The Minefield

Even for those who don’t gamble, the exponential growth of online sports betting since 2018 has made it impossible to avoid. Not only have odds and ads been seamlessly integrated into sports broadcasts, but the language of betting has now become pervasive in sports commentary. Thanks to ease of access through mobile technology and their relative value as ready-made “content”, speculation and predictions are the air that sports fans now breathe.
It is into this cultural environment that prediction markets have recently exploded. Prediction markets are online platforms that accept wagers on whether relatively specific events will occur by a certain date, whose payout is determined by the likelihood of that event occurring. These zero-sum “event contracts” can cover everything from geopolitics to popular culture. Real examples include: will Justin Bieber perform during the World Cup final half-time show; what will the high temperature be in New York City on a particular day; will Nicolás Maduro still be the president of Venezuela at the end of 2025; will Trump use specific words during the State of the Union; will the second coming of Jesus Christ take place before 2027.
Like sports betting, prediction markets have grown rapidly in both value and reach over the last two years. The odds of one platform accompanied the broadcast of the 2026 Golden Globe Awards, and at the end of 2025 media companies like The Wall Street Journal, CNN and CNBC announced partnerships with prediction markets to integrate their data directly into news coverage.
Advocates for prediction markets insist they represent a sophisticated form of “crowd sourcing” and that, in a world of unaccountable punditry and rampant misinformation, the financial incentive is a way of getting people to “put their money where their mouth is”. (A similar rationale has been given for the superiority of calculated sports bets over irrational fandom.) We could think of this as a kind of corruption of Karl Marx’s famous aphorism from the Communist Manifesto: analysts have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to profit from it.
Such high-minded epistemological justifications notwithstanding, we have already begun to witness the ethically problematic uses to which prediction markets can be put. In January 2026, one platform allowed users to bet on whether Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be ousted by 1 March (though the company subsequently issued refunds and refused to honour what amounts to a “death contract”). There has also been a predominance of perfectly timed bets on covert military operations involving Venezuela and Iran, leading the Anti-Corruption Data Collective to conclude “that certain categories of political prediction markets, especially those tied to military activity, display signs of asymmetric information and potential insider trading”.
Such concerns over corruption have led both to the prosecution of a member of the US military and the passage of the Banning Event Trading on Sensitive Operations and Federal Functions (BETS OFF) Act by the US Senate, prohibiting politicians and staff from trading on prediction markets.
This raises a number of pertinent questions. Do the epistemological claims offered by prediction markets hold up — or do they not only incentivise corrupt behaviour but, thereby, signal a pervasive distrust in more ethically credible sources of knowledge and expertise? In countries where prediction markets are not legal, like Australia, what does the habit of viewing the world through the predictive lens — which treats the trivial and the tragic alike as fodder for speculation and profit making — do to our sense of justice, legitimacy and decency?
Guest: Adam Piovarchy is a Research Fellow at the University of Notre Dame Australia. He is a lead investigator on a research project examining the ethics and politics of prediction markets.

It’s no mystery why David Frankel’s 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada was a hit. The movie had all the ingredients of a certain kind of success. Take a bestselling novel (by Lauren Weisberger) about a midwestern girl trying to make it in the big city, place it in the hands of a screenwriter known for broadly appealing rom-coms (Aline Brosh McKenna), cast a much-loved screen legend in an uncharacteristically villainous role (Meryl Streep) and put her alongside a doe-eyed starlet on her way to becoming a superstar (Anne Hathaway) … then set the plot in the rarefied world of haute couture and divide it between New York and Paris — what’s not to love?
What is a little surprising is that The Devil Wears Prada should have achieved the quality of a certain timelessness (despite being released a year before the now ubiquitous iPhone). It is a cinema classic whose enduring appeal and pop cultural resonance have been demonstrated by the global success of a sequel, two decades on.
But does the film’s success point to narrative and thematic elements that run much deeper than the appeal of the glossy surface?
Take, for instance, the obvious Faustian connection, evoked both in the title of the film and the blunt words of Emily (played by Emily Blunt) to Andrea Sachs (Hathaway): “You sold your soul the day you put on your first pair of Jimmy Choos.” The narrative arc of the film is, broadly, the naïve Andy’s “descent” into the world of high fashion, cultural influence and sterile, superficial beauty, only to step back from the hellmouth of corruptibility at the end, lest she too share Miranda Priestly’s (Streep) unhappy fate. Does this mean that Andy also shares in Faust’s culpability, less a victim than a participant in his own damnation?
