🚀 TO THE MOON
the unstoppable meme movement
You are cordially invited to this week’s brew of High Tea, your dispatch of 🔥 internet culture served piping hot. This week: WallStreetBets against the world, stock market bf and astrology gf are a match made in heaven and we remember the undeniably brilliant SOPHIE.
Drink up 🐸☕
p.s. if you’re not a paid subscriber, here’s what you missed from this week’s Bucks Fizz:
🥂Peng Black Girls, Serena Isioma & Aly & AJ
what we’ve been sipping on: $GME go brrr!
We did it Joe, we shorted GameStop. Last week, the meme 🧤 was the message against the backdrop of the inauguration, where a pair of humble mittens became the vessel for the intersection of political commentary, quiet rebellion and...well, shitposting in its purest form. This week, the meme is the movement – spilling out from a niche subreddit (+ Discord server, gone but never forgotten, RIP) and bleeding into a communal call to arms for retail investors to liquidate a billion-dollar Wall Street hedge fund. Just another normal week in January, right?
“GameStop is a US video game retailer that has lost much of its market share to online trade and whose stock plummeted from $56 a share in 2013 to about $5 in 2019. It is set to close 450 shops this year. Some big hedge funds decided that they would cash in on GameStop’s misery by shorting its shares...A bunch of Reddit geeks on the online forum r/wallstreetbets, an investment discussion group that boasts more than 6 million users, decided to buy GameStop shares en masse….Once it became a global story, others piled in too, boosting the share price from about $40 to almost $400 in a matter of days. As a result, big investors lost big” - Kenan Malik, The Guardian
Now, we ain’t here to give you a deep dive on shorting stocks because we’re no Margot Robbie in a bubble bath, but here’s what you should know:
👉 January 14: $GME begin rising, from $4 to $20 (“HE’S STILL IN”)
👉 January 25: mainstream media begins reporting on the story, price rockets to $76.79
👉 January 26: Elon Musk tweets “Gamestonk!”, with a link to r/wallstreetbets
👉 January 27: top spike reaches $351.94 as subreddit moderators took the forum offline for more than an hour
👉 January 28: GameStop briefly became the largest member of the Russell 2000 Index after hitting a peak value of $33.7 billion
👉 January 28: GameStop reaches its peak of $469.42...meanwhile Robinhood restricts its users: “In light of recent volatility, we restricted transactions for certain securities to position closing only”
Steal from the rich and give to the poor? Robinhood said: hold my quaaludes.
What ensued on social this week was an extension of the original discourse - once buried in niche community forums - now distributed with a shared sense of collective outrage. Simmered down into accessible entry points and easily replicated formats, the narrative surrounding $GME, Robinhood, stonks (they only go up, right? 🚀) and Dogecoin 🐕 are visible badges of association that provide pointed references as to what side of the WallStreetBets saga you’re on – and who or what you’re hedging your bets on.
Cryptic to the outside looking in but unifying to the cohort of internet bandits that produce them, memes of this moment produce a *chef’s kiss* confluence: internet pariahs leading the linguistic charge, albeit in stonks lexicon. The memes of this past week are visual cues of “put your money where your mouth is”, retaining their cultural capital through constant iteration of different digital subcultures – often formulaic and very, very meta.
Say hello to the new era of internet nationalism, united by a common cause in a time of heightened social isolation. Montagues vs. Capulets are out, now we’re talking about the normies vs. elites and suits vs. bandanas 🥊. Let’s dig into some of our faves:.
Exhibit A: hold my bully boys, hold!
Exhibit B: stock market bf and astrology gf
~ Of COURSE the stock market is a pisces ~
Exhibit C: get in loser, we’re shorting the stock market
Remember when Kpop stans and Z TikTokers bought up all of the tickets to Trump’s rally in Tulsa to leave a whole heap of empty seats? Yep, same energy.
Just as Gen Z proved there was more to TikTok than lip syncs and viral dances, r/wallstreetbets and its meme lords jumped on the opportunity to break the reputation of self-organized communities having minimal clout, and to give hedge fund managers a thing or two to write to their investors about.
Source: Subreddit Stats, via FT
Starting the year with 1M users and now sitting at a cool 7.4M, this week r/wallstreetbets was crowned the fastest growing subreddit with new traders, meme lovers and curious onlookers wanting to take a peep, as this community was catapulted into the mainstream. So how did they do it? How did they shake the bigwigs? Look no further than WallStreetBets celebrity Keith Gill (aka DeepFuckingValue), the bullish trader behind this week’s phenomenon and accidental leader of the movement that inspired a community pile-on to squeeze short-sellers (betting against GameStop) into covering their positions. To the r/wallstreetbet-ters, (a mere online subreddit, lest we forget) GameStop – representing nostalgia in a stock – was the perfect opportunity to collectively unite against public enemy #1 (aka Melvin Capital and...the rest of Wall Street 🚫 🧢).
During a time of record unemployment against the backdrop of a nation up in arms and, ya know, a global pandemic, this was the underdogs’ way of fighting back. And not via taking to the streets as before (Occupy Wall Street, anyone?), but by playing the big cheeses online at their own game. These memers have proven that self-organized communities have the power to stick it to the man 🖕 with the sheer determination of collective will, much to the disbelief of the established market players.
“I'm HOLDING for my immigrant parents so I could pay off their house and give them the retirement life they deserve, after leaving a comfortable life and moving to the US to give my brother and I better opportunities. And I'm HOLDING for you! GME 🚀 🚀” – one Reddit user posted today
TL;DR, don’t mess with the power of community, and niche ones at that. At a time when community is confined almost exclusively to online spaces (unless you’re a TikToker secretly living it up in the Bahamas 🐸☕), forums like Reddit and servers like Discord are fast becoming the places to gather, providing us with the digital space to satiate our IRL frustrations. We think that these virtual communities will continue to grow in number (cc: Clubhouse 👀), alongside the powerful affinity for their causes. Nothing displays this better than a Times Square billboard, don’t ya think?
Okay, you made it. Now this one is for SOPHIE, rest in power queen. 🖤
ttyl,