https://www.derekthompson.org/p/we-havent-seen-the-worst-of-what
I often find myself thinking about the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who argued in the introduction of After Virtue that modernity had destroyed the shared moral language once supplied by traditions and religion, leaving us with only the language of individual preference. Virtue did not disappear, I think, so much as it died and was reincarnated as the market. It is now the market that tells us what things are worth, what events matter, whose predictions are correct, who is winning, who counts. Money has, in a strange way, become the last moral arbiter standing—the final universal language that a pluralistic, distrustful, post-institutional society can use to communicate with itself.
As this moral vocabulary scales across culture, it also corrodes culture. In sports, when you have money on a game, you’re not rooting for a team. You’re rooting for a proposition. The social function of fandom—shared identity, inherited loyalty, something larger than yourself—dissolves into individual risk. In politics, I fear the consequences will be worse. Prediction markets can be useful for those who want to know the future, but their utility recruits participants into a relationship with the news cycle that is adversarial, and even misanthropic. A young man betting on a terrorist attack or a famine is not acting as a mere concerned citizen whose participation improves the efficiency of global prediction markets. He’s just a dude, on his phone, alone in a room, choosing to root for death.