Who, then, plays the role of the seducer? Who is the film’s Mephistopheles, also trapped in a hell of diabolical design? Is it Emily — starved, harried, contemptuous, miserable? Is it Christian Thompson (Simon Baker) — urbane, erudite, well-connected, corrupting, and ultimately impotent? Surely it is Nigel (Stanley Tucci) — personable, appealing, but a slave to Miranda’s imperious demands, and a prisoner to a corrupted vision of beauty (“size six is the new fourteen”). And to what extent does Andy escape unscathed, given her string of broken relationships?
The Devil Wears Prada also draws deeply on those specifically New York stories of tragic or monstrous success. Stories like Alexander Mackendrick’s 1957 The Sweet Smell of Success (with imperious newspaper columnist JJ Hunsecker playing the Miranda Priestly role) and Darren Aronofsky’s 2011 Black Swan, or John Badham’s 1977 Saturday Night Fever and Mary Harron’s 2000 American Psycho, or Oliver Stone’s 1987 Wall Street and Taylor Hackford’s 1997 The Devil’s Advocate. Is New York really a place of opportunity, or is it the kind of environment in which the price of success is one’s own soul?
The transformation that Andy Sachs undergoes in the first half of the film initially looks like an external accommodation to a class or caste of society where one wants to belong — a sartorial equivalent of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, though with Nigel in the role of Henry Higgins. But if there is any lesson from the film, it is this: in a culture where appearance is essence — which is to say, how you look is who you are — the change of appearance rarely remains skin deep.
Finally, The Devil Wears Prada trades on, and in no way resolves, one of the central contradictions in modern democracies — one that is explored at length by Elizabeth Anderson: in political cultures that prize agency and democratic self-determination, many workplaces are tyrannies, and bosses despots. The glimpses we get of Miranda’s unhappy home life, however sympathy inducing they are, does not reduce our sense that she presides over a domain in which she has no equals, no one to whom she is morally answerable. All there is, is the standard of aesthetic perfection and cultural sway to which she has sacrificed everything (apart from, of course, her Harry Potter-devouring twin daughters).
It is therefore diabolically fitting that, at the film’s end, Nigel’s ambitions for professional self-determination and Emily’s momentary escape into the world of bread rolls and chocolate pudding are both frustrated. They end the film, presumably, where they began — namely, imprisoned and mendicant.
The question is: where does the film leave its audience? Are we left longing for the world of glamour that had seduced Andy — and us, vicariously — or are we content with the nobility of a job reporting for a modest newspaper that would soon be swallowed by the advent of social media
Guest: Clare Bowditch is an Australian musician, broadcaster, author and actress.

Essential to the profitability and widespread adoption of modern technologies is the need to conceal their costs — the human labour, the unjust or exploitative working conditions, the environmental degradation and drain on natural resources, the reduction of precious goods to mere ‘raw material’. By means of such concealment, those who enjoy the conveniences these technologies afford are lulled into a state of (what Hannah Arendt called) “unthinkingness”. The benefits simply appear, and consumers are left incurious about how it could have happened so quickly, so cheaply, with so little friction.
The other thing that is crucial for the success of such technologies is the way that their speed, financial backing and sheer scale project a sense of irresistibility — what Shoshana Zuboff has termed “the cult of inevitabilism”. Put otherwise, the belief that resistance, however principled and noble, is ultimately futile. So get on board or get out of the way.
Artificial intelligence represents, in many ways, the apogee of both aspects. The assumption that AI development hovers somewhere between an “arms race” with existential stakes and the key to unlocking untold productivity and economic growth has had the effect of reducing calls for prudential care and democratic consultation to little more than inconveniences to be gotten around rather than objections to be engaged with meaningfully. At the same time, the twin mantras of “more compute” (more chips, more data centres, more electricity) and “more data sets” have been used to legitimate both the expenditure of unimaginable sums of money and the indiscriminate (and ultimately illegal) use of intellectual property for the training of AI models. You could call this theft generative AI’s original sin.
In both cases, the guiding philosophy seems to be that the purportedly beneficial ends will have justified the unprincipled means. Which is to say, the emergence of artificial general intelligence will cicatrise the moral wound inflicted by these companies’ originary theft. After all, what’s a little copyright infringement between inhabitants of an AI-ushered utopia?
And yet, beginning in 2024, despite the size, the rapaciousness and the heedlessness of these AI companies, a number of courageous pockets of profoundly human opposition have emerged. To date, perhaps the most consequential are the resistance on the part of local councils in the US and UK to the construction of data centres, and the lawsuits filed on behalf of writers, artists and some media companies against the illegal use of their copyrighted work to train generative AI models.
