Financialize Everything

You are, no doubt, being inundated with news about “prediction markets” right now. The two buzziest being Kalshi and Polymarket. Last month, both markets hit new volume records and the former recently raised $1 billion and inked a partnership with CNN, while the latter just got permission from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to relaunch in the US after being banned here for the last four years.

A big part of the Kalshi and Polymarket push right now is thanks to the genuinely clever “prediction market” branding, making them both sound like some kind of actual scientific polling platform. But really they just offer event contract betting. Kalshi’s homepage has popular pool running right now called, “Who will be the first to leave the Trump Cabinet?” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem is leading. Weird, I’d probably go with Hegseth. Hmm maybe I should put some money down… wait no. And Polymarket has a big one at the moment called, “Time 2025 Person of the Year.” The popular bet is it’s going to be “artificial intelligence.” Really? Over Charlie Kirk. Hmm…

There are all kinds of allegations flying around that Polymarket is being used for insider trading. And its main X account has realized that posting apocalyptic financial news is great for engagement and, one would assume, perfect for inspiring people to gamble big, hoping to outrun the market collapse they keep posting on X about. But you know you’ve entered supervillain territory when even Grimes is calling you evil, writing on X yesterday, “You should not be able to bet on human suffering. The nihilistic gambling arena should not be allowed to publish their own headlines to spread [fear, uncertainty, and doubt] on the wellbeing of the people.”

Morals aside, these prediction markets are the dream of the post-COVID NFT mania. Unlike the NFT frenzy, though, they aren’t trying to turn JPGs into digital assets, they’re trying to commodify our opinions. But yes, crypto is involved here. Kalshi is a traditional betting market, but is launching a bridge to the Solana blockchain ecosystem soon. Polymarket runs on the Polygon blockchain and pays out in the USDC stablecoin. And just like the early 2020s crypto boom, there is an entire ecosystem of influencers that want to convince you to buy in. Kalshi has a whole army of users that post their wins to X and even livestream them. And 60 Minutes did an interview last week with a Polymarket user that goes by Domer, a former professional poker player, who has made around $3 million last year. Polymarket also seems to have quietly acquired the @NewsWire_US X account, which has more than 120,000 followers and now links to the platform’s “breaking news” tab. “Kalshi versus Polymarket is the first time we’ve seen armies of loosely affiliated paid influencers battling on behalf of their companies,” Neeraj Agrawal, the communications director for crypto nonprofit Coin Center, wrote on X last week.

Last month, Tarek Mansour, the co-founder of Kalshi, gave the audience at the Citadel Securities conference a chilling glimpse of where this is all headed (if we let it). “The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion,” he said on stage to a crowd of poor souls who, I guess, think that sounds dope.

Mansour’s “financialize everything” line is, in many ways, a condensed version of something Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on a podcast last spring. A comment I come back to often because I believe he accidentally stated the fundamental driving philosophy of Big Tech. A perfect, succinct, unfathomably embarrassing snapshot of how a bunch of very wealthy losers view themselves:

“There’s this stat that I always think is crazy. The average American has three friends, three people they consider friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it’s like 15 friends or something,” he told podcast host Dwarkesh Patel, while talking about the rise of AI companions. “I think that there are all these things that are better about physical connections when you can have them, but the reality is that people just don't have the connection and they feel more alone a lot of the time than they would like.”

Researcher Paul Fairie, on X at the time, had an even tighter summary of Zuckerberg’s worldview, “The average American has three eggs, but has demand for 15. So here are 12 photographs of eggs. I am a business man.”

The “here are 12 photographs of eggs” philosophy is everywhere you look. Not just at AI companies, but every large tech service. All of these platforms have inserted themselves into the cracks of modern life and want you to pay them — with your time, data, or actual money — for a hollow digital imitation of something we used to get from the other human beings in our lives. Or as X user r0sylns wrote recently, “Groceries? Get em delivered. Books? Buy em on amazon. Fuck libraries and bookstores. Stop buying CDs, vinyls, and DVDs, it's all on the cloud! Movie theaters? Obsolete. Subscribe to 10 different platforms instead! Stay inside. Be afraid of your neighbors. Work til you die.”

These “prediction markets” take Zuckerberg’s “here are 12 photographs of eggs” philosophy to its logical endpoint. A way to capture one of the few parts of the human experience they haven’t been able to ingest into their mega-platforms. Here are 12 photographs of opinions, bet on which ones will come true. It’s hard to imagine a better metaphor for late-stage Silicon Valley: Pay us a cut to imagine the future for us. An industry completely devoid of new ideas asking users to gamble on what might happen next.

