The Moral Cost of Optimizing for Engagement in a World on Fire

I recently finished reading Stephen King’s The Running Man.

For those who only know the Schwarzenegger or Powell movie, the book is darker. It depicts a dystopian future where the public’s desperation is harvested for entertainment. Life-or-death struggles are broadcast on TV, and the audience isn’t just watching—they are complicit. They cheer. They bet. They eat popcorn while people bleed.

These types of stories always read like satire to me. Until last week, that is.

On Wednesday, I was scrolling X when a screenshot stopped me cold. It was a trending betting contract from Polymarket:

“Will the US bomb Iran before Friday?”

I don’t use Polymarket, but there it was, sandwiched between tech memes and industry news. The interface in the screenshot was beautiful. Clean typography, slick charts, fluctuating trend lines. It looked exactly like a stock tracker or a sports betting app. But the “asset” being traded wasn’t a share of Apple or the spread on the Broncos game. It was a bombing campaign.

Thousands of dollars were flowing in. The odds were ticking up and down in real-time. People were placing bets on a scenario that involves real human lives, the same way they bet on the Super Bowl coin toss.

As I combed through the posts and updates, I realized we had crossed a dangerous threshold. We hadn't just gamified the news; we had gamified the catastrophe itself.

The Abstraction of Consequence

As a marketer, I’ve spent much of my career obsessing over “engagement.” We treat gamification as a holy grail. We design loops to keep users clicking, scrolling, and converting. We abstract human beings into "segments" and "cohorts." We turn complex behaviors into clean dashboards where green lines mean success and red lines mean failure.

But prediction markets reveal the dark side of that mechanism: The Abstraction of Consequence.

When you turn a geopolitical crisis into a wager, you strip it of its moral weight. The slick UI acts as a barrier between the user and the reality.

A drone strike is messy.

A prediction contract is clean.

We are seeing the ultimate result of viewing the world through a dashboard. By converting tragedy into data, we allow ourselves to interact with horror without feeling it. We stop seeing “casualties” and start seeing “payouts.”

I imagine there were people that day hoping for a bombing run—not out of political conviction, but because they bought 'Yes' at 40 cents and wanted to sell at a dollar.

The Audience Is Now The Player

In The Running Man or The Hunger Games, the horror wasn’t just the violence itself. The true horror was the audience. The society that had become so desensitized that they treated suffering as content.

We are slowly becoming that audience.

We live in an attention economy that demands constant engagement. Passive consumption isn't enough anymore; we need "skin in the game." We need to predict, to bet, to comment, to participate.

But there is a line where "participation" becomes "depravity." And watching the odds of a war fluctuate like a cryptocurrency feels like we have crossed it.

Just Because We Can...

Technology is neutral. A prediction market is just code. But how we use it exposes our culture, and ultimately ourselves.

Right now, the market is proving that we are willing to turn anything into a game if the interface is slick enough. We have built a world where we can bet on the end of the world from the comfort of our sofas.

The question we need to ask as we build the future of the web isn't "Can we create a market for this?" It’s "Should we?"

Because if everything is a game, then nothing matters. And that is a terrifying price to pay for engagement.