To set the scene, it was the morning of January 27th, 2021, a very sunny day in São Paulo, Brazil, and I’ll admit I was anxious to witness a revolution. It was roughly 8am. I had just sat down with my morning cup of coffee. My workspace was set as it always was; a MacBook Pro to my left running both the software I needed for my “real job” and a web browser logged into Robinhood.com. To my right, an iPad opened to the Reddit app; /r/WallStreetBets daily “discussion" post front and center with the comments section set to automatically refresh every 5 seconds. This subreddit had become for me what a traditional day-trader might have considered a ticker-tape, albeit peppered more heavily with profanity. I, and millions of others like me, had only one thing on our minds that morning: a video game retailer that hadn’t been significant to us for more than a decade.
For the uninitiated, a few terms here need to be unraveled. From the top, starting with Robinhood. As its name suggests, Robinhood was devised as an online brokerage platform “for the little guy.” With no commissions on trades, availability on all smartphones, and a sleek user interface, it was my first choice for trading. One could feel free to invest modestly to their heart’s content aided by helpful information, real-time pricing, and for a small monthly subscription, access to trading on margin! This low barrier to entry meant it was the perfect tool for inexperienced traders. The year of its creation, it had roughly 500,000 users. In 2021, it had roughly 18 million (businessofapps.com). Most of these users were not your typical Wall Street patrons, they were your “average Joes,” your side-hustlers, perhaps people you would see sitting at a slot machine on a trip to Las Vegas.
As of December 27th of 2020, most of these users had received at least $600 thanks to the “Consolidated Appropriations Act” stimulus checks meant to offset financial worries due to the COVID-19 pandemic (pgpf.com). For me, the pandemic uprooted my entire life and $600 was not going to change that so into my savings account it went. I was not the only one according to the comments I saw on /r/WallStreetbets. This will become important shortly.
/r/WallStreetBets is what’s known as a “subreddit” or a forum within the broader and fabulously popular website Reddit.com. Reddit stands currently on the shoulders of giants like digg.com and Slashdot.com. By this I mean, although functions like allowing users to organize into communities based on shared interests and filtering user-submitted content based on a democratic voting system are powerful, they are not without precedent. Yet, despite the possible banality of its utilities, Reddit currently has 52 million daily active users (backlinko.com). Roughly 1.7 million of these users were subscribed to /r/WallStreetBets at the time of January 2021. At the time of writing, WSB (as I’ll be abbreviating the subreddit from here on out) has garnered a whopping 10.8 million subscribers (subredditstats.com). Compare that to the self-reported 11 million client accounts boasted by the more traditional retail investing platform, TD Ameritrade (tdameritrade.com), and you’ve got the beginnings of a trading paradigm shift.
If “Communities of Practice” are collectives who “share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly,” (wenger-trayner.com) then WSB was/is a “CoP” built upon a framework of constant interaction revolved around a singular purpose: the acquisition of “tendies,” WSB slang for “chicken tenders.” As humorous as this is, I find it illustrates the original pathos of the subreddit quite well. “We are average people. We’ve seen how the volatility of the global market has meant financial ruin for millions and simultaneously consequence-free windfalls for hedge fund managers over the last couple of decades. We want in on that fun, but we are not greedy. We don’t want a yacht, we’ll be satisfied with chicken tenders from McDonald’s. Any further enjoyment will come from celebrating the gains (and losses) of our fellow WSB traders. Our favorite movie is Adam McKay’s The Big Short, not Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. Just like the brokers we’re mocking, we will risk financial ruin for ourselves, the difference is in the pursuit of only enough return to purchase fast food. To us, this is no more absurd than the structure of the market itself. All value is relative and my only allegiance is to my portfolio and my fellow WSB-ers. You only live once.”
Of course, this is not an actual quote. This is my impression of the average WSB’s user after my two years of use. An association that began embarrassingly approximate to the market crash of March 2020.