The following is NOT a paid ad. It’s a good ol’ fashioned promo4promo. If you’re interested in promo swaps OR paid advertising, email us at josh@garbageday.email and let’s talk. Thanks!

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A Good TikTok

Minnesota Was Promised To Somalis 3,000 Years Ago

Last week, President Donald Trump lashed out at the Somali community in Minnesota. During a cabinet meeting, he told reporters, “I don’t want them in our country. I’ll be honest with you, okay? Somebody said, 'Oh, that’s not politically correct.' I don’t care. I don’t want them in our country. Their country is no good for a reason. Their country stinks, and we don’t want them in our country.”

Conservatives are fixated on Minnesota right now, both for the brewing scandal over COVID fraud and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey’s showdown with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt doubled down on Trump’s rant, accusing the Minnesota Somali community of stealing over $1 billion in taxpayer funds. As with everything the Trump White House says, take that with a massive, massive grain of salt.

As racist as this all is, the Somali community has found a very, very funny way to respond. TikTok, Instagram, and X are filling up with videos claiming that Minnesota was actually promised to Somalians centuries ago. Example embedded below:

The trend is a double-whammy, both making fun of Trump and, also, working as a pretty searing parody of Israeli propaganda. Did you know that the word “Minnesota” actually comes from two Somali words?

Yes, Heated Rivalry Did Start As A Stucky Fic

—by Adam Bumas

Just to remind everyone, a sizable chunk of the publishing industry is being supported by Wattpad and Archive of Our Own fanfics that have been flipped into original fiction. Now it’s spreading into Hollywood too. HBO Max’s new sleeper hit is Heated Rivalry, a show based on books about two hockey players who are secretly in love. There’s finally a major production tapping into the enormous, frenzied hockey “real people fandom” — but the actual relationship between the show and fanfic is a bit more complicated.

Fans noticed that last week’s episode of Heated Rivalry dressed one of its main characters in strikingly similar clothes as Steve Rogers (aka Chris Evans’ Captain America). Over the weekend, it led to a debate over whether the entire story started out as a fanfic of “Stucky” (Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes, one of AO3’s most popular pairings). It only got more contentious when Salon asked the books’ author Rachel Reid about it, with the headline “Sorry, the Heated Rivalry gay Marvel fanfic origin story isn’t true”.

Confusingly, the article confirms it is true. Dedicated fans already have archived links to the Stucky fanfic, and Reid wrote on her blog about the process of adapting the fanfic into an original novel. The headline says otherwise because Reid claims she wrote the book as an original work first, then changed the male leads to Steve and Bucky because she “thought it had to be fanfic” to be published on AO3. Some fans are dubious, but it’s still a hell of an official story to say, “this hockey romance needed MCU superheroes to find an audience.”

The Fascinating Implications Of The Rizzler’s AI Ad

OK, yes, AI bad. We all agree. But here’s an interesting use case I hadn’t really considered. The Rizzler posted an ad for the creative operations software Air last month. The video may have some real footage at the beginning, the bulk of the minute-long sponsored post is just The Rizzler deepfaked or AI-inserted into various movies. It’s pretty dumb, but it did half a million views, so I’m sure everyone involved feels pretty good about it.

The interesting dimension here, the thing I hadn’t totally considered, is that The Rizzler exists at a really weird intersection of fame. Where he is both a very famous child, but, also, definitely not making the kind of money serious movie stars make (though, from what I’ve heard recently, movie stars aren’t making serious money these days either). So, in this very specific instance, AI is, with consent, outsourcing what would have been child labor. A serious concern for child influencers like The Rizzler where the only real thing they can actually monetize is their likeness.

This 6’9” Looksmaxxer With A LMTN Facecard Is Actually A 6’6” Fraudmaxxer

Last week, TikTok user @chadified_ggm8 revealed that he’s not actually 6’9”, but actually just 6’6” and wears lifts because he has a “LMTN facecard.” “LMTN” means “low to mid tier normie.” For those of you who do not have internet-induced psychosis, this is a very tall man experiencing such extreme body dysmorphia that he think he needs to be nearly seven-feet tall to attract women.

But @chadified_ggm8 is not the only guy on TikTok who is making content like this. One of the bigger accounts for this stuff is a user that goes by @syrianpsycho or K. Shami, who makes all kinds of videos targeting insecure men (he is also selling them supplements, obvz).

What’s notable here is that incels don’t typically post face online. And I’m actually kind of optimistic about the fact that young men steeped in red pill theory are opening their cameras because it’s possible other people will tell them that, one, they’re talking like crazy people and, two, they look fine and don’t need to smash their jaws or wear three-inch lifts.

Jokers Grinky

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