14

Preemption, Premediation, Prediction

The Politics of Betting on the Future

Greg Elmer and Andy Opel

Bets are essentially predictions.

(Abramowicz, 2007b)

If this is such a good idea, why haven't the markets created it on their own?

(Stiglitz, 2003)

Media are awash with stories about the future, temporal loops, and time-bending figures that struggle with fate. Terminators help humans merely survive the inevitable “judgment day,” while Heroes perform unimaginable loops through time in vain attempts to stop similar apocalyptic futures. ABC's 2009–2010 hit, FlashForward, offers perhaps the most compelling rendition of the always already experienced future. On FlashForward, future visions are experienced by the whole globe, essentially becoming synonymous with human experience. This time traveling, however, is not open ended; it is a near future, a brief experience of living almost a year in the future – just close enough to be familiar, yet distinct. It does not stretch the imagination or call for a suspension of disbelief; rather, the flash forward, the experiencing of the future, provides a seemingly universal experience and dilemma for all those on the planet, save those who are “already” dead in the near future. To not know the future, in other words, is to have already died.

What FlashForward suggests is a universally shared subjectivity, through individuated visions that disrupt a previously unknown future. Life stories unfold in a seemingly predetermined fashion whereupon a series of uncanny moments or clues become pieces of a puzzle that, once fully assembled, render a predetermined image, the future-as-present. This same uncanny feeling of inevitability experienced prior to the second war in Iraq led Richard Grusin (2010) to argue that media have increasingly sought to premediate dangerous and risky future events, in an effort to prepare their audiences for preemptive actions. He writes:

Premediation posits something of a paradox. While preferred futures need to be premediated, or otherwise brought into the present, their central messages, images, and tropes also invoke remediations or re-presentations, deriving from past events and mythology. (The attack on Pearl Harbor was one such re-presentation, Bush's invocation of a “crusade” was another.) To suggest that premediation or other forms of preemptive narration similarly function as media representations, however, would negate the nonrepresentational dynamics of preemptive media politics, the instrumental components of a futurist agenda that seek to bypass dialogue and debate over future paths and solutions. As but one starting point for this chapter, we might question the logic of pre-presentations – or, as was the case in the TV series FlashForward, pre-presence. If we use popular culture as one important site of premediation, or pre-presentation, we find that today the future is as much lived as it is viewed or imagined. It is literally a pre-presence, a living in the future-present. As we have noted before (Elmer & Opel, 2008), the notion of already being in the future is a common one, and one that suggests, rhetorically, that there are few options or alternatives. As a consequence, debate, dialogue, and dissent – key components of liberal democracies – must give way to preemptive action. Pre-presence eschews talk of likelihood and probability, in the vernacular “what-if” scenarios, in favor of “when-then” declarations of action.

While such future-focused programs speak to contemporary anxieties over future social, economic, and geopolitical risks, it is also the case that similar efforts to preassemble the future into the present have been going on for decades. Specifically, such efforts have taken the form of financialized future-risks, commodities, markets, derivatives, and other financial investments that seek to price and monetize the future. It is only relatively recently, however, that “futures markets” – trading systems that seek to establish and otherwise account for future economic value – have also sought to monetize future social and political outcomes. Such markets are more commonly referred to as “prediction or information markets,” “idea futures,” or “event futures” (Wolfers & Zitewitz, 2006). This chapter focuses in particular on financial strategies that have evolved from the University of Iowa's Iowa Electronic Market (IEM) project,¹ which sought to establish future political outcomes through an economic market that called for “investors” to buy shares in the most likely political outcome. Established in 1988, the IEM market is now used by universities worldwide for pedagogical and research purposes. Moreover, the logic of the IEM has inspired a host of similar markets, including, as we discuss in this chapter, the controversial US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Policy Analysis Market, also known as “terrorist futures markets.”

