The Absolute Casinofication of Everything
On prophecy, prediction, Polymarket, and the desperate need to end the future
At the site of the former Bethlehem Steel plant—once the United States’ most monolithic steel producer, closed in 1995, the same year I graduated high school—you can now spend a few hours steeped in a cacophony of sports betting, stadium blackjack, or any number of popular mythologically-themed slot machines, all shrouded in the shadow of the Steel’s skeletal remains and the silhouettes of hulking blast furnaces that gave birth to much of the country’s early infrastructure. Wind Creek Bethlehem, one of the largest casinos in the northeastern United States, is owned by descendants of the indigenous Creek Nation, a group known as the Poarch Creek Indians.1 The casino and its event multiplex serve as but one instance of the absolute casinofication of everything.
America’s deindustrialization was already well underway when I began my academic journey at the nearby Northampton Community College more than thirty years ago, where many of Bethlehem Steel’s freshly unemployed took advantage of retraining benefits awarded as part of their untimely severance. Unlike the image of college life portrayed in the likes of Animal House or Revenge of the Nerds, the student body at NCC was a genuine confluence of society’s heterogeneous groups: people searching for a better financial foothold or finding their place amid the broader flux. It wasn’t uncommon to see the pixie-cut punk girl who worked at Play It Again Records seated in the same developmental psychology class as a former cold sheet mill operator in his early forties. Though the organs of industrial capitalism were being systematically dismantled from within America’s own borders, the promise of higher education still lingered, even as colleges continued to court corporate interests to the detriment of that promise.
The state of Pennsylvania—where I was born, raised, and currently reside—has become the ironic locus of America’s total casinofication. Once the veritable forge of the American empire and arena of some of the country’s most notable labor struggles, Pennsylvania suffered the pangs of post-industrial transformation as hard as any state in the union. In its perpetual swing-state status, it helped incubate the reigning Trumpism amid the shifting sentiments of its disenfranchised working class and a labor legacy ground under the wheels of the Democratic Party’s rightward drift. Pennsylvania now engenders a prototypical character of what is to come in our post-neoliberal conjuncture: the radical democratization of gambling as the basis for the economic paradigm.
While Pennsylvania is hardly unique in its expanded legalization of gambling, the scope and character of its gambling apparatus and the culture that has grown around it are notable. According to Crossing Broad, Pennsylvania holds the distinction of having become the biggest online casino market in the United States, generating $3.46 billion in gross iGaming revenue in 2025, marking a 27.7% increase over the previous year and producing $1.24 billion in tax revenue for the state.2 The casino’s reach has expanded to truck stops, coffee shops, and family-owned convenience stores—many of which now feature slot machines in the form of what are called “skill games,” which cloak the aleatory logic of slots beneath a thin veneer of proficiency challenges (think an inferior version of Japan’s pachinko parlors absent the cool little metal marbles). It has been a proliferation with legislative blessing: in October 2017, Pennsylvania’s Act 42 authorized satellite mini-casinos, video gaming terminals at truck stops, online casino games, sports wagering, and an online lottery, enshrining in law what was already growing in practice.3
In Pennsylvania’s Happy Valley, where I now reside, residents have recently lost a battle that is converting the former Macy’s anchor space of the Nittany Mall into the Happy Valley Casino, a $120 million gambling venue opening its doors this spring.4 The addition of the casino promises a surface-level economic boost, but its arrival also heralds further woes for an already precarious working-class population living in the shadow of the wealthier State College region. Resistance signage along Benner Pike, where the mall is being converted, acknowledges the failure to prevent the project, engaging now in a more desperate politics of refusal, urging members of the community to boycott the now transformed venue.
