We’re coming up on the ten year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. The 2011 protest for economic justice that lead to a two month occupation of Zuccotti Park in New York’s Financial District. For most folks, this brief but enthusiastic bit of activism has faded into a combination of memes and obscurity but its echoes are felt all throughout the modern activist landscape. Guy Fawkes Masks, the idea of “The 99%”, rampant police brutality against non-violent protestors, it was all there. Of course, leftist activism was nothing new, but the massive media coverage the movement received put progressive ideas in front of a very large audience of young, angry, people; myself included.
In 2011, I was a college student living in Missouri. I was getting my first major exposure to progressive politics so whenever new videos would come out of Zuccotti park, I was a moth to the flame. Like most young people at that time, I was staring down the barrel of a decidedly different adulthood than the one my parents had experienced and being told to suck it up. This was, after all, the beginning of what would be a nearly decade-long battle against think pieces claiming that Millennials were lazy, entitled, children who needed to accept the realities of life.
Occupy was one of the first public movements I’d seen that tapped into and validated the anger I had towards the people in power. Hundreds of miles away, protestors were coming together to finally change things and I was just young enough to believe they were going to pull it off. After all, the desire to see America’s parasitic financial sector brought to justice for the devastation they caused throughout the 2007 and 2008 Financial Crisis wasn’t limited to college students.
I watched the news media and even my childhood comedic idols mock the protestors for wanting a better world. But for each video tailor-made to embarrass the movement, YouTube would deliver tenfold in the form of brief moments of solidarity. This one still gets me due to a mix of nostalgia for the hope it once gave me, sadness for what came after, and the always welcome presence of Jeff Mangum. A crowd of protestors sing along to “Oh, Comely” and scream up at the skyscrapers: We know who our enemies are. It’s loud and it’s moving and it’s optimistic in the face of something that we now know to be easily capable of crushing hope into dust.
But we’re not really here to talk about Occupy Wall Street. Occupy ended a few months after it began and we all know how the next decade went. Things got progressively worse until the very idea of living in anything other than the slowest, most boring dystopia possible faded into memory.
Then came the stonks.
To beat a dead horse in three sentences: A hedge fund bet billions of dollars that GameStop’s stock would fall. A group of investors on Reddit saw this, did not like it, and decided to buy GameStop stock en masse to force up the value. The general public got in on the fun and the subsequent rise in value could potentially cause the hedge fund to collapse.
Obviously, this is very cool. I’m not a financial expert, I have only my humble English degree from the Harvard of the Midwest (University of Missouri). But I feel very confident in my theory that anything that makes hedge fund guys very mad has value at the very least as entertainment.
But some questions have arisen: Is this collective action? Is it a meme gone wild? Or did some casual investors just want money?
More importantly: does it matter?
When a movement reaches a certain size, can its original intention lessen its impact?
The idea of doing things For The Lulz is going on twenty years old at this point and has become something of a guiding principle online. No decision is too stupid, cruel, or misguided if that decision results in something funny. Living for the lulz* means, anything can be spun into humor and if something is funny then it wasn’t a waste of your time. “It was a joke” has become everything from a defense mechanism against rejection to an excuse for using racist language. In a way, irony’s overwhelming presence has turned every action into Schrödinger’s joke. An action exists as both joke and non-joke until a reaction is observed. Haha, just kidding…unless.
The point is this: whether or not the Gamestop squeeze was intended as collective action or a collective goof is irrelevant when billions of dollars in hedge fund assets are about to be forcibly redistributed to those in lower income brackets. The 18th century French aristocrat doesn’t care why you’re there, once the guillotine comes out, it’s all the same to him.
*it’s worth noting that “For the Lulz” culture is most often associated with 4Chan and the alt-right but the mentality is prevalent, if not by the same name, in circles at all ends of the political spectrum.
So let’s go back to the Jeff Mangum Occupy Wall Street video for a moment and consider how much our culture has changed since it was recorded. We can’t process this level of genuine fervor anymore. If I saw it today, it would likely hit me as saccharine, sad, or even the dreaded cringe. We have been so thoroughly beaten down over the course of the last decade that a pure expression of optimism in the face of a difficult fight feels embarrassing to watch. We’re stuck in an eternal game of Charlie Brown football against our own society and the only way we’ve found to cope with it is to act like we enjoy falling down. So it’s fitting that a major event like this is cloaked in a thick layer of that ironic detachment the internet knows so well. The only way something like this could have happened was with an element of comedy. It had to be a living meme. It had to be GameStop.
Wasting no time, the media is already painting a picture of these new shareholders as internet buffoons. There’s no doubt in my mind that by the end of the week they’ll be described as a dangerous element gambling with the health of our economy. Sure, “gambling with the health of the economy” is basically the only thing the stock market does, and people in power do it all the time with impunity, but these misinformed and greedy young men MUST be stopped at all costs. They’ve treated our precious stock market like a joke and now the real gambling addicts need to be allowed to step in and clean up the mess.
But ultimately, with this kind of response on the table, intent is the last thing anyone is thinking about. Joke or not, this is going to change our economy. And the mood on r/WallStreetBets has gotten mighty populist for a subreddit that claims to be apolitical. Reading this sentiment echoed by hundreds of traders online all day long makes it fairly easy to see that this joke has turned into a movement filled with people who are inspired by the idea of their community coming together to snatch some of their stolen wealth out of the hands of the rich. The feeling I get reading posts like this one is strikingly similar to the one I got watching that Jeff Mangum video. The people are screaming in the face of Wall Street only this time instead of indie folk, they’re screaming a mixture of memes and expletives.
Unfortunately now I’m old enough to know that the world will not change overnight. The end of this story is obvious. Some form of classist regulation will pass to restrict the power of non-accredited traders. The wealthy will defend their positions. Things will seem like they’re the same as they’ve always been. But every single person with their eyes on this story will once again watch corruption happen in real time. And like every time they do this, every time they force common people to drown in the consequences of their greed, they will get one step closer to the point where they finally lose their grip on the world. And that day is going to be very, very, funny.
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