Unlike traditional markets that monetize future commodities, services, or contracts through an assessment of economic relationships, environmental, and even political risks, IEM-style futures or prediction markets increasingly invoke and monetize traders or investors to justify their collective future visions. For such prediction markets, monetizing risk is not necessarily the only goal. Instead, such markets also aggressively lay claim to a science of sorts, an ability to more accurately predict future events through the collective bets placed by traders. While such bets on the future are aggregated or crowd-sourced to give a larger sample of investment predictions, the legitimacy of these markets is overwhelmingly articulated as a singular act: the accrediting of individual participation in the markets.

This speculative future, then, is not simply an exercise in providing market-friendly visions of the future; rather, it is an attempt at expanding the financialization of everyday life (Martin, 2002) outward (across economic, social, and political sectors) and forward (in time), to the very contours of the possible – the unknown future. Critics of market financialization have provided compelling critiques of the recent global financial meltdown, focusing in particular on the demise of infrastructure investments, and the concomitant rise of derivative pricing (Ayache, 2010; LiPuma & Lee, 2004) and speculative forms of commodity financing (Marazzi, 2010). This chapter builds on these critiques to interrogate the subjects of contemporary futures markets: those individuals who are accredited to participate in markets that seek to price – and give probable weight to – political, cultural, and foreign policy futures, including elections and military coups. In other words, we examine the forms of subjectivation that animate futures markets – the means by which individuals are accredited to participate within and thus legitimize such futures market metrics. And we question whether such futures markets and their accompanying forms of subjectivation may be undermining democratic institutions, systems, and processes worldwide.

Accreditation in the Future-Information Economy: Discrediting the Political

Before we move toward a more in-depth discussion of the mechanics of futures markets and prediction markets, some further conceptual remarks concerning the subjectivation of both the market and the political sphere in general are in order. Of particular concern here is the concept of accreditation, the means by which futures markets cultivate and legitimate their future-predictions with trading platforms that act as much to premediate insider-traded or individuated risk-averse bets as they do to monetize future risk. In such a state of affairs, we again highlight the need to understand the manner in which markets themselves (and their boosters, of course) tell stories about who may – individually and socially – participate in the act of predicting the future.

In Catégories de l'impolitique (2005), Roberto Esposito offers a critique of influential conservative philosopher Carl Schmidt's (2007) definition of the political – one defined simply as the relationship between friend and enemy. Esposito argues, conversely, that such a relational form or definition of politics is increasingly displaced, though he reminds us that this is not to be confused with emergent apolitical or nonpartisan domains. For Esposito, politics is as much defined by negation, invisibility, or absence as it is by Schmidt's blunt and pervasive assessment of social relations and antagonisms. That which is beyond question, or autonomous, as Esposito defines it – particularly with regard to the function of the market or economy – exemplifies the “impolitic,” a set of relations that are considered inevitable, as existing outside of meaning, and thus ultimately unrepresentable (2005, p. 11). Futures markets similarly feed upon an impolitics of forecasting, a truth-telling mode of intelligence gathering, with an invisible hand that is embedded not in the market as such but in the affective truth – the gut feeling – produced by investors-at-monetary-risk. To suggest that such future visions are unrepresentable, however, would miss the point. Again, the future is intensely remediated through past histories and future-images and visions, defining who we are, where we have come from, and what it will be like in the future. At the same time, future mediations also invoke decidedly instrumental and impolitical techniques and logics. That is to say, predictive markets not only offer visions, they also serve to define or altogether negate a socially inclusive process of decision-making, choice, and options – in short, democratic life.

Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffrey's “Evil Media Studies” (2009) similarly suggests that media studies must move beyond critiques of representation and spectacle to an understanding of the “sorcery” of media, the “hypnotic” effects that cannot be reduced to semantic forms of critique and analysis. Following Lazzarato (2004), Guattari (1995), and others, Fuller and Goffrey suggest that media increasingly define the world around us, the very landscape upon which mediation is enabled (2009, p. 143). To suggest that such a media world is “evil” emphasizes that the structure, function, and essence of the possibilities for communication are a priori corrupted. However, Fuller and Goffrey's invocation of an evil media studies paradigm stops short of our focus on time, on a future media studies that posits an already visited or experienced future. Still, Fuller and Goffrey's evil media studies does posit a vision of media as embodying, or spawning from, an always already decided future, a tomorrow that cannot arrive unexpectedly since it carries with it evil intent too risky for society to ignore.