Met with such opposition, unsurprisingly, AI companies are looking for new terrain on which to construct their data centres, and new sources of data to be strip-mined for their models. Concerns are that the Australian federal government is attempting to position itself as an attractive destination for these companies, and Australia as the beneficiary of the investments that come with them. But at what price to Australia’s creative industries?
Last year, the Productivity Commission proposed a “text and data mining exception” to the Copyright Act, paving the way for AI models to be trained on the copyrighted work of Australian authors and artists. Concerned that this exemption may be revived as part of a proposed deal with AI companies to “attract more than $50 billion worth of datacentre investment”, authors and artists converged on Canberra last week to oppose any such dilution of legal protections to their intellectual property.
The questions raised by this opposition are difficult and extremely consequential. Is “fair compensation” for the use of these artists’ works sufficient to heal the moral wound inflicted by the original theft of their work? Is the establishment of a fund to support future artists enough to encourage and sustain such creative work, when the cultural effect of AI is to devalue both human creativity and the time and labour required to truly create? Aren’t both current and future authors and artists jeopardised by the indiscriminacy with which training models treat “data”, effectively equating the collected works of Dostoevsky with 100,000 hours of transcribed YouTube videos, and reducing them all to raw materials?
“Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI”, by Alex Reisner, The Atlantic (20 March 2025).
“I don’t want a US tech bro as a patron — which is why artists must defend our copyright in the age of AI”, by Anna Funder, The Guardian (6 July 2026).
Guest: Anna Funder is Professor of Practice in Creative Writing at the University of Sydney, and the award-winning author of Stasiland, All That I Am and, most recently, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life.

In 1967, after reaching the heights of social and political influence in 1963, after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, and having been instrumental in the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr watched his popular support fall precipitously away. He had reached the lowest point of his life on the public stage, with fully two-thirds of Americans disapproving of him. 
King’s rousing vision of nonviolence — of racial coexistence within a community defined by mutuality, interdependence and love — seemed to be growing ever more remote following the landmark civil rights legislation. The Black Power movement was gaining influence, and in 1967 alone there had been 76 violent riots across major American cities.
Then, in April 1967, King denounced the US military involvement in Vietnam — a war that was wildly popular with the vast majority of Americans. For his supporters, it was strategically counterproductive to so connect the cause of civil rights with the goals of peace activists; while Barry Goldwater, the standard bearer of a kind of atavistic conservatism, characterised King’s words as treasonous.
King had also grown concerned that the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts represented, for many Americans, the end of their concern. This legislation had ushered in a kind of complacency that absolved them from any further inconvenience or moral concern.
Now that Black people had been granted equality de jure, what was needed was for them to be accorded equality de facto — especially in education, employment and housing, and not only in the South. Therefore, in the autumn of 1967 King launched what would be known as the Poor People’s Campaign, which was meant to culminate in a new march on Washington DC in the spring of 1968.
But disagreement with the ambitions and unruliness of the campaign from within, coupled with outright antipathy from the Johnson administration due to his opposition to the war in Vietnam, plunged King into a condition of deepening despair. Even as he gave himself with increasing desperation to the cause, and tried to rally support for the Poor People’s Campaign across the South, he suffered from a growing sense of futility. The constant threat of being killed did nothing to alleviate his depression. According to those closest to King, he was physically, emotionally, spiritually exhausted.
In March 1968, King received a request from Memphis, Tennessee, to offer his support for the 1,300 of the city’s sanitation workers, who had gone on strike for better pay, the ability to organise and improved working conditions after two of their number had been killed on the job. King accepted the invitation, believing that Memphis would mark the beginning of a nationwide campaign against poverty and housing discrimination.
In Memphis, he and his team met with reticence among their own number and political opposition to mass demonstrations — including a federal injunction obtained by the city prohibiting any demonstrations for ten days, after one such march had been derailed by violence. On the evening of 3 April, King was scheduled to speak at Bishop Charles Mason Temple. Because of severe storms, King believed turnout would be suppressed. He was, moreover, sick with the flu and asked Ralph Abernathy, whom he described as “the best friend that I have in the world”, to speak in his stead. But when Abernathy saw the church was filled to capacity, with more than 3,300 people packed into the building, they sent word back to King telling him the people needed to hear King speak, even if briefly.
Once King arrived, Abernathy gave an unusually long introduction — close to 30 minutes — in order to minimise the strain on King himself. King spoke without notes, and was evidently unprepared. He habitually started his speeches slowly, haltingly, in order to allow them to reach a series of rhetorical peaks. But his weariness on this occasion was evident from the beginning. At times, the speech feels improvised, vague, superficial, a little meandering; at other points, it feels as though he is playing his “greatest hits”.