We are now at a phase in late capitalism where the infrastructure of America’s dead factories and shopping malls is being repurposed for gambling—and only after these spaces enjoyed a brief afterlife as ruins suffused with an uncanny post-capitalist appeal. The return of “aura” to these spaces had been followed by a cultural resurgence of the exploratory imaginary—one evidenced in the vaporwave aesthetic of the 2010s, but which has since expanded into a broader wayfaring through America’s liminal unconscious made popular on YouTube and other social media: excursions into decayed infrastructure, abandoned hospitals, derelict malls, and the creeping dread of The Backrooms, the paradigmatic fictional liminal space first formulated on 4chan and soon to be featured in a forthcoming film from A24.5 The collective desire for a sublime aesthetic reorientation to our world amid the wreckage of crass consumerism has been overrun by the clamor to commodify liminality—to give it canonical contours, as Stranger Things has done, colonizing collective yearnings with clichéd renditions of era aesthetics. The excess that the market cannot metabolize as spectacle, however, it will eventually absorb in another form.
In the imaginal register, the experience of the liminal sublime is overcoded by spectacle; as for the husk of the real—the ruins of the shopping mall itself—it requires only a few legal adjustments to be reincorporated into ever-expanding casino logic. That Pennsylvania has presided over this acceleration while maintaining one of the more archaic bodies of vice law born in the original thirteen colonies is, to put it mildly, a curiosity.
Pennsylvania has a notoriously prudish—if not often absurd—history when it comes to the collision of vice and the rule book. Our infamous “blue laws” have been the occasional subject of clickbait articles for both their formal severity and characteristic quaintness. To this day, pursuant to the Board of Vehicles Act of 1983, you cannot buy a car on a Sunday. The specter of Protestant purity has haunted the ongoing culture war, which has at times weaponized blue laws as a cudgel against immigrant communities, practitioners of folk and occult traditions, and queer-coded spaces alike.
In October 2023, Beck Ravenswood, the owner of the Serpent’s Key Shoppe and Sanctuary in Hanover, was visited by police officers after a local nonprofit article casually mentioned that tarot readings were offered by appointment. This prompted the Hanover Borough Police Chief to call and warn that such readings violated a Pennsylvania law dating to 1861. “The message was basically, ‘We’re watching you,’” Ravenswood recalled.6 The case has since grown into a statewide legal challenge aimed at overturning the law entirely. The irony was not lost on Ravenswood, who noted in their petition that the same state which threatened them with arrest “permits businesses to make predictions about this Sunday’s football score and permits individuals to give money to the prediction-providers in the form of a ‘bet.’”7
Yet other ironies abound. The Ravenswood case involves the clash of oracular tradition with crude betting at the level of law. Tarot and related practices were once seen as subversive in earlier decades of American culture; the specter of paganism maintained a firm power to unsettle the mandate of the Protestant-inflected sociopolitical order. The latter-day legalization of fortune-telling in Pennsylvania would serve as a delayed decoding of subversive flows that once threatened that order. Yet a deeper insight remains to be probed: the growing penchant in the US for gambling, tarot, and other aleatory logics as a symptom of systemic collapse. What I am gesturing toward is a feature of the political economy of epochal shifts and its general imaginal character—the Ravenswood vignette illustrates precisely what is at stake when the subversive power of prophetic culture becomes reduced to the predictive logic of the bet.
In Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents (2021), Federico Campagna distinguishes between competing ways of seeing the future at the end of the world.8 For Campagna, as the dominant mode of Western civilization nears its end, its form of “worlding” becomes exhausted alongside it. The instabilities exacerbated by the crumbling of empire impel us to navigate the ruins and envision the world to come. This impulse finds expression in two modes: prediction and prophecy. Prediction follows the logic of internal continuity—extrapolating from the facts, perspectives, and the sociopolitical investments of extant reality in a bid to know what comes next under the current paradigm. Prophecy, on the other hand, involves a cosmological reorientation that cannot be articulated inside an existing logic. It collapses our chronological notion of time, emerging out of a gridless eternalism from which an “outside” speaks. The language of prophecy murmurs, stutters, and convulses something often nonsensical to the ear inured to the present, speaking forth a future for those who will inhabit the world after ours has come to pass.