Like Esposito and Fuller and Goffrey, Bernard Stiegler (2004) concludes that the encoding of the very possibility of media, and of communication in general, follows a preemptive logic, a mode of subsistence (as opposed to existence) that proffers nothing but survival – a symbolic misery (“misère symbolique”) (p. 30).² In Mécréance et discrédit: la décadence des démocraties industrielles, Stiegler's concern with future media is wrapped within contemporary networked information and communication technologies, a concern that he expresses in terms of a radical shift toward a mathematical terrain of communication. Stiegler argues that, ironically, such a statistical terrain is dominated as much if not more by collective sentiment and emotion than it is by rational or scientific probability. Such collective sentiments lie at the heart of futures or prediction markets – such markets only work, as we shall see, if individuals are motivated by fear of possible financial loss (of a bet or “investment”). Stiegler refers to such a landscape as existing “désormais,” which importantly has two complementary definitions in French, referring both to “in the future” and to that which exists “now, going forward.”

Stiegler's political critique of contemporary postindustrial life is also wedded to broader debates about the relationship between culture and economy, a shift clearly evident in the move from futures (commodities) markets to political prediction markets. For Stiegler, the economic and cultural spheres are one and the same, or at least significantly define each other. Culture, defined as collective sentiment and emotion, has come to define the domain of the economic, particularly as manifested in information and communication technologies (ICTs), networks, and digital life that “feed back” circuits of production, exchange, and consumption. Within such an “épokhè,” as Stiegler refers to it, information capitalism suffers from a systemic mode of discredit (“discrédit”) (p. 29). We believe that here Stiegler suggests a process of not only disabling, misrepresenting, or marginalizing voices and opinions, but altogether removing accreditation – the very means and mechanisms through which one can participate in political and economic life.

Such debates over voice, authority, and accreditation are hardly new. Rather, in many respects our discussion of the preempting of democratic life dates back centuries, invoking classic definitions and debates over the possibilities and limits of democratic politics. Yet, in the modern or electronically mediated era, we argue, debates over political roles and responsibilities have intensified, particularly with regard to political justifications, mandates, and other claims of legitimacy. Claims of popular support, of course, seemingly trump all other considerations in the conduct of public life, including legal frameworks (Agamben, 2004), and even the learned opinions of individual experts, as Walter Lippmann (1997) famously defined them: “[The expert] [. . .] is certain, moreover, to exercise more power in the future than ever he did before, because increasingly the relevant facts will elude the voter and the administrator” (p. 241).

Lippmann's views are of particular concern today as his thesis of political leadership – the need for a special leadership class of learned individuals – mirrors in many respects contemporary fears over meta-information. These fears invoke the simple fact that information, and of course opinions, are ubiquitous – making it nearly impossible to discern the truth or plan for the future. In such a state of affairs, some have claimed that new mediated spaces, such as the web and social media, have led to a degradation of authority (Keren, 2006). And at a time when political mandates have seemingly become harder to achieve, both within and outside of political legislatures, popular opinion and other forms of voter “intelligence” have become increasingly more important to politicians, corporate leaders, and other policymakers. Political opinion today, however, is not simply invoked or manipulated by the political elite to support their own predetermined plans, as some have argued (Lewis, 2001). Rather, as we detail in the remainder of the chapter, it has increasingly divested itself of any claims to mass representation, “informed” or otherwise. Markets now speak in the present about the future.

