April 8 2026 - 12:30pm
You’re not just imagining it: prediction markets are everywhere now, from cable news to TikTok videos, and they could soon be coming to a bar near you.
This week, it was reported that Kalshi had struck an agreement with Fox News, which will see the channel incorporate Kalshi forecasts into its programming. Fox will now join CNN and CNBC in embedding betting-derived odds directly into its news coverage.
Meanwhile, Polymarket became the exclusive prediction market partner to this year’s Golden Globes. And no longer content with hooking young men into sports gambling, prediction apps are using influencers to get Swifties to bet on who will be a bridesmaid at Taylor Swift’s wedding. Polymarket even brought online betting on everything into the physical world last month with a pop-up “Situation Room” bar in Washington, where journalists, political staffers, and the terminally online could mingle beneath betting screens and wager on whether China will invade Taiwan by June. It’s a sports bar, but for watching the world fall apart.
Polymarket and Kalshi have become the twin gods of the prediction market boom. These platforms let users place financial bets on the outcome of virtually any event: elections, geopolitical crises, celebrity gossip, the price of oil, and whether Jesus Christ returns before 2027 (it’s a 4% chance, if you’re counting — identical odds to the Iran regime falling by the end of the month). Global prediction market trading volumes quadrupled from 2024 to 2025, surging to nearly $64 billion. These aren’t niche platforms anymore. They are part of the internet’s infrastructure — the Pepsi and Coke of America’s new casino era.
It’s no coincidence that gambling is the big new thing online. After the pandemic-driven early-2020s peak of doomscrolling and compulsive shopping, many people have logged off X, watched less cable news, ignored the discourse, and unplugged from the culture wars. Prediction markets are, among other things, a counteroffensive against that drift towards detachment. They offer a way to keep people glued to the feed, but in a more predatory way, turning every political development, celebrity scandal, sports contest, or geopolitical crisis into a mini-derivatives market. What fantasy football did to ordinary sports fandom, these platforms threaten to do to all of public life.
Journalist Cory Doctorow has a word for this process: enshittification. Platforms, he argues, follow a predictable lifecycle: first they benefit users to hook them, then they pivot to extracting value from those users on behalf of advertisers and business partners. Prediction markets are the attention economy’s ultimate upgrade — from the platform that kept users scrolling to the one that keeps them invested, literally, in whatever happens next.
The results can turn ugly fast. During the Iran conflict, traders wagered over $1 billion on every twist of the war. “Death markets” sprang up, betting on whether Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei would be killed — a prediction that came true on 28 February. A Times of Israel correspondent reported that gamblers who had bet on Iranian missile strikes tried to coerce him into changing his reporting, even threatening his life.
Polymarket apologized for allowing bets on downed US pilots, yet over 200 war-related markets remain active, including whether Iran gets a nuke this year. One trader, “Magamyman”, earned nearly $600,000 predicting the timing of US and Israeli strikes, with a 93% win rate. Donald Trump Jr advises Polymarket, and his firm 1789 Capital has invested millions, making regulation from the White House unlikely.
A quarter-century ago, Thomas Frank wrote One Market Under God, an autopsy of how market logic was swallowing democracy. What we see now in the mid-2020s feels like its gaudier, degenerate sequel. Politics is not enough as spectacle, nor news as information: everything becomes a market, every market a game, every game content, every piece of content a lure back into the machine. One Polymarket Under God, if you will.
The danger is not only losing money, though many already are. It is losing the last mental traits that separate a citizen from a gambler. Citizens ask what is true and just. Gamblers ask only for the odds and when they can cash out. Prediction markets did not invent this worldview, but they refined it, monetized it, and wrapped it in a sleek interface.
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