How many people will the Trump administration deport this year? Will Gaza suffer from mass famine? These are serious questions with lives at stake.

They’re also betting propositions that two buzzy startups will let you gamble on.

The 2018 legalization of sports betting gave rise to a host of apps making it ever easier to gamble on games. Kalshi and Polymarket offer that service, but also much more. They’ll take your bets, for instance, on the presidential and midterm elections, the next Israeli bombing campaign, or whether Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg will get divorced.

Tarek Mansour, the CEO of Kalshi, laid it out simply at a conference held by Citadel Securities in October. “The long-term vision,” Mansour said, “is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.” It’s as dystopian as it sounds.

If you believe the hype, the promise of these companies isn’t in the money they take in as bookkeepers. They argue that the bets they collect offer a more accurate forecast of the future than traditional institutions. (In fact, they’ll tell you that you’re not betting at all but trading on futures contracts — a distinction that feels so tenuous it’s hard to justify with a full-throated explanation.)

This pitch has been especially enticing in the wake of the 2016 election, when polling missed the rise of Donald Trump, and its allure hasn’t faded as collective distrust of traditional institutions grows. But if the initial wave of social platforms — the Facebooks and Twitters of the world — fractured our sense of a shared reality, the predictive platforms are here to monetize the ruins.

If the initial wave of social platforms fractured our sense of a shared reality, the predictive platforms are here to monetize the ruins.

Polymarket acknowledges the gravity of some of its more shocking propositions. It tells those who click on its more unsavory wagers: “The promise of prediction markets is to harness the wisdom of the crowd to create accurate, unbiased forecasts for the most important events to society. That ability is particularly invaluable in gut-wrenching times like today.” The app goes on say that “After discussing with those directly affected by the attacks, who had dozens of questions, we realized prediction markets could give them the answers they needed in ways TV news and 𝕏 could not.”

It might seem odd, then, that these very platforms have lately been signing deals to entrench themselves into mainstream........

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