It is here that we begin to speak more of the growing influence of so-called futures markets – systems and platforms, not merely polls of consumer or voter opinions, that have increasingly caught the attention of policymakers, economists, data miners, and other members of the intelligence-gathering class. Such futures markets encapsulate the emerging power of accredited forms of prediction technologies and techniques that displace debate, dialogue, and discussion in favor of accredited opinions (bets) and insider trading, a process fueled by the fear of monetary loss (the market “investment”). Some have argued that betting on political outcomes can be traced as far back as sixteenth-century Italy, eighteenth-century Britain, and the nineteenth-century United States (Rhode & Strumpf, 2008). As we argue in this chapter, futures markets also have their genesis in both media and markets, for example with the emergence of the telegraph. While the telegraph facilitated the telling of stories (interpersonally, or socially through newspapers and other media), it also produced a new economic landscape (as Fuller & Goffrey, 2009 likewise noted) that enabled shifting representations of everyday life. James Carey argues how the introduction of the telegraph in the United States, for instance, fundamentally changed modern perceptions of time, space, and markets. The telegraph, in other words, produced a real-time form of communication that in turn facilitated the expansion of markets both spatially (national markets) and temporally (futures commodity markets). Real-time, national communication thus fueled a speculative move in market dynamics, where changes in weather that affected crops in Florida, for instance, could be communicated across the country in real time, in effect producing a futures market price in advance of the final production cycle. Carey (1989) writes:

Today, intelligence, data mining, consumer and voter behavior researchers are similarly fixated on the future, moving forward and, of course, “in” the future (as Stiegler again reminds us). These futures markets differ from public opinion polling, where individuals are asked to state or express their opinions on a series of issues, and even from telegraph-enabled futures markets, where weather patterns and their potential impact on agricultural productivity were communicated in near-real time. A key difference is that contemporary information or intelligence-based futures markets seek to accredit the feelings of individuals and “insiders” who have first-hand knowledge of variables that could possibly alter future markets, opinions, or world events. Some key futures market boosters, particularly Michael Abramowicz (2007a), also note, as Lippmann did many decades ago, that “information overload” is motivating developments and adoptions of futures markets. But such proponents almost always invoke the affective aspects of financial “investment” – what we (via Stiegler) refer to as accreditation – as the key component required to enable the predictive capacities of futures markets. Futures markets, in other words, serve much more than mere aggregators, ranking algorithms or other sorting machines. In short, they call for “bets,” not opinions, affinities, hopes, or even desires. “A prediction market, then, is a decision-making device for excluding from consideration predictions that no one appears willing to back with money” (Abramowicz, 2007a, p. xii).

Politically speaking, our concerns with such betting markets lie in the fact they are used to invoke the future-as-now, a not-so-subtle setting of the political and economic agenda. Futures markets reconfigure social relations around a depoliticized model of hyper-individuation. Wage earners become wager-ers, with all the associated risks and benefits condensed down to an individual level. Where citizens participate in governing decisions, debating policy solutions to collective problems such as education, criminal justice, or traffic congestion, wager-ers seek to maximize their own profits, risking personal financial loss. Such markets thus invoke fear of economic loss (at best) to define the future as predictable. Furthermore, for some prediction markets like Intrade, both the market and the future are greatly simplified and predefined before investments are even made. In addition to such futures being overdetermined by singular events, prediction markets call into question the framing of the future in terms of “either/or” propositions. In the case of Intrade, trading in futures markets is reduced to a “yes” or “no” proposition, as its website indicates:

Such futures/prediction markets do not ask respondents to divulge their preferences, likes, or even dislikes; rather, they ask individuals to wager (or risk their assets) on specific future events, not what they would like the future to be or even what set of factors contribute to future outcomes. Futures market defenders, like futures market booster Michael Abramowicz, argue that such criticisms miss the point. For them, such markets cannot work with “opinions” since they are tainted by “sentimentality” (2007a, p. 6), in lieu of apparently objective gut feelings produced by the risk of financial loss. But such markets often actively promote themselves to so-called insiders, those who in fact have nothing to lose at all – quite the opposite: since insider knowledge is actively courted, their agendas are much more likely to be “predicted.” Or according to Abramowicz: “Because no one is forced to participate in a prediction market, those who participate tend to be those who have information relevant to the particular prediction or at least those who can obtain the information at low cost” (2007a, p. 7).

