Financialization of culture: everything becomes an asset class

We're building a "truth machine" that can be gamed and calling it "wisdom of crowds" to feel better.

In the past, markets were for commodities, equities, interest rates. Then finance invented derivatives and made it possible to trade not just assets, but outcomes, correlations, and narratives.

Prediction markets are the next step: they turn anything people care about into something tradeable.

Attention as infrastructure

That's why platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi can be massive. They don't need new factories, new supply chains, or even new products. They just need attention.

Anything can become a contract: politics, sports, war, celebrity gossip, anime storylines. If there's uncertainty and passion, there's a market.

Derivatives of curiosity

And once a market exists, it naturally grows a product tree: sub-markets, variants, bundles, time windows, conditional contracts. That's how derivatives form.

People don't stop at "will X happen?" They immediately want "how soon?", "by how much?", "if X happens then what about Y?" Financial instruments are basically curiosity + disagreement packaged into tradable form.

Not 2008, still a cultural shift

The interesting part is that this doesn't automatically recreate 2008. The 2008 problem wasn't just "people traded outcomes," it was leverage and synthetic replication layered on top of opaque risk, with big institutions warehousing exposure. Prediction markets can stay relatively safe if they stay properly collateralized and tightly margined. The platform can operate like a venue: take fees, manage liquidity, ensure settlement, avoid directional risk.

But the cultural impact is still massive. Because once culture becomes an asset class, every debate becomes a trade, and every trade becomes a dopamine loop. People don't just want to discuss politics or sports, they want to put skin in the game. They want a price that "proves" they're right.

And you can see the same pattern everywhere:

• Runescape had its own gambling economy and black markets for years.
• r/wallstreetbets turned options trading into a social identity and a meme war.
• Tipsters sell certainty as a subscription business.

So the big idea is not just "prediction markets are gambling." It's that we are turning the entire world into tradeable narrative.

Culture becomes a market, and the market becomes culture. Once you can trade anything, everything becomes a financial instrument.

And at that point prediction markets don't just measure belief, they manufacture it. Same way hedge funds can push sentiment, these markets can push attention, incentives, and ultimately what people treat as "true."