From March 2020 to January 2021, I felt sentiments towards The Federal Reserve, the US government, and even the stock market in general change for the worse on WSB. While not rosy to begin with, the announcement of “unlimited quantitative easing” via the Federal Reserve in late-March 2020 did not endear itself to the members of this community who took pride in their “little guy” label. What “unlimited quantitative easing” meant was the Federal Reserve committing to the purchase of long-term securities as a means to “re-inflate” the crashed market, literally no matter the cost. On the always-sardonic WSB forum, this came to be represented by an animated .gif of Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell feverishly cranking dollar bills out of a kind of mimeograph or handle-cranked printer.
If we assume that the average age of a WSB subscriber paralleled the average age of a Robinhood user, then at 31-years-old (subredditstats.com), an amateur trader witnessing the 2020 bailing out of the economy may have gotten flashbacks to the 2008 housing crash and subsequent stimulus and quantitative easing.
At that time, the billions invested to save Wall Street instead of the victims of subprime loans sparked a mass movement called “Occupy Wall Street.” So named under the idea that, if Wall Street can physically influence where we live, we will physically influence where they live. For many millennials, this represents a moment in time where the values of their governing state became abundantly clear. There’s much literature devoted to why Occupy Wall Street withered away, but what’s clear is its sentiments lived on in the backs of the minds of average millennials as they went off to or finished college, crushed by student loan debt in a hegemonic ideology that tells them no forgiveness is coming for the responsibilities they took on themselves. Fiscal responsibility for thee, not for me.
Fast forward now again to early January 2021. With Robinhood as the tool for practice and Reddit the tool for communication, WSB had become a well-oiled machine. A decentralized, grass-roots community of semi-professional and amateur investors millions of users strong. And they knew it.
In the weeks prior to the 27th, users on the subreddit had noticed something. Many large hedge funds had begun targeting older brick-and-mortar retailers for short-sells as the market shifted to one less dependent on physical storefronts. Or in other words, Wall Street was betting on them to fail. This created a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy where, trusting one another’s valuations, more and more hedge funds took short positions. This drove the stock price of the retailers further and further down as a stock’s price simply reflects what someone is willing to pay for it, not that stock’s inherent value.
One such retailer was GameStop. If we are to continue assuming the average age of a WSB user, this particular storefront meant something. It represented a cultural Mecca for a younger class of citizens that grew up in a time of perpetual budget cuts for social programs and infrastructure while wealth inequality sky-rocketed (Richard Kogan, Kathleen Bryant) (Horowitz). It represented the “good old days” of our childhood where a new game meant an escape from the world outside. A world that seemed radically more alienating than the one our parents told us was out there.
The 27th was the reckoning. The philosophy was as follows: “we like the stock.” In the same way that cumulative short speculation drives a stock price down, cumulative long speculation must drive a price up. Hedge funds take positions worth billions of dollars, but relatively few positions compared to the total volume of traders of a given stock. Users realized it’s not the reputation of these agencies driving prices down, it’s the size of the positions. Therefore, in the same way that a few friends could get together and all buy themselves shares of a stock that just might perform poorly, communities using the internet could collectively decide to buy a stock together. Suddenly individuals investing their spare change could be joined by millions of other like-minded investors doing the same. This realization created what can be seen as one of the world’s first crowd-sourced hedge funds.
By joining together and buying the “artificially low” price of a share of GameStop ($3 in early Jan 2021), due to the speculative nature of the market, the price must go up as the people are willing to pay more for the stock. What made the 27th so notable was its proximity to the expiration date on many short-positions for large hedge funds. Should the price rise high enough, many of these positions would expire worthless, meaning huge losses for the hedge funds that bet against them and, as WSB theorized, huge spikes in value for the stock as these negative positions disappeared. Thus WSB set out to “short squeeze” GME (the ticker symbol for GameStop) from the clutches of Wall Street.
