What matters more, your vote or your bet on a prediction market? A campaign contribution or a stock purchase?
It has long been common practice to worry about “campaign finance.” But even since the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision further unleashed dark money, that kind of finance was relatively straightforward: contributions to support the costs of campaigning. But something different is happening here: campaign financialization. The election is becoming swallowed into a far more bewildering mix of speculative financial instruments. Their purpose is not simply to funnel money into campaigning but to turn campaigns and politics into a mere asset class.
This election season, we’re not just watching the speeches, ad buys, and polls. Election junkies are also paying attention to the bets on Polymarket, a cryptocurrency-based betting platform that counts Trump donor Peter Thiel as a major investor. They are following the temperamental swings of Trump Media & Technology Group stock—the holding company for the former president’s Truth Social platform. They may even be following the prices of Trump-branded sneakers, bibles, and NFTs. Trump’s family now has its own “decentralized finance” platform in the works, World Liberty Financial, turning them from mere market participants to market-makers.
Something is also changing with the practice of polling and organizing. Partisan polls are aiming less to produce truthful assessments of the electorate than headlines that will seed future declines in institutional trust. Trump-aligned mobilization efforts seem less focused on getting out the vote than producing expectations about what should happen that could set the stage for delegitimizing a loss. Those predictions have the power to remake reality.
We already know how financialization turns human lives into data points and game pieces. This is how Wall Street’s inventiveness meant millions of people losing their homes in the 2008 financial crisis. This is how pandemic-era shortages made the richest billionaires richer.
Watching the lead-up to the election has left me with a case of deja vu. For the past decade, I have been studying the development of governance practices in the realm of blockchains and cryptocurrencies. There, the reigning political ideology goes by the name of “cryptoeconomics”: the belief that a combination of digital cryptography and economic incentives can produce more trustworthy institutions than relying on human judgment or political ideology. Through ever more intricate financial techniques, carried out across unregulated digital networks, self-interested speculators are supposed to produce worthwhile public goods. As a common slogan in this subculture goes, “The casino bootstraps the infra[structure].”
This is not such a new idea, really. Back in the 1990s, a pair of Brits diagnosed the strange “Californian ideology” coming out of Silicon Valley, which sought to discard the messiness of partisan politics with the alleged efficiency of technology and markets. But even while many Big Tech companies have finally invested heavily in Washington politicking, blockchains have given the Californian ideology a new lease on life.
Using cryptoeconomics, people have designed a mirror world of institutions based on cryptoeconomics in place of professionalism, democracy, or mutual trust. Blockchain-based organizations use tradeable tokens to vote on decisions large and small—relying on economics, not legal enforcement, to orchestrate decision making. Blockchain-based courts attempt to resolve disputes with juries who act not out of public duty or virtue but out of economic self-interest. The same logic of a prediction market like Polymarket is used throughout these systems. Betting on future outcomes, and shaping those outcomes through betting, is the replacement for good citizenship.
I have been fascinated by these experiments, and I came to be convinces that they have some virtues. Cryptoeconomics has produced innovative new methods for voting and forming Internet-native organizations. Some of these techniques could contribute to making future institutions more accountable, responsive, and trustworthy. Prediction markets, properly designed, could help produce better policy by focusing decisions more on evidence than ideology. But soon I began warning the crypto community that relying too much on cryptoeconomics presented a profound danger to good governance, limiting the scope of people’s motivation and enabling a race to the bottom. One of the leading acolytes of cryptoeconomics, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, came around and agreed.
This is because, over the years, the perils of financialization have played out in practice in crypto-world. The ecosystem is full of startups peddling complex financial tricks, but very little gets invested in solving real problems for people outside of finance. I have known a lot of well-meaning people in the blockchain community who genuinely want and work toward the common good. But they get drowned out by the speculators. Many retail participants who were sold on the idea of decentralization and economic freedom got burned by scams and grift.
The past decade of financialization in crypto has lessons for the prospect of campaign financialization in politics. When you put speculation in charge, it consumes all other interests. There is no invisible hand that makes it work toward the common good—at least not without strong regulation to set rules and goals. The more you let financialization run amok, the more you end up with a nihilistic culture that values nothing more than the next chance for a bit of upside.
Among all the risks that this election poses to democracy, the slide into financialization seems to be creeping in undetected. In some respects it is ancient; speculation on the future has long been part of political life, going back to ancient Chinese divination with bones and the oracle of Delphi in Greece. But digital networks and financial techniques run the risk of supercharging this old temptation, to the point of washing away what is left of democracy.
In an article such as this, it would be customary at this point to suggest reforms to correct for the situation I have identified. But given the unwillingness of the political class to equip itself for even the last war of campaign finance, I have little confidence that such suggestions would do much good.
From what I can tell, however, only one side in this election has massively invested in campaign financialization. The other seems to be clinging to the notion that politics is still about campaigning, persuasion, and identifying a shared sense of the common good. When political discourse is just an asset class, it becomes easier for wealthy, charismatic figures to accumulate it for themselves. A vote for Donald Trump, among other things, is a vote for the speculative casino as the engine of our political future.