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Polymarket’s D.C. Pop-Up Bar Brought Young People Together To Collectively Ignore Each Other

The clearest sign of the Situation Room’s failure was the people who left because Polymarket abandoned the human experience.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. — If you were looking this past weekend for a place to be served inexpensive drinks, enjoy blaring music in a half-empty room, and stare at screens instead of talk to human beings, Polymarket’s D.C. pop-up bar was the place to be.

Polymarket, the worldwide cryptocurrency prediction market that allows betting on everything from sports to war, hosted a pop-up bar in the nation’s capital over the weekend called the “Situation Room,” which it described as “the world’s first bar dedicated to monitoring the situation.”

“Imagine a sports bar … but just for situation monitoring — live X feeds, flight radar, Bloomberg terminals, and Polymarket screens,” the company said.

Polymarket bought out Proper 21 on K Street NW and completely transformed the atmosphere, plastering the walls with screens showing market data and betting odds for a variety of different things.

The business model raises concerns about the morality of betting on, and making money off of, things like missile strikes or the deaths of world leaders, effectively commodifying human suffering.

As one American University student, who was not impressed with the Situation Room, told The Federalist, the entire endeavor takes the unfortunate, yet revolutionary CNN-invented concept of a 24-hour news cycle and makes it interactive. Starting in the 1990s, people became glued to their screens watching CNN — now they can bet on what they might see on those screens.

And while alcohol and bar settings are normally perceived as social lubricants, the strength of the glue that 80-plus screens provided at the Polymarket bar seemed insurmountable for many there.

Excessive screen time has been associated countless times with antisocial behavior in children and adults, and has also been pegged as a source of marital problems. It is not just young people though. As The Washington Post points out, Boomers are glued to their phones as well.

In terms of young people socializing, the event verged on offensive, given that screen........

© The Federalist