I Owe Reddit an Apology: My Love Letter to r/wallstreetbets

        

          I'm not going to explain to you what the subreddit wallstreetbets has done. Chances are you know.  I'm here because this morning I listened to the soothing, but firm tones of Michael Barbaro explore the story of wallstreetbets on his NYT podcast "The Daily". It was actually kind of jarring to log into spotify and see the headline "The GameStop Rebellion".The dude gets one big news story a day and he's talking about a bunch of nerds on a cursed website that up until a week ago may never have appeared in the mainstream media scene, let alone become the hot topic of financial discourse.

        There was something very odd and haunting about hearing a professional reporter describe Reddit on a prominent publication's podcast. Technology reporter Taylor Lorenz explains with such confidence and integrity how reddit works that it made me cringe. Hearing Taylor say things like "It’s very irreverent, and it has its own language. They post nonstop memes and jokes. They call winnings or gains “tendies.” It’s a play off “tender,” you know, sort of tender, money. They called it chicken tenders and now tendies." and talking about users with names like "DeepEffingValue". Like??? How did this very intelligent woman, a staffer for the New York Fucking Times end up reporting about a meme website as a job. There is something so chaotic about this being a legit news story, something just absolutely other worldly. I guess because to me, Reddit had always been a joke of a site. Like, literally. The site is for jokes, or art, or whatever weird topic the boy I'm dating is hyperfocusing on at the moment. It was a place where a lot of men (69% of 2016 reddit users were male according to statisia.com) went to say a lot of insensitive things that I didn't like and make a lot of dumbass memes I didn't get. Enter: r/wallstreetbets. 

      From what I've seen and heard this subreddit has the same irrelevant culture of almost every other subreddit out there. These are not some daddy's boy trust fund bitches. The people on reddit vary from "I think it's okay to say the r word and here's why" to "I read the wiki page of Das Kapital once and now I am Karl Marx reincarnated" to "armchair analyst turned professional instigator" and finally to those who gathered us here today the "I wanna feel powerful so I am going to meme the market. And also bc daddy elon told me to" types. I actually have a friend who was in the Wall Street Bets subreddit for some time previous to this historic event. According to him, this was a place where people came to lose their money. The top upvoted posts (that's equivalent to a like) are about people losing large sums of cash. This wasn't a space where people tried to make it big or organize to overthrow the market as we know it. This, reader, was a space to be a troll in the context of the stock market. And according to my source the buying up of GameStop stock and subsequent upheaval of the market was as sudden in the subreddit as it seemed to be in real life. Out of the blue the stock was up and people were posting things like "Hold the line" and spamming the corresponding discord chat with rocket emojis (my source tells me this means that stocks are going up). In a week r/wallstreetbets had become the central hub of a rebellion. And for that I say something I never thought I would to a subreddit community: Thank you. 

    In writing this post I find myself at a loss for words. I seem to lack the ability to describe what happened here. Maybe it's because I don't know enough about the stock market or reddit to do a full intersectional analysis of what happened, like I want. Maybe it's because this, to me, smells like the first whiff of revolution. And I never EVER dreamed that the uprising against "the man" and a failed economic system would be headed by a bunch of people in a subreddit. Like??? wtf?? There is something about internet culture (and specifically reddit culture) that is indescribable. I don't think I can give you the full picture of the beautiful mess that is any social media site, let alone reddit. There is something lawless about these digital gathering spaces (think twitter, tik tok, 😖tumblr😖). We all live in the same hellscape of a world and social media sites provide an ungoverned space where we can unleash the chaos that resides within. I see this chaos in the jokes people put out. I see it in serious posts where users overshare about their personal lives. This chaos was also present when I was diving into wallstreetbets. It reminded me of some other recent grassroots social media... pranks? goofemups? challenges to the current social order?

1. when KPOP stans flooded the bullshit blu*lives****er hashtag with fancams. Less of a large scale rebellion and more like a "f u if u believe this dude now all u have to look at are vids of BlackPink dancing"

2. When all those kids on Tik Tok organized and bought out trumps rally and never showed up. At the time I thought this was exhilarating. 2020 Sarah thought she was seeing the mobilization of the people at its height! What could top this???

    Both of these events feature pretty admirable goals by absolutely chaotic means. And I guess it kind of makes sense that this is happening now? I think the worldwide pandemic has encouraged more aggressive discourse regarding the wealth gap and the overall unfair structure our country/world operates on. It makes sense that something more powerful than memes would eventually come out of these social media sites. Gather the exploited in one space and eventually they're going to come to a conclusion or two. It makes me wonder what the next grassroots internet rebellion will be.

    This market massacre is extremely exciting to me. I see it as a win for the little guy. For once it was the rich pissing their pants running around trying to gather enough money to pay up. I see it as a historical moment where the people finally realized that they have power in numbers.They made a commitment to each other and the people to pull off the biggest stonks scandal of 2021. I hope they're just setting the mood. I also see it as an indicator of a larger problem. The stock market is unfair. Any system that fluctuates as much as my will to live is not a stable one. The market should not be able to be manipulated in such an extreme way. Not by the rich man as it has been for many years, nor by the poor man as it has this once. This system seems in two words: unsustainable and unnecessary. Of course, like I said before I don't know much about the stock market, but I DO know it is NOT the economy. And that the economy can do great while the market tanks and vice versa. So......do we really need to dedicate a whole section of my city for slick rich bitches to gamble all day? I don't know. I hope the answer is no.

    The only thing I can say with absolute certainty after diving into this story and listening to endless amounts of wallstreet bro jargon is that the stock market is the institutional personification of coke. No wonder they're all cutting lines on their desks. You probably need some of that shit just to keep up. Unfortunately for me, I am terrified of coke, and therefore will never be a wallstreet bro. I'll be sticking to my socially acceptable drugs of choice (caffeine and exercise) thank you very much. 

xoxo,

Sarah L.

P.S.Also if you want to know what actually happened this week with Game Stop give "The Daily's" episode a listen. It's short, sweet, and very informative.

P.P.S And how perfect is it that Game Stop's slogan is "Power to the Players" I just...you can't make this shit up man!