I’m tired. The news has been a constant barrage of negativity and even after I cut out about 95% of my news consumption it’s still too much. The middle east is in a state of chaos again, Palestine is still not free, AI chatbots are teaching teenagers how to most efficiently kill themselves and now we’ve finally upgraded to the final boss of gambling. It feels like there are a million topics to talk about when it comes to the final stages of capitalism, but above all the other things that are currently happening, there is one that feels particularly vile.
Now imagine for a second, that you want to bet on your favorite sport. Perhaps you think you’re good at predicting what a soccer team is going to do in the next few games and you want to make a few bucks by betting on it with some friends. Now I’m not big on gambling, but that’s something I don’t see much harm in. An example even more up my alley would be an idea that my favorite streamer had. Get four people together and put money on a game of Mario Party where all four characters are played by the AI. That seems like good fun where no one really loses much, except that one of your friends gets a few bucks out of it.
So let’s expand on this. What if you could not only bet on your favorite sports team, or get to put money on Luigi winning by doing absolutely nothing, but what if you could bet on pretty much anything? Election results, current events, harassment and even which words your favorite CEO is going to say in a conference call. You name it, prediction markets have you covered. It’s on these websites (Kalshi, Polymarket) that you can bet your hard-earned money on all these things taking place throughout the world. Is the Ayatollah going to die soon? Put money on it. Will Trump say “Sleepy Joe”? Put money on it. Will someone throw a dildo on the WNBA field during a game? Put money on it, why the hell not. I wish I was making that last one up but no, that is unfortunately a real thing that people did and then started betting on.
Now these companies will try to pretend they’re offering a valuable service to the world. You can put down money against odds and get something out of the knowledge you have. And cheating is obviously encouraged, so any insider information you have should be a big boost to your winnings. It’s not gambling if you know what’s going to happen after all. Now as some of you might know, I once studied business economics in a dark, dark past. I loved the idea of working with numbers and making a company grow. I still like the more mercantile aspects of this idea, think about Spice & Wolf for example and the way they trade goods from one city to another, changing what wares they bring with them based on what needs the next city might have. But the way our economy has been operating for the entirety of my adult life has been downright depressing. We’ve lost the concept of adding value to the world completely and we’ve replaced it by a profit dogma that is holy above all other things. If you’re not constantly growing your profits, you’re a total failure. It’s that world that I dipped my toes in for a year or two before I completely tapped out and spiralled into a deep depression. Now admittedly, I was dealing with some pretty bad undiagnosed mental health issues, so the depression spiral would have probably happened either way, but I think it definitely made things worse.
I’ve since changed the direction my life is taking – as you’re well aware – and this has come with a different outlook on some parts of my life as well. I no longer want to make money. I want to make enough to live my life – and preferably in some comfort – but my childhood dreams of living in a big mansion with a pool have long died out. The way you can make money in this world is by taking the value of other people’s work and taking it for yourself. Capitalism as a system can only function if you are paid less than the value your work adds to the company. And in the final stages of this system, we’re desperate to make just a little bit more, and this is easily exploitable by these psycho CEOs that want you to bet on anything and everything so they can suck you dry with their commission fees. In gambling, the dealer always wins and there is no difference in this sentiment when it comes to these prediction markets. So even if you are perfectly fine with the athletes in the WNBA being harassed during their matches or the middle east once again crumbling before our very eyes with absolutely no regard for the serious effect these things have on people throughout the world, at least know that you’re probably just shoveling your hard-earned money towards the sycophantic corporate elite instead of making a big profit. I doubt anyone who’s been immersed in my blog over the past few years would be the type of person to use these websites so I’m probably preaching to the choir, but it feels nice to get this off my chest.
There will unfortunately not be an anime related post this week. I’ve been working hard on my stories and just like I said before the weekend, not in the right places. But that’s okay, this is my outlet and my hobby, not my job. I’d much rather enjoy myself than follow the schedule I’ve set up. I will try to get the chapter ready by Friday though, because I need to be somewhat consistent if I want to keep your continued support. Thanks for reading!
Opal Kaharis 