On the morning of the 27th, the price for a single share of GME was $347.51, an increase of more than %11,000 percent in roughly a month. One particular hedge fund singled out by WSB, Melvin Capital, was forced to cancel their positions netting a loss of nearly $7 billion over the course of the next week. It never went fully under, but to this day, it has not recovered. Mission accomplished? On the other hand, GME has yet to reach the same high it did on January 27th, and thus many people who joined in the “fight” are still holding their shares of GameStop, waiting for financial revolutionary sentiment to hit a fever pitch once more.
For the price of a share of GME, an old friend, one could join in a fully-digitalized revolution that was realizing the dream of Occupy Wall Street, showing Wall Street that there was power in numbers. (Stokel-Walker) However, unlike the original Occupy Wall Street movement, the WSB vs. Melvin Capital saga burned faster and hotter. Its results were not simply psychic, they were tangible.
Like Occupy Wall Street, it’s hard to decide exactly whether or not this movement could be considered a success or whether or not it was even a “movement” to begin with. However, in the minds of millions who were watching and participating, it provided a valuable lesson about democracy and collectivity.
What further lessons can we derive from the WallStreetBets saga? Because of the moralistic, Hollywood-esque, underdog vs big-bully themes of this story, it can be difficult to quantify the technological structures that underpin it all. At its heart, it’s a continuation of the story of techno-democratization that has been unfolding since the internet was invented. It’s a story that begs questions regarding the definition of democracy itself and, even deeper, what it means to act in an autonomous and non-coerced manner; what it means to be free. Famously, Wall Street mocked Occupy Wall Street. CNBC still respects the name “WallStreetBets” almost a year later.
One of the crucial differences between these two movements was the tools at their disposal. Occupy Wall Street consisted of an occupation of New York’s financial district, but had scarce doctrine beyond that. Their communication was decentralized and unguided. Their only tool for non-violent practice was their bodies. One’s own body is technically a tool for protest, but it is a tool with high collateral potential. Compare this with the tools at WSB’s disposal. Their emotional fuel was exactly the same, a revulsion to the hypocrisy of market/state values, but they were singular in their battle plan due to their communication through Reddit. Their weapons for change were smartphones and tablets, not Molotov cocktails. And the same government they saw as the harbinger of an artificially inflated economy, had just gifted them $600. Not enough to severely help with rent, but perhaps enough for a couple of shares of GME.
Neither Reddit nor Robinhood, despite what their marketing material may suggest, were designed to be revolutionary tools. They both exist very comfortably within the status quo they claim to be disrupting. While built for the inexperienced, downwardly mobile retail investor, Robinhood still helps perpetuate the same market economy that perhaps also necessitates an investor’s need to gamble on stocks for a chance at a taste of the good life. Robinhood, within its proper context, is not a technological guillotine, it is a slot machine with low odds. Like all slot machines, it is designed to keep a person in their seat. Reddit, while claiming to be built on a democratic voting system, is still a platform. It is still a platform built upon architectures of particular uses and algorithms of content filtering. It will always contain some level of content bias by nature.
Let’s say for instance a group decided to create a staunchly anti-Reddit subreddit, one devoted to the dissolving of Reddit as a corporation at any cost. How long would Reddit allow them to carry on if such a subreddit were to garner large-scale attention? “/r/anti_Reddit” does exist, but with its 41 members, I suspect it’s more valuable to Reddit’s ideals of freedom of speech to live and let live. Here we should keep in mind that on February 18th, 2021, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman was forced to provide a statement to the House Committee on Financial Services to distance the website as a whole from the actions of WSB. “Reddit’s mission is to bring community and belonging to everyone in the world,” is how his statement began. His following statement was a boast regarding the success of “/r/Unemployment.” To me, there is no better illustration of our moment in history than the CEO of a techno-democratic community platform bragging to a governing body about the membership size of its unemployment support groups in an attempt to defend against accusations of market manipulation while neither party realizes the deeply sad irony of the situation. As if to say “how could you accuse us of defrauding Wall Street? Look at how many unemployed people we’ve connected!” (Reddit CEO Steve Huffman's opening statement at GameStop hearing)
These radically improvised uses for both Reddit and Robinhood, to me, are proof our societies are not technologically determinant. Both of these platforms came about in full synchronicity with and in full support of the status quo. As soon as their uses were recontextualized, those uses warranted apologies and official statements. They were met with cries of “market manipulation” and other such reactions the likes of which I’d expect from sour video game developers watching “speed-run” compilations. While possible, the game is simply not designed to be played in this manner and will need to be “patched.”
