We Are Watching the Dystopia Happen in Real Time
OSINT, betting markets, memes, and the quiet moment we crossed into science fiction
Like, seriously.
The very fact that we get to watch, live, a dictator get kidnapped, see photos of it the next day, then watch the exact clothes he’s wearing sell out completely, all while people are actively betting on it, is insane.
This just happened on the world stage. Literally yesterday.
The United States invaded Venezuela, kidnapped the president, and brought an end to a dictatorship (probably because they have a lot of oil). I’m not actually going to talk about that part, I try to remain as non-political as possible.
One side of the world is celebrating the end of a dictatorship. The other is furious at the very obvious breach of international law and the ramifications this has for other countries watching on, seeing it as permission or opportunity to invade.
Looking at you, China. We all know you’re gearing up to invade Taiwan, that was basically your New Year’s resolution.
Anyway. Not focusing on that.
What I am focusing on is the genuinely dystopian world we live in, revealed by how all of this unfolded right in front of us. Just pause for a second. Put on the big-brain thinking hats. How did we actually end up here?
The News Didn’t Break the News
First things first: I found out about the invasion before the news reported on it.
Not through anything official, but because I was in an Instagram OSINT chat showing footage as it happened. An event on the literal other side of the globe, in the dead of night over there, being streamed in fragments as people uploaded videos of explosions straight to social media. People who know far more than I ever will about specific military aircraft were already calling it as an American invasion.
Within hours, again, before ABC even acknowledged it had occurred, I already knew the president had been abducted by US forces and taken to New York.
Let that sink in for a moment.
We live in a world where normal, everyday people can know exactly when a massive global event happens, as it happens, before the news can even report on it. That was unheard of ten years ago. Let alone fifty.
This is new territory.
Betting on Reality
Next: the betting game.
Did you know Polymarket is literally letting people bet on this? As it happens? To the point where what is essentially insider trading is occurring based on real-world wars?
An anonymous guy reportedly bet around USD $30k that Trump would invade and take Maduro, and walked away with roughly $400k in profit. All through what is almost certainly undisclosed information being monetised on a betting market that lets you wager on almost anything.
We live in a world now where you can often see a major event coming before it happens, whether through standard OSINT frameworks, the Pentagon Pizza Tracker, or prediction markets like Polymarket. All because people in high-up positions know they can make money off the existence of information before it becomes public.
Imagine that power.
Memes, Merch, and Collapse of Meaning
Then, within not even 24 hours, memes were everywhere.
The “drip”, the Nike gear he was wearing, was instantly identified. Exact items. Exact SKUs. And just like that, it sold out on the Nike website. I’m not exaggerating. It became a trend to buy the exact clothes worn during the capture of a world leader, and within a day they were gone.
It is unfathomable that in this day and age the world moves this quickly. Globally. Unfiltered. Unadulterated.
And it will get faster. Much faster.
The Accidental Soothsayer
At the end of the day, this is just the world we live in, whatever dystopian scape you want to call it. And honestly, it makes me want to build an OSINT framework that layers Polymarket, Kalshi, traditional OSINT sources, and behavioural signals to predict future wars.
I wouldn’t even bet on them. Can’t be bothered.
But at this point, you genuinely could predict the future using the data we already have as it becomes clearer and more interconnected. Add a layer of AI to turn that data into human-readable analysis, and you’ve effectively built a soothsayer dressed in a machine trench coat, conjuring predictions not from mysticism, but from leaked intent, probabilities, and insider behaviour.
Living Inside the Sci-Fi
This dystopian world we live in keeps getting more satirical by the day.
It actually annoys me a bit. The far-fetched worlds I wrote about when I was sixteen, back when I wanted to be a novelist, don’t feel far-fetched anymore. Reality has moved beyond what my sixteen-year-old brain could even conceive.
We are living inside the science fiction now. It’s just less fictionalised.
Anyway. That’s a quick one while it’s still rattling around in my head.
I’m still genuinely in awe that this is happening, and even more so at how it’s happening. It feels like constant access to information is slowly unifying our worlds into a single shared timeline, in a way that’s fascinating, unsettling, and very strange all at once.