ARTIST'S STATEMENT

There is a new kind of loneliness and I've been trying to find its name.

It's not the loneliness of being watched—we've made our peace with that. It's the loneliness of being lapped. Of living inside a question that others have already answered. Of carrying uncertainty that has, for someone else, already resolved into profit or loss.

Every meaningful human event is now substrate for someone's position. Your layoff is priced into a labor market derivative before you clean out your desk. Your diagnosis exists as a data point in a healthcare futures model. Your neighborhood's decline is someone's short position on municipal bonds. Your creative work's failure or success is already factored into prediction markets about cultural trends.

The violation isn't that people profit from your misfortune. That's ancient. The violation is that your uncertainty is someone else's resolution. You're still living inside the story while strangers have already closed their books on your ending.

I built THE SETTLED to make this condition visible. It monitors real prediction markets in real-time, translating financial positions into human terms. It calculates a temporal index—how far ahead of your lived experience capital has already traveled. It synthesizes what the market believes about your future, updated continuously.

The piece doesn't ask you to do anything. It doesn't collect your data or make you complicit in its own critique. It simply describes the water you're swimming in with enough precision that you can't unsee it.

We are heading toward a world where having a position on someone's life without their knowledge becomes a recognized form of violation. Not illegal—but unseemly. The way we now look back at certain forms of exploitation that were once just called business.

That recognition won't come from argument. It will come from enough people discovering they've been bet against.

This is a mirror. It shows you what has already been decided about your life, by whom, and with what conviction.

The market has settled. You're still inside it.

— Aaron Vick, 2026