The following is an excerpt from "Mistakes and Memes" on the Stratechery blog by Ben Thompson.
Mistakes and Memes
Excerpt:
Who, for example, imagined this?
There have been a thousand stories about what the GameStop saga has been about: a genuine belief in GameStop, a planned-out short squeeze, populist anger against Wall Street, boredom and quarantine, greed, hedge fund pile-ons, you name it there is an article arguing it. I suspect that most everyone is right, much as the proverbial blind men feeling an elephant are all accurate in their descriptions, even though they are completely different. What seems clear is that the elephant is the Internet.
This is hardly a profound observation. It has been clear for many years that the Internet made it possible for new communities to form, sometimes with astonishing speed. The problem, as Zeynep Tufekci explained in Twitter and Tear Gas, is that the ease of network formation made these communities more fragile, particularly in the face of determined opposition:
The ability to use digital tools to rapidly amass large numbers of protesters with a common goal empowers movements. Once this large group is formed, however, it struggles because it has sidestepped some of the traditional tasks of organizing. Besides taking care of tasks, the drudgery of traditional organizing helps create collective decision-making capabilities, sometimes through formal and informal leadership structures, and builds a collective capacities among movement participants through shared experience and tribulation. The expressive, often humorous style of networked protests attracts many participants and thrives both online and offline, but movements falter in the long term unless they create the capacity to navigate the inevitable challenges.
Tufekci contrasts many modern protest movements with the U.S. Civil Rights movement:
What gets lost in popular accounts of the civil rights movement is the meticulous and lengthy organizing work sustained over a long period that was essential for every protest action. The movement’s success required myriad tactical shifts to survive repression and take advantage of opportunities created as the political landscape changed during the decade.
In Tufekci’s telling, the March on Washington was the culmination of years of institution building, in stark contrast to more sudden uprisings like Occupy Wall Street:
In the networked era, a large, organized march or protest should not be seen as the chief outcome of previous capacity building by a movement; rather, it should be looked at as the initial moment of the movement’s bursting onto the scene, but only the first stage in a potentially long journey. The civil rights movement may have reached a peak in the March on Washington in 1963, but the Occupy movement arguably began with the occupation of Zuccotti Park in 2011.
It’s interesting to reflect on the Occupy movement in light of the Gamestop episode two weeks ago; on one hand, you could squint and draw a line from Zuccotti Park to /r/WallStreetBets, but the only thread that actually exists is expressions of anger, at least from some number of Redditors, with Wall Street and its role in the 2008 financial crisis and the recession that followed. There was certainly no organizational building in the meantime that culminated in taking on the shorts (and, unsurprisingly, enriching others on Wall Street along the way).
What actually happened — to the extent anything meaningful happened at all — is that instead of storming the barricades of Wall Street, i.e. living in a tent two blocks away from a building long since removed from actual trading, /r/WallStreetBets used the system against itself. They didn’t protest short sellers; they took the other side of the bet.
The Meme Stock
Who, though, is “they”? Sure, there was /u/DeepFuckingValue, who according to a profile in the Wall Street Journal started buying GameStop stock in 2019, and making YouTube videos to promote his comeback thesis last summer. There was also /u/Jeffamazon, who made the case on Reddit that GameStop was primed for a short squeeze last fall. There were all of those folks who wanted to get back at Wall Street, and those that simply wanted to make a buck. There was Twitter, and CNBC, and there were hedge funds themselves.
This is why everyone has a story about what happened with GameStop, and why they are all true. The 2019 story was correct, but so was the summer 2020 story, and the fall 2020 story, and the January 2021 story. None of those stories, though, existed in isolation: they built on the stories that came before, duplicating and mutating them along the way. This is my second mistake: it turns out the Internet isn’t a cheap printing press; it’s a photocopier, albeit one that is prone to distorting every nth copy.
Go back to the time before the printing press: while a limited number of texts were laboriously preserved by monks copying by hand, the vast majority of information transfer was verbal; this left room for information to evolve over time, but that evolution and its impact was limited by just how long it took to spread. The printing press, on the other hand, by necessity froze information so that it could be captured and conveyed.
This is obviously a gross simplification, but it is a simplification that was reflected in civilization in Europe in particular: local evolution and low conveyance of knowledge with overarching truths aligns to a world of city-states governed by the Catholic Church; printing books, meanwhile, gives an economic impetus to both unifying languages and a new kind of gatekeeper, aligning to a world of nation-states governed by the nobility.
The Internet, meanwhile, isn’t just about demand — my first mistake — nor is it just about supply — my second mistake. It’s about both happening at the same time, and feeding off of each other. It turns out that the literal meaning of “going viral” was, in fact, more accurate than its initial meaning of having an article or image or video spread far-and-wide. An actual virus mutates as it spreads, much as how over time the initial article or image or video that goes viral becomes nearly unrecognizable; it is now a meme.
This is why, in the end, the best way to describe what happened to Gamestop is that it was a meme: its meaning was anything, and everything, evolving like oral traditions of old, but doing so at the speed of light. The real world impact, though, was very real, at least for those that made and/or lost money on Wall Street. That’s the thing with memes: on their own they are fleeting; like a virus, they primarily have an impact if they infiltrate and take over infrastructure that already exists.
The Meme President
In 2016 the Washington Post documented how 4chan reacted to Donald Trump being elected president:
4chan’s /pol/ boards have, for much of the 2016 