Happy Monday!

I hope you are having a great start to your week as we come out of a crazy weekend. If I’ve learned anything from working weekends for the past two months, it’s that the Trump administration loves a shocking Saturday morning blitz. It catches us all off guard, which is in line with his strategy of flooding the zone. 

The news has been cycling at such a rapid pace that it’s hard to keep up with. However, I think there’s a few things that have come out over the weekend at the intersection of culture, politics, and technology that I wanted to talk about today. Ultimately, we have reached a point where a number of online services are facilitating our destruction.

In lighter fare, we have a the resurgence of Janelle Monae’s “Yoga,” Rob Rausch’s post-Traitors move, and an interesting Lenten sacrifice on TikTok.

A sense of dread crept over me when I woke up early Saturday morning to the news that the U.S. and Israel bombed Iran. That feeling worsened after I found out that people were betting on this new war using prediction market apps like Polymarket and Kalshi. 

Prediction markets allow traders to bet on anything, from the Golden Globes to the likelihood of U.S. ground invasion in Iran. These apps have skyrocketed in growth over the past year. Like any good gambling service, they lure users in with the promise of big payouts, even if that cash is contingent on atrocities. 

Polymarket saw $529 million traded on the timing of bombings in Iran, with some large paydays going to a few new accounts. This raised suspicions about insider trading, as the creation of these winning accounts were unusually close to the attacks. 

Meanwhile, Kalshi founder Tarek Mansour had to refund fees related to a market predicting Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s ouster. He explained that the company has a death carveout preventing direct betting on the loss of life, although users are still wagering on the future of Iran’s leadership. 

“We don’t list markets directly tied to death,” Mansour shared on X. “When there are markets where potential outcomes involve death, we design the rules to prevent people from profiting from death. That is what we did here.”

Betting on death and war is technically illegal under U.S. commodity trading laws, yet these winners have received hundreds of thousands for wagering on bombings. Those same lucrative assaults have already had a tremendous human cost. Dozens of children were killed by a missile strike that hit a girls’ school in Iran, which took the lives of 165 people in total. Across the country, even more civilians were killed, while four U.S. service members have already died. President Donald Trump has suggested that the assaults would “continue until all of our objectives are achieved.” It’s unclear when that would be.

Polymarket justified allowing these bets by claiming it was helping people on the ground access information. 

“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,” a note at the top of Middle East markets on Polymarket reads. “That ability is particularly invaluable in gut-wrenching times like today. After discussing with those directly affected by the attacks, who had dozens of questions, we realized that prediction markets could give them the answers they needed in ways TV news and X could not.”

I’ve felt uneasy about the ubiquity of prediction markets, which are increasingly partnering with awards shows, with media companies, and even with pop culture accounts like Pop Crave. These placements have been a strategic and calculated way to normalize betting on everything, which then leads to more sinister wagers in these Iran markets. Not to mention, we are in a gambling epidemic, meaning people are getting hooked and losing as big as they win.  

The rise of prediction markets, particularly in this context, compounds my anxiety around recent technological advancements. Many people have written about the enshittification of the internet and how our digital services are becoming unusable due to corporate greed. Simultaneously, we have seen AI improve faster than we could have predicted. One study found that popular AI models, when modeling nuclear war scenarios, used tactical nukes 95% of the time in warfare because “the nuclear taboo is no impediment to nuclear escalation.”

It is worrisome to think about the applications of AI in war, especially considering the ongoing struggle between the Department of Defense and Anthropic. The AI company provoked the DoD’s ire for refusing to drop its safeguards against mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. OpenAI quickly seized on the opportunity to take Anthropic’s place, claiming that the government would not use its tech to engage in these activities. Experts warned that the DoD would be able to cross these red lines despite OpenAI’s assurances. In any case, Anthropic’s Claude was used during the assault on Iran. 

The fact that both prediction markers and AI are exacerbating the act of war makes me feel sick. In a culture that has swung toward nihilism, it’s discomforting that we have so many tools at our disposal that incentivize the degradation — and eventual destruction — of humanity. I’m not sure what comes after this, although I do think the continued pushback against these applications is necessary to our continued existence. 

Every Monday letter gets a playlist. In honor of Alysa Liu’s homecoming and new mural in Oakland, here is a hyphy playlist from a Bay Area native.

In this week’s playlist:

Other things I want to share with you.