Polymarket as the ultimate unethical abstraction game

About nine months ago, I wrote about abstraction being on my mind and my thinking about how games abstract human life in potentially problematic ways. Abstraction is still on my mind, not least because I’m continuing to read Jacques Ellul, whom I referenced in that post (among so many others). In particular, I think a lot about Ellul’s argument that efficiency and efficacy are the ultimate value in the technical society, and that everything essentially gets ground down to that. I also think a lot about how “efficiency” so often comes down to “less money for others, more money for me,” turning complex policy and other decisions into a single, self-interested abstraction.

Since at least December, I’ve been thinking about Polymarket, a so-called “predictions market” in this context. At 404 Media, Matthew Gault wrote about an incident where:

A live map that tracks frontlines of the war in Ukraine was edited to show a fake Russian advance on the city of Myrnohrad on November 15. The edit coincided with the resolution of a bet on Polymarket, a site where users can bet on anything from basketball games to presidential election and ongoing conflicts.

Note that Gault describes what’s happening on Polymarket as “betting”—Polymarket itself rejects this terminology, insisting that it’s not about gambling but about using the pure power of the market to accurately predict the future. (I think that lends itself to other Ellulian critique, but that’s a post for another time). Whatever Polymarket’s claims are, Gault succinctly describes what’s so problematic with what’s going on here:

Practically every town and city along the frontlines of the war between Russia and Ukraine has a market and gamblers with an interest in geopolitics can get lost in the minutia about the war. To bet on the outcome of a war is grotesque. On Polymarket and other predictive gambling sites, millions of dollars trade hands based on the outcomes of battles that kill hundreds of people. It also creates an incentive for the manipulation of the war and data about the war. If someone involved can make extra cash by manipulating a map, they will. It’s 2025 and war is still a racket. Humans have just figured out new ways to profit from it.

Polymarket is back in the news with the Trump administration’s strikes on Iran, and with suspicion that a small number of people made a lot of money using insider knowledge to make money off of the Iran strikes. So, it’s also back in my thoughts about the dangers of abstraction and the way that “efficiency” so often comes down to personal gain.

• abstraction
• Jacques Ellul
• Donald Trump
• Iran