Abramowicz articulates the central assumption about futures markets: they will more effectively solicit “insider” knowledge – information that could not be found by other means of collection, surveillance, or solicitation. Thus, in addition to accrediting future visions invoked by those market participants who risk financial loss (market bets), futures markets also seek out those individuals, groups, or communities that are already in positions to dictate future events. The move away from polling and intelligence-gathering techniques that seek to collectively determine potential future events and outcomes, therefore, is better understood as an enticement program. These techniques are efforts to accredit those in a position to directly financially suffer while also actively proffering financial gain to those already in positions of knowledge and control. One need look no further than the US Pentagon's 2003 “terrorist futures market” to view how the logic of such futures markets expanded to accredit wagering cynics, driven by fear and insider-opportunists whose positions in society and the economy could in fact direct future outcomes.

Betting on Terror

On July 28, 2003, the Pentagon announced the formation of the DARPA-backed Policy Analysis Market (PAM),³ or “terrorist futures market” as it came to be known. The program was designed for cultures, regions, and nations where the United States had little to no intelligence-gathering mechanisms, limited surveillance techniques, or reliable political allies. To an extent, the PAM betting system was designed to act as a new form of intelligence gathering, one that would replace overt surveillance techniques that had failed to produce actionable or reliable information in the past. While the US military had been called upon to smoke out terrorists and insurgents, PAM's market logic proposed the establishment of an embedded mechanism, an insider trading market. To use police terminology, the program attempted to create its own legion of market-enticed “informants.”

In short, the PAM program proposed an online, real-time form of betting on the likelihood of the next terrorist attack (among a host of other security-related issues). As the US Defense Department noted, “research indicates that markets are extremely efficient, effective and timely aggregators of dispersed and even hidden information” (quoted in Hulse, 2003, p. A1). The PAM was based on the efficient market hypothesis, the central premise being that collective thought, and in particular insider knowledge, is more accurate than individual opinion or policy analysis from a distance. Under the PAM proposal, the Pentagon was to act as “the House,” setting the odds on “literally millions of possible scenarios” (Coy, 2003). In a contradictory and somewhat confusing attempt to harness the power of market incentive while limiting the potential to profit from terror and manipulate the markets, bets were to be limited to $100. This price cap was also said to be a way to minimize the cost to the government as it expected to lose money to well-informed investors. This cost was seen as a small price to pay for accurate information (Coy, 2003).

The program gained considerable notoriety through the media when former US Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton referred to the program as a “futures market in death” (Pethokoukis, 2004). The controversy prompted an intense debate in Washington and on cable news, where the program was attacked as “morally repugnant and grotesque,” and criticized as a potential venue for terrorists to bet for or against their own efforts and potentially profit from their actions (Hulse, 2003). A week later the Pentagon scrapped the idea. Shortly after the program was shut down, though, a chorus of economists began to articulate the rationale behind the PAM, chiding critics for injecting morality into a prediction modeling tool that was designed to prevent future attacks. Former CNN financial commentator and anchor Lou Dobbs, for one, accused the critics of PAM of “asserting the all-too-familiar orthodoxy of both Washington and New York, the capitals of politically correct-inspired conformity” (Dobbs, 2003). As details of the program emerged after its demise, the coupling of insider “prediction” and market forces became clear. George Mason University economics professor Robin Hanson, the scholar behind the model, defended the program as a way to “pay people for information about bad things” (Said, 2003).

While the semi-public version of PAM was scrapped, a privatized version has since reappeared from Net Exchange, an original partner on the DARPA-led project. The program was defended as a viable alternative to surveys and a new tool for gaining potentially valuable information. The most ethically contentious, subjective component of such a market, however, continued PAM's accreditation of “insiders.” In a 2003 presentation to the Microsoft research department, a representative of Net Exchange (2003) discussed possible “investors” in the market: “Mossad agent thinks Hamas mil. [sic] wing will not disband – buys ∼B @$0.50.” Net Exchange president Charles Polk explained it this way: “One way to look at the use of a market-type process is that it provides a filter at the very front [and provides] the incentive to concentrate on those things that they actually know something about” (quoted in Edmonson, 2003).

