Full article: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/02/gamestop-wallstreetbets-twitter-populism-progressives.htmlLast week, a motley mass of shitposters, gambling enthusiasts, and disaffected Zoomers — united by hate for Wall Street and love of chicken tenders — beat a multibillion-dollar hedge fund at its own game. Through their collective intelligence and audacity, users of the Reddit forum WallStreetBets executed a sophisticated "short squeeze" that took money away from some billionaire speculators, gave it to some badly indebted workers, and made a mockery of neoliberal capitalism's legitimizing myths. Unfortunately, right when these working-class retail investors had Wall Street's titans on the run, the plutocracy's visible hand appeared to reach down and thwart them: Robinhood, a trading app popular with young recreational investors, suddenly barred its users from buying GameStop shares, thereby relieving pressure on the hedge-fund shorts.
That is one way of recounting the GameStop rally, anyway.
Here is another: A group of small-time speculators — including some finance-industry professionals — orchestrated a pump-and-dump scheme that involved convincing a lot of financially inexpert (and/or politically disaffected) people that they could stick it to Wall Street's largest money managers by … bidding up the price of an equity that is owned by Wall Street's largest money managers. This generated enough momentum to trigger a "short squeeze," and the price of GameStop shares shot to the moon. Wall-to-wall media coverage ensued. Inexperienced investors bought the hype, and began piling into what now resembled a Ponzi scheme: When the bubble finally burst, those who bought in early would have a chance to cash out before the stock fell beneath their break-even price; those who bought late would have little warning before the "dump" wiped them out.
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There is some truth to both these accounts. But to believe that the GameStop short squeeze was "an updated and superior version of Occupy Wall Street" — which is to say, a populist challenge to the tyranny of high finance that deserved the left's avid support and attention — one had to accept the first summary as gospel, and dismiss all confounding details as apologetics for Big Hedge Fund.
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For a few days last week, amid mass hunger and unemployment, various left-wing Twitter influencers chose to focus their advocacy on the plight of small-time speculators who'd been barred from buying into a pump-and-dump scheme — while socialist congresswomen treated the right of amateur market manipulators to purchase whatever stocks they want, in whatever quantity they can afford, on the phone-based trading app of their choice, as a cause of national importance.
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In the hands of a well-organized progressive movement — one accountable to working-class constituencies, and tolerant of internal dissent — social media is a powerful weapon. In those of an agglomeration of progressive media addicts and creators — who are accountable primarily to their followers, employers' traffic expectations, and Patreon subscribers — social media is a potent brain toxin that causes its victims to mistake spectacle for substance, anti-intellectualism for anti-elitism, conspiracy theorizing for critical thinking, and the interests of iconoclastic college graduates for those of working people writ large (in severe cases, it may even lead a supposed leftist to mistake Ted Cruz for an ally in the fight against high finance).
Extremely online progressives could have spent last week pressuring congressional Democrats to increase the value of the federal unemployment benefits in Joe Biden's COVID-relief plan to $600; instead we successfully pressured them into demanding investigations into Robinhood's treacherous abrogation of its users' right to lose money to hedge funds.
I would recommend reading the entire article, since it does a great job of breaking down the unusual framing of the Gamestop/Blackberry/Sundial/Nokia/"joke" stocks being shorted as some stand against the elite who don't play by the same rules/don't have to abide by them.
