Last week’s stock market shenanigans over GameStop found me drifting back to anthropologist Gabriella Coleman’s excellent 2014 book titled Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: the Many Faces of Anonymous.
In the book’s introduction, we can see how the loose collective of Guy Fawkes mask-wearing hackers and activists permeates mainstream culture.
“Even after Anonymous drifted away from ungovernable trolling pandemonium to engage in the global political sphere, whenever people scrutinised its activist interventions – whether in a street protest or a high-profile computer intrusion – a question always seemed to loom,” Coleman writes, “are Anonymous and its adherents principled dissidents? Or are they simply kids screwing around on the internet as lulz-drunk trolls?”
The same question could be asked of the Redditers’ crowdsourced stock market binge that cost hedge funds that bet against GameStop billions. The answer is: both.
Like all rapidly emerging cultural moments, it was not lit by a single spark, but coalesced like converging wildfires. We don’t know whether the originators of the event were driven by virtuous and playful motivations, but many of the people who jumped on the bandwagon were.
A little window opened up to mess with the system. It offered a release of sorts, this latest glitch in the matrix
A little window opened up to mess with the system. It offered a release of sorts, this latest glitch in the matrix, and a chance to make a few quid in the process. It’s a prank too, but one that speaks to the moment.
The GameStop event pulls at cyber-anarchism, anti-capitalist direct action, pure internet divilment, pandemic boredom, recession-revenge, the get-rich-quick need that enters the economy when personal finances have collapsed (the last recession was cash-for-gold, this time, it might be stock-for-lulz) and a point of view that borrows as much from utopian thinking as it does from nihilism: the urge to “burn it all down”.
Rocketing shares
The “it” is late-stage capitalism and the systems that perpetuate and uphold it. This is an increasingly agnostic and non-partisan (or perhaps multi-partisan) position. Nothing illustrates the bizarre common ground element of it all than Ted Cruz agreeing with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about the unfairness of one of the small-investor trading apps, Robinhood, halting trading on GameStop stock as the share price rocketed.
The fact the motivations are multifaceted – and the actors involved are diverse – is not necessarily a flaw. In fact, it tells us more about where people are really at than a homogenous group pushing a particular campaign rooted in a singular worldview.
Outside of Michael Lewis books and Jordan Belfort biopics, the corrupt casino of the stock market has traditionally felt impenetrable, and increasingly so as it operates in a different universe to the “real” economy.
The corrupt casino of the stock market has traditionally felt impenetrable, in a different universe to the 'real' economy
It’s somewhat poetic that access has been granted digitally, through apps such as Robinhood and Revolut which let people buy shares on their smartphones with a couple of clicks. These alternative platforms for investing and banking presumably set out to “disrupt” their industries, and last week they did just that.
But too much disruption is a scary thing for “the market”. We know that hyper-capitalism doesn’t like the taste of its own medicine, which is why there are socialist interventions for banks when the system does the work of anarchists for them and burns itself down, which it does in a cyclical manner.
Market to manipulate
But perhaps more profoundly, the GameStop event has another Anonymous rhyme. Where hackers need anonymity, last week was an unmasking. The stock market was revealed for what it is, a game to play that is easily manipulated if enough people gather to do so.
One of the greatest scenes in modern cinema flashed through my head as the Reddit thread grew gleefully, Matthew McConaughey explaining “nobody knows if a stock is going to go up, down, sideways or in circles”, to a green Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street, “Fugayzi, fugazi. It’s a whazy. It’s a woozie. It’s fairy dust. It doesn’t exist. It’s never landed. It is no matter. It’s not on the elemental chart. It’s not f***ing real.”
When the tyres of power are kicked (or in this case, slashed), the response tends to be one of indignation based on myth: you can’t do that! But what the pranksters often realise is that you can.
If it’s decided, even briefly, that nothing is sacred, that nothing holds meaning, you can actually do whatever you want. All of a sudden, the rules do not apply. One thing you can bet on is that somewhere in the background, people were winning big. And you can also bet that it wasn’t the little guy.