But as King goes on, the speech grows in clarity and coherence. He begins with a kind of survey of human civilisation and the struggle for enlightenment and freedom — a historical arc spanning from the liberation of the slaves from Egypt to the gathering that stormy night on behalf of the sanitation workers of Memphis, all expressing the same cry: “We want to be free.” He concludes with a survey of the high points of the civil rights movement, expressing his gratitude for the gathering in Memphis to now belong to that number — and inviting those gathered to see themselves as continuing the common struggle.
Between these two surveys, he urges the audience to see their struggle on behalf of others through the lens of the “dangerous unselfishness” of the Samaritan who tended to the man beaten and bloodied on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho in Jesus’s parable.
But near the end of the speech, at one point King’s voice trails off a little. He uncharacteristically does not finish a sentence he has begun: “And they were telling me …” He breaks off to recount a threat to his life as he made his way from Atlanta to Memphis by plane earlier that same day. His voice slows down once again. He refers twice more to the “threats” he has faced: “What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?”
But in the final two minutes, his voice grows at once strong and carefree. He repeatedly says he “doesn’t know” what is going to happen next and “doesn’t mind” about the “difficult days ahead”. But he couples that with one of his characteristic statements of modest moral purpose (such as “I just want to be a good man” or “I just want to leave a committed life behind”, on other occasions): “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will.”
What is remarkable is not only the absence of ego in these sentiments and the lack graspingness that accompanies the fear of death. It is King’s ability, having begun by invoking the journey out of Egypt, to conclude by pointing those gathered to the task ahead, now described as the departure from a wilderness of hatred and violence and into the “promised land” of mutuality, interdependence and love:
“I just want to do God's will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And so I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
Guest: Stan Grant is a proud Wiradjuri man, a theologian, and the Vice Chancellor’s Chair of Australian-Indigenous Belonging at Charles Sturt University. He is the Director of Yindyamarra Nguluway and the author, most recently, of When Words Fail Us: Truth Beyond Time.

If One Nation leader Pauline Hanson managed to reignite a public debate with her assertion that Australia is “a multiracial society, but we must be monocultural” during her address last week to the National Press Club, it is only because certain anxieties over multiculturalism have long been smouldering in the social undergrowth, just waiting to be fanned into flame.
The question of immigration, handwringing over the racial constitution of the nation and the desire to maintain Australia’s essential “Britishness” go back at least as far as the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act. And these concerns continued to resurface throughout the twentieth century. As the then Minister for Immigration and future leader of the Liberal Party, Billy Snedden, said in 1969 (the year after Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech):
“I am quite determined we should have a monoculture, with everyone living in the same way, understanding each other, and sharing the same aspirations. We don’t want pluralism.”
It wasn’t long afterward, the White Australia Policy was dismantled and multiculturalism became official national policy, culminating in the 1989 National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia. Just seven years later, the rise of John Howard and the election of Pauline Hanson placed both multiculturalism and immigration back on the table.
Debates over the proper levels of immigration are, of course, entirely appropriate in a healthy democracy. Immigration policy is something about which citizens should be able to deliberate and disagree without fear being called xenophobic. But something potentially dangerous happens when the debate turns to multiculturalism, as longstanding government policy, itself. For then we are not discussing prudential concerns about the proper allocation of limited social and economic resources; instead, we are discussing the desirability, or not, of our fellow citizens, our neighbours, those with whom we find ourselves pursuing a common life. We are discussing who truly belongs, and who does not.
One of the dangers of the discourse about “the utterly flawed policy of multiculturalism” (as Hanson put it) is that it turns fellow citizens into abstractions, other cultures into barriers, our neighbours themselves into impediments one’s own sense of wellbeing and social comfort.
As John Dewey argued a century ago, it is not enough for our experience of democracy to be confined to elections and abstract values (call this the vertical orientation of democratic life); democratic habits must pervade everyday life and casual interactions with our fellow citizens (call this democracy’s horizontal or relational aspect). In the same way, multiculturalism cannot remain a government policy or series of eight goals; for it to become a moral reality, it must find inter-cultural expressions in civic life. It is in this way that we go from being strangers to one another, to fellow citizens.
The desire not to feel like “strangers in our own home” or to be a “monocultural” society is surely a form of the desire to eliminate strangeness from our lives, to achieve what Pierre Rosanvallon calls the radical “simplification of the social bond” through the commonalities of culture, custom and language. But what does this longing conceal, and what does it assume both about “culture” and “national identity”?
Guest: Glenda Ballantyne is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Swinburne University of Technology, and Coordinator of the Australian Intercultural Cities National Network.