Conclusion

At a time when casinos and other forms of state-sanctioned betting continue to be approved by jurisdictions worldwide, betting on political outcomes has not only become a commonplace pastime and game, it has increasingly sought to replace polling as the most accurate predictor of future electoral results. Such dubious claims of accuracy and predictability point to perhaps the most insidious anti-democratic components of prediction and markets. Putting aside the “insider wager-er” that is often less prominent in more policy-based forms of futures markets, the collective forms of intelligence that such systems invoke raise troubling questions about how political forecasting techniques can be used to preempt democratic elections.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, crowds were feared – consistently represented as dangerous masses or mobs that threatened capital from the outside. Some insist that contemporary mobs can now be “smart,” assisted by social forms of mobile communication (Rheingold, 2003). However, futures markets rely upon a much more sinister, cynical, and fearful crowd. The crowds that collectively predict the future today channel fear and loss, within a market-based mentality, as a means to posit the future-as-present. Today's mobs, in other words, are not represented as fearful but instead are harnessed or harvested for their collective fear. Futures markets are constituted by fear.

To suggest that futures markets harness fear is to recognize their nonrepresentational characteristics. The goal of futures markets is to move beyond signification, representation, dialogue, and debate and into the future, or rather, into a future-act in the present, a future-oriented solution in the present to a problem that has allegedly already happened in the future. Such time-traveling-like endeavors are intensely mediated, or premediated as Grusin suggests. Yet we also argue that such futures markets actively discredit political forms of representation. In fact, they aggressively strive to undermine polling and other ways of representing political opinions as being unreliable and “sentimental.” To participate in such a forward-looking enterprise, then, one must become accredited, which is to say, risk one's credit and, more importantly, answer the simple question: what do you believe will be the outcome, not what do you hope the outcome will be.

Futures market boosters thus emphasize the integrity of future visions that derive from fear and loss – from individuals betting “their own money.” In true market fashion, all value is reduced to personalized financial value, which is said to be the best indicator of collective will because people only risk their own money when they have a strong degree of confidence. This fundamental assumption about prediction markets and preemptive thinking in general denies the broader conditions of consumerism and commodity fetishism, where people will make repeated irrational, impulsive, emotion-based purchases with little regard for potential financial implications. This irrationality is essential to modern consumer society and its associated markets, allowing wealth bubbles to emerge and capital to be concentrated “before the bubble breaks.” The celebration of individual financial risk as a measure of accreditation suggests that losing money is the worst thing that can happen to an individual. Such a financialization of politics and society neglects the impacts of lost infrastructure, especially the losses to collective goods and services, such as clean water, public roads, a rules-based judiciary, and adequate schools that ensure basic literacy across the population (in the enduring struggle to prevent the emergence of a large underclass). When political changes are reduced to individual risks and rewards, personal balance sheets may reflect changes, but the social costs of policy changes are never tallied.

The irony of celebrating the visionary “wisdom” of futures markets, even as market failures have rippled across the globe, appears to be lost on futures markets' boosters. As colossal as they have been, market failures have not inhibited the proliferation of “betting as voting” venues or the valorization of those venues in the mass media. With policy debates that seem too complicated and muddled by competing facts hurled by opposing experts, individual agency is directed toward the betting table, where the “wisdom” of the masses or mobs overcomes the elitist predictions of the pundit class or the wishes of public opinion.

NOTES

1 See the website for University of Iowa's “Iowa Electronic Markets,” retrieved from http://tippie.uiowa.edu/iem/

2 See also Marc Abeles (2006).

3 For an excellent collection of news reports on PAM see http://hanson.gmu.edu/otherPAMpress.html

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