Fellow philosophers might here be reminded of a poorer wager on the “outside,” where prediction was mistaken for prophecy: that of accelerationist Nick Land, whose bid to steward into existence a post-Marxist technocapitalist singularity was wholly bound to the predictive apparatus. Skitching on capital’s line of flight, Land fell in love with Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel, enjoyed briefer affairs with Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, J.D. Vance, and Steve Bannon, and found himself sharing a clown car with an expanding roster of fascists and fascist sympathizers. Since learning of Anthropic’s alleged newer, more powerful AI platform Claude Mythos and its predilection for the grammar of his acid communist protégé and rival Mark Fisher, Land has seethed with resentment on social media, having failed to become the prince of predictive text to which he aspired.
Who knows—perhaps one of his venture capitalist admirers can set aside some seed funding to program a bespoke NickGPT as a conciliatory legacy project for the jilted villain?
As for the rest of us, casinofication continues in forms so perverse as to be unfathomable by any previous moral or ethical standard. The introduction of Polymarket—a blockchain-based prediction market founded in 2020 that allows users to wager on the outcomes of real-world events, from presidential elections to Federal Reserve rate decisions—has repurposed gambling technologies into an apparatus serving imperialist violence and those with market-obsessed epistemic privilege.9 Backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, the platform processed over $3 billion in bets on the 2024 presidential race alone, its CEO declaring it “the most accurate thing we have as mankind” for predicting future events.10 Now valued at $9 billion following a $2 billion investment from the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, Polymarket has since been implicated in a military insider trading scandal in which an Israeli air force officer allegedly earned approximately $162,000 betting on airstrikes he knew were coming—a tidy illustration of what happens when the wager becomes the only remaining idiom through which power dares to imagine the future.1112 This is to say nothing of figures surrounding the Trump administration becoming totally possessed by the demon of speculation, cashing in what remains of American hegemony to game the outcomes of political subterfuge and nuclear brinksmanship.13
Over the past week, things got notably worse. A Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruling strengthened the prediction market industry's position by exempting sports prediction contracts from state gambling laws—a decision brought by Kalshi against New Jersey but with sweeping implications for Polymarket and its competitors, all of which face ongoing pushback from states arguing that wagering on sporting outcomes constitutes gambling under state jurisdiction rather than the financial derivatives the federal government is content to call it.14 Also this past week, Polymarket bets began to populate on Google News alongside regular event-based reporting. When some had recorded the breach of this epochal threshold—inaugurating a world in which front-page links led directly to immediate financial risk for readers—Google intervened, citing the feature as a technical error.15 Mistake or not, the casino had a taste of primetime alongside AI-generated summaries, which have by now become an almost ineradicable feature of daily browsing.
With a new apocalyptic threshold phasing in and out before us, we are left to wonder where the “outside” truly remains. What speeds and orientations are demanded of us so that we are not consumed in the incandescence of the prophetic rite? This past week, back in the shopping malls of America, Luis Javier Gallegos Jr. was apprehended on arson charges after allegedly setting fire to the True Religion store at the Ontario Mills Mall in Ontario, California.16 Just down the road, a warehouse worker named Chamel Abdulkarim stood before a 1.2-million-square-foot Kimberly-Clark facility—the blaze he set estimated at $500 million in damages—and chanted “all you had to do was pay us enough to live.”17 Whether or not these acts constitute an enduring politics, they nonetheless constitute a symptom and a search for an exit.
The future, it seems, has become an intolerable promise. For those who wish to forsake the current world and its hollow guarantees, fire becomes a portal to an outside. Will flame, the universal and divine element of the prophetic rite, engulf the futurity to which we refuse to be condemned? In the absence of that refusal, it is a fate that seems guaranteed through the imminent reality of climate catastrophe, the infernum of the ongoing global war, and the absolute casinofication of everything.
"Wind Creek Bethlehem." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Accessed April 12, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_Creek_Bethlehem.
Drew Ellis, "Pennsylvania Online Casino Revenue Closes Out 2025 With Record $324.3 Million in December," Crossing Broad, January 20, 2026, https://www.crossingbroad.com/news/casino/pennsylvania-online-casino-revenue-december-2025/.
Navratil, Liz. “Wolf Signs Bills to Balance Pa. Budget with Gambling and Borrowing.” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 30, 2017. https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/politics/state/pa-budget-gambling-borrowing-teachers-seniority-veto-20171030.html.
Rushton, Geoff. "New Renderings, Operational Details Unveiled for Happy Valley Casino." StateCollege.com, November 19, 2025. https://www.statecollege.com/articles/business/new-renderings-operational-details-unveiled-for-happy-valley-casino/.
The observation that abandoned American shopping malls have had their “aura” restored (in both the Benjaminian and Gen-Z senses of the term) belongs to my friend and fellow philosopher Tim Elmo Feiten.
Tabb, Asia. “Tarot Reading Arrest Threat Sparks Legal Fight Over Pennsylvania’s Fortune-Telling Law.” WITF, December 18, 2025. https://www.witf.org/2025/12/18/tarot-reading-arrest-threat-sparks-legal-fight-over-pennsylvanias-fortune-telling-law/.
Russell, Erica, and Ryan Reichard. “Pennsylvania Police ‘Threaten to Arrest’ Metaphysical Shop Owner for Reading Tarot Cards.” PopCrush, December 15, 2023. https://popcrush.com/hanover-witch-hunt-shop-owner-tarot-cards-police/.
Campagna, Federico. Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.
Manoylov, MK. “US Presidential Winner Prediction Market Crosses $3 Billion on Polymarket a Day Before the Election.” The Block, November 4, 2024. https://www.theblock.co/post/324357/us-presidential-winner-prediction-market-crosses-3-billion-on-polymarket-a-day-before-the-election.
Cooper, Anderson, Aliza Chasan, Graham Messick, and Alex Ortiz. "Polymarket CEO Says His Prediction Market Is 'the Most Accurate Thing We Have as Mankind Right Now.'" CBS News / 60 Minutes, November 30, 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/polymarket-predictions-accuracy-shayne-coplan-60-minutes/.
Beganski, André. “Polymarket Valued at $9 Billion After NYSE Owner Invests $2B in Prediction Market.” Decrypt, October 7, 2025. https://decrypt.co/343228/polymarket-valued-9-billion-nyse-owner-invests-2b-prediction-market.
“Israeli Air Force Major Charged with Using Classified Info to Place Bets on Polymarket.” Times of Israel. Accessed April 12, 2026. https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-air-force-major-charged-with-using-classified-info-to-place-bets-on-polymarket/.
Associated Press. “Well-Timed Bets on Polymarket Tied to the Iran War Draw Calls for Investigations from Lawmakers.” NPR, April 10, 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/04/10/nx-s1-5780569/betting-polymarket-iran-investigation-lawmakers.
Healy, Jackson. “Third Circuit Blocks States from Regulating Kalshi Prediction Market.” Courthouse News Service, April 6, 2026. https://www.courthousenews.com/third-circuit-blocks-states-from-regulating-kalshi-prediction-market/.
Landymore, Frank. “Google Says Showing Polymarket Bets on Google News Was a Mistake.” Futurism, April 9, 2026. https://futurism.com/future-society/google-news-polymarket.
Matthews, Brad. “Fires Ontario California First Warehouse Mall.” The Washington Times, April 11, 2026. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/apr/11/fires-ontario-california-first-warehouse-mall/.
Chavolla, Elizabeth, Jonathan Lloyd, Bill Feather, and Andrew Blankstein. “Man Faces Federal and State Charges in Ontario Warehouse Arson Fire.” NBC Los Angeles, April 9, 2026. https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/man-faces-federal-and-state-charges-ontario-warehouse-arson-case/3874037/.
You should write about Musikfest next
In the context of gambling as a contemporary problem, it seems to me as if it has replaced the model of the American dream as the economic zeitgeist for America. No longer does anyone expect that actual work or education will help them to even gain a better place within the system, the only thing that could make a difference, in the eyes of the average person now, is to randomly get a large sum of money. This gives a miraculous aspect to the phenomenology of gambling, and speculation becomes the only perceived means of financial self-improvement. From the outside it’s easy to see this as the farce it is, but it’s how it maintains people in the cycle of thinking that next week’s Bills v Giants or Dodgers v Braves game will save them.