I vividly remember how, in the days of Gamestop, even normally reasonable people on the left bought into that "Sticking it to Wall Street" narrative. Sadly, I'm not surprised at how things turned out.
this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2023
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I think it's important to not forget the positive facts (pardon the pun!) in the GameStop situation. The event really did contain a short squeeze, and one Manhattan hedge fund really did take it in the shorts (pardon me again!), nearly becoming insolvent in front of their friends and eventually closing up shop. (One London hedge fund also was taken to the cleaners. Robinhood was embarrassed in front of Congress, and worse, in front of their clearinghouse.) Additionally, GameStop has continued to restructure its management and operations, and the local GameStop (in the local dying mall) is doing about as well as the Claire's next door in terms of customers.
This was a victory, but only in a specific sense: Wall Street was wrong about GameStop's failure, and collective action forced specific firms to admit their wrongness and even fail as ongoing concerns. The meme-stock cult can't understand this, because they imagine that there must be more. More wrongness, more collective action, more FAFO. They can't be proud enough to have destroyed two hedge funds and caused a Congressional inquiry; it's gotta involve literally melting the bull and throwing traders out of skyscrapers. (Not that I'll stop anybody from melting the bull!)
For all the talk about "sticking it to Wall Street", it's quite likely that most of the biggest "winners" in the GameStop mess were Wall Street types. Either trading for their employers or trading in their personal accounts.
IIRC, some people pointed out at the time that this particular trade was quite sophisticated - probably orchestrated by people who knew what they were doing and who understood that the hedge fund they wrecked had acted in a particularly dumb/risky way. I guess with this kind of information, another hedge fund could have pulled that off just as easily as the people from WSB on Reddit.
it always confused me a bit, just due to the 'you know wallstreet people can read reddit right?' factor.
social media has done fucking wild things to our collective ability to even conceive of opsec. how many of these asshole companies do you think would survive if we taught opsec and data security in high school like we should?
Yeah, cryptocurrency people also are very weird re their security, for all the things they say about how their shit is revolutionary they never seem to really grasp the further security implications. I recall the person posting on a bitcoin place about his travel plans in way to much detail and if people wanted to meet up (a nice mugging target I'd say, hope they didn't get mugged), but also the bitcoin boat thing where only John Mcafee seemed to have thought about personal security in a libertarian world and brought actual hired goons to protect him (I doubt many of the coiners realized that this kind of thing also creates a risk for them in the libertarian world as now there is a personal security red queen race).
Hedge fund managers (and their staff) can read reddit, of course, and they can even participate and - for example - manipulate people into betting on a stock they themselves have a "leveraged long" bet on (or desperately need to dump for whatever reason). It's important to remember that those with the deepest pockets are very likely to win here, and also that hedge funds (and other institutional investors) might have deep pockets in part because they use investment money from everybody's pension funds. In rare cases (such as Gamestop) they may be taken by surprise, but only when there is a very specific attack from an angle they didn't expect, which is hard to replicate systematically IMHO.
Traditional collective action is successful mainly because actual people show up (or refuse to show up at their workplaces) in large numbers. IMHO it's impossible to replicate that via accounts on a trading app and anonymous sock puppets. This is simply not how financial markets work.
Also, if this gets more people addicted to gambling on the stock market (which obviously happened), Wall Street is going to win either way through fees etc.
IMHO, the only way to "win" here is not to play.
Gamestop just seemed to me like a 'that will only work once' thing, as now their moves are predictable and dumb, and dumb predictable people are easily exploited on the stock market. Just sell them BBBY!
So in “capitalist realism,” Mark Fisher talks a bit about how capitalists quickly and easily coopt anti-capitalist messaging for more profit. Meme stockery is like, a dumber version of that.
That was a fun little read