whether Palestinians will be ethnically cleansed. “Gaza mass population relocation in 2025?” reads one of its many Gaza-related betting markets. You can also bet on when Israel will bomb Gaza, bomb the West Bank, or annex either.
Kalshi’s two biggest investors, Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, are also heavily invested in the very same Israeli military whose genocide is serving as a popular forum for gambling markets. The most visible partner at Sequoia Capital, Shaun Maguire, is an outspoken supporter of Israel’s genocide, an open racist, and frequently discusses the need for using tech to promote Israeli propaganda. “The future of information warfare is AI,” Maguire said at the International DefenseTech Summit in Tel Aviv earlier this week. “If Israel doesn’t build its own [information war] engines, defensive and offensive, it will be outmaneuvered in a war it can’t see but is already in.”
To what extent will these betting markets help fuel said “information warfare”? How much will betting market manipulation, once integrated into the news, become its own power-serving self-fulfilling prophecy? In February 2025, New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani was given a 8% chance to win the election by Kalshi. If, at the time, CNN made this fact central in its coverage, how much would it have influenced voters’ perceptions of the race? How would it have impacted momentum? Polling has long served this conservative argument-by-tautology function, but the full embrace of betting markets—with their supposed air of predictive power—will now supercharge this already perverse, anti-democratic and anti-intellectual dynamic.
All that’s left will be aggregation and wagering, gawking and rubber-necking at images of suffering, death, and starvation. But don’t worry, you’re no longer just a passive consumer of the horror content, you’re a passive consumer with a new and exciting ersatz agency allowing you to wager and lose money on the world events for which—we are repeatedly told—you can do nothing to meaningfully influence.
Techbro pipeline to socialism? Thanks for all the info, I will check it out!