Can a website ever claim to be fully democratic? Is the internet itself inherently democratic? If Democracy can be simplified as the sovereignty of the will of the majority, this necessitates a sovereign governing agency to carry out that will. In a neutral framework, the internet would possibly function like a decentralized library or a series of virtual-intentional-communes, but the internet is democratic, not anarchistic. This means so long as there is a starch dichotomy between creating and consuming bodies online, the vacuums created by the desires of mass consuming bodies will necessitate platforms with greater power than they to interpret and fill those desires; like a kind of cyberpunk, Rousseauian general will. But the internet does not exist in a vacuum. It was not discovered underground. It did not crash on earth via an asteroid. It rose up as a reflection of the society that built it. “Cyber-space” and “meat-space” are not two independent dimensions. An adoption of “digital-monism,” or perhaps more aptly “digital-dialectical-materialism,” gives us a much clearer view of how our present moment shapes online occurrences and vice-versa.
The internet, like a nation-state, consists of many individual nodes with their own wills, goals, and connections to other nodes. As time goes on, the will of these individual nodes is necessarily expressed. This “will” is an inherent need to change one’s own environment. In life, this is travel, work, combatting entropy, etc. Online, this is data creation and consumption along the lines of an ever-shifting architecture. One does not buy a computer for it to sit idle, just as one does not remain fully sedentary even while sleeping. To be online is to generate data through action just as to be alive is to create lacks and needs. Online, an action does not derive meaning from within a single node, but instead from the nature of the connection between it and another node. There is no internet without a connection. As we see in Hegelian philosophy, wherever there are two, we must evaluate hierarchy. The nature of the relationship of two nodes is not determined by the connection itself, it is determined by the architecture that enables that connection. What of yours may I access and what of mine can you? What permissions would I need to change these terms?
For instance, due to the manner in which Amazon.com is designed, I as a visitor to the site have no means of contacting and authoring a deal between myself and the server which could result in money flowing from Amazon to myself. Due to the design of the website, I likely wouldn’t even consider such an action. However, such an interaction between myself and Amazon’s server would be theoretically possible. That possibility is simply not embodied anywhere within the architecture of our connection. Both myself and the server are connected, but the monetary potential of our interactions flows only in one direction due to the architecture of the site. This is a very obvious example, but on some level, this idea can be applied to any form of architecture.
It is not the design itself that is inherently political, it’s that the design’s uses take on a political dimension when laid against the backdrop of the society it rose up from. An Iron Maiden in the 1700s struck fear into the hearts of those aware of their existence. They likely kept some from breaking laws for fear they would end up in a castle “face-to-face” with one. Nowadays, people pay to get inside a castle for a chance to see an Iron Maiden up close. The design is exactly the same, but the society has evolved around it and its once seemingly inherent fear has become a simple commodity. Inherent to design is the ideology of the designer whether or not they are consciously aware of it. As psychoanalysis has illustrated since its founding, not even individuals are in control of their own ideologies. While this could then be used as an argument for technological determinism e.i. technology provides our lives with suggested meanings where we can not fully conceive our own, it is our society that changes the meanings of our meanings depending on the context we find ourselves in.
Good design seems to cause the tools of practice to fade away, out of our view. As Martin Heidegger described it, when a hammer is functional it becomes simply an extension of the arm and “ready-at-hand.” It is only when the hammer breaks that we notice it “present-at-hand.” What this implies is a kind of waking hypnosis where well-designed technology becomes a conduit for our will to change our environments to flow through us unobstructed. This puts an incredible emphasis on what creates our “wills.” In his book “The Whale and The Reactor,” Langdon Winner states "technologies are not merely aids to human activity, but also powerful forces acting to reshape that activity and its meaning" (Winner 6). There is a cyclical nature between human’s willingness to shape their environments and their environment’s effects on shaping human will. I have not been able to find who the quote is attributed to, but the phrase that best illustrates this point to me is “to herd cats, tilt the floor.” When one’s only tool is a hammer, the world seems made of nails and when that hammer is well-designed, we feel as though we are the hammer.
There seems to be a contradiction between democratic values and a system of commodification underlining the internet today. Since this was not always the nature of the internet, it follows that it must’ve been influenced by an external force. This is not specific to the internet, this is inherent to technology itself.
A piece of technology is designed with a use in mind. It is designed to solve a societal problem. Societal “problems” are deemed as such by society or our existential experiences at large. Which came first, human subjugation of fire or the problem of hunger? The overpriced commodity or the social construction of trade itself? We languish over our addiction to our screens as if chained to them by an alien race.
When we buy a stock, there is a Rube Goldberg machine’s worth of ideological apparatuses under our action that shape the way we perceive the transaction as “fair.” I use a dollar, which derives its value from exchange-value; a material object constructed to transcendentally stand-in for any alternative object of human desire. I use it to buy a stock, a virtual object the value of which reflects confidence in a particular corporation. When I view this transaction as just, I accept the corporation itself as a valid entity, the stock as a valid unit of measurement, and not only the dollar as a stand-in for desire, but the desire it is standing in for as well. When I buy a stock, I am betting either on a corporation’s will being expressed within the hegemony of the society I find myself in or against its will being expressed. Inherent in my bet is a trust in the market system that enables the corporation whose stock I’m purchasing, the platform which authorizes me to purchase said asset, even the society which has created the terminal through which I order my transaction. A computer that, as of the most recent models, includes a biometric finger-scanning device in order to more safely authorize transactions. What if it is the way in which society is structured that has necessitated my playing of these games?
When WSB comes together to get rich while getting revenge, they’re not necessarily behaving of their own volition. They’ve been guided here by the same system that has guided their perceived “enemies” to this moment in time through the very architecture they both exist in. It is the same architecture that would allow them to utilize collectively what the hedge funds utilize with their large reserves. By getting down “into the mud” with the hedge funds, they accept the swamp as fact.
Perhaps this is what the WSB/GameStop “micro-revolution” failed to grasp: the contradiction that lead to the dissolution of the sentiment for change. It was never really about the “tendies.” It wasn’t even fully about getting revenge on the colossal financial apparatus that gambled away their futures on intangible assets they’d never see the benefits of. It was about finding their next meal. They asked only for the bare minimum but failed to see the world around them that required them to ask. So enamored in their reversal of the tools given to them by the status quo were they, that they failed to see a total victory would mean becoming exactly what they fought against. They banded together to become a decentralized hedge fund and sanctified the hedge fund model in the process. In organized sports, upsets can happen, but the outcome of a single game will never dismantle the league.
The denizens of WSB found themselves at the Blackjack table of online retail brokerage, cards ready-at-hand. They saw the house that had taken all their chips now on the verge of busting. Their only course of action was to hit. An alternative could not even be conceived. They won the hand and in their ecstasy forgot they were still inside the casino.
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Winner, Langdon. Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology, Second Edition. University of Chicago Press, 2020.
Zickgraf, Ryan. “Don't Laugh, Gamestop Really Is Occupy Wall Street 2.0.” The Third Rail, The Third Rail, 3 Feb. 2021, thethirdrail.substack.com/p/dont-laugh-gamestop-really-is-occupy.
| By Richard Kogan and Kathleen Bryant, et al. “Program Spending Outside Social Security and Medicare Historically Low as a Percent of GDP and Projected to Fall Further.” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/program-spending-outside-social-security-and-medicare-historically-low-as-a.