An Arabic-named prediction market company rises alongside a novel obsessed with Arabic and lotteries
This week author Helen DeWitt has been all over the book internet in news that she, a writer who has struggled publicly with the particular publishing cruelty of being a critical success and still poor, turned down a $175,000 writing prize due to its promotional requirements. I have been meaning to write a post about DeWitt for the past couple of months—not a hot take on her prize pass, but rather about a curiosity in a myriad curiosities that is her most recent book, co-written with Ilya Gridneff, Your Name Here. That specific curiosity is the strange confluence in timing between the popularity of an Arabic-named prediction market company, Kalshi, and the long overdue release of this novel that happens to be obsessed with Arabic and lotteries.
Your Name Here was apparently first published around 2008 as a PDF on DeWitt’s website, and finally made its way into print last October. In January of this year, I checked out a digital copy from the library and read it on my phone, but, like two other DeWitt books I’ve previously read this way, I was compelled to buy it in print after I finished it. It was, by all appearances, a difficult book to write, publish and, also, to read. I loved it.
DeWitt and Gridneff’s book is difficult because it is long (600 pages) and complicated and has little interest in making it easy for the reader to follow. It is, among other things, a book about how characters that are a lot like DeWitt and Gridneff (including having the same names at some but not all points) met in a bar and decided to write something together. Much of this occurs in an epistolary format via emails complete with footers from hosting companies of yore. These exchanges are not charming in the manner of epistolary novels like current bestseller Correspondence by Virginia Evans (which I also recently enjoyed) or Helene Hanff’s beloved 84 Charing Cross Road. Imagine something more akin to what emails between Hunter S. Thompson and Sylvia Plath might have been.
Your Name Here also includes a book within a book, called Lotteryland, by DeWitt’s alter ego, Rachel Zozanian. It is set in a dystopian England where goods are distributed by a labyrinthine, rigged lottery system, reminiscent of the “lottery postcode” used to describe how the quality of care by the UK’s National Health Service differs by geographies. The book’s protagonist is obsessed with trying to game said lottery, losing hours at a time sitting in front of her “lottomonitor” running “luck checks” by concocting increasingly specific draws like “GRANDMOTHER CHECKING ODDS OF MARRIAGE TO A NICE JEWISH GIRL.”
Alongside this book within a book is a recurring riff on the premise that if more Westerners understood Arabic the world would be a more peaceful place, i.e., literally understanding other people humanizes them. DeWitt marvels repeatedly that if some writer (her?) had just done for Arabic what Tolkien did for his made-up Elvish languages in writing The Lord of the Rings to explain them, we may not be in yet another war in the Middle East. (Languages are a recurring theme in DeWitt’s work. She is a polyglot, as is one of the main characters, Ludo, in her best known novel, The Last Samurai.)
So, just to recap, we’ve got a novel by two authors about writing a novel by two authors, with a novel about a society obsessed with lotteries within it, plus a side dish of Arabic studies. It’s no surprise, then, that I made a connection to the prediction market company, Kalshi, whose name comes from the Arabic word for everything, when I first came across it via Scott Galloway of the podcast Pivot. Galloway has lately been talking a lot about prediction markets, the two biggest of which are Kalshi and Polymarket (whose tagline is similarly “Markets on everything”). His thesis is roughly that they are a concerning if logical indicator of younger generations, especially men, turning to higher risk gambits (see also: Bitcoin) having concluded, in short, that the traditional economy, including the stock market, is rigged against them.
Around the same time, a Lunch with the FT feature with Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour was published, in which I (sort of) learned what the hell a prediction market is and why it’s different than Vegas or any other of the bazillion online gaming sites. In short, the public can use them to trade shares of any future event (more on this later); they are redeemable for $1 if the event occurs and nada if it does not. Mansour, who was born in California and raised in Lebanon, has been previously quoted saying that “the long-term vision is to financialise everything, and create a tradeable asset out of any difference in opinion,” demonstrating how one person’s vision is another person’s dystopia.
While DeWitt/Zozanian’s world is ruled by luck, Mansour and pals have created a world where you can bet on that luck (aka uncertainty). In this world, those with better information systematically profit. Have I mentioned Donald Trump, Jr., is a strategic advisor to both Kalshi and Polymarket, as well as an investor in the latter? Or perhaps you heard how the White House recently had to tell its staff, perfectly placed as they are to be the beneficiaries of information asymmetry, not to bet in prediction markets. It gives me no pleasure to recount here the grotesquerie that was Polymarket accepting bets on the fate of the downed U.S. airmen in Iran earlier this month, even if the confluence of those subjects fits well here. Regardless, you can start to imagine how someone might be compelled to try their luck, perhaps even compulsively, given no subject for a bet is off limits. The topics are accessible, no longer the preserve of those fluent in the financial statements of publicly traded companies.
According to the above linked New York Times article, both prediction market companies collectively handled over $50 billion in bets last year, i.e., business is booming. It’s hardly a leap from the DeWitt/Zozanian lottomonitor of the noughties to, well, the smartphone—with the Kalshi app installed—of today. At one point, the protagonist of Lotteryland recounts how, at age nine, “I had been at it for eight hours without a break and my parents made me stop.” Sounds familiar enough.
DeWitt would probably take cold comfort in knowing her novel foreshadowed prediction markets as younger generations’ chosen instrument of fortune-seeking. Perhaps the fact that I’ve learned an Arabic vocabulary word from the modern-day lottomonitor would cheer her, but there’s no getting around the disappointment of not buying a contract on Kalshi on Helen DeWitt winning a Windham-Campbell prize. If only she had made that bet, she may have gotten to walk away with the equivalent of the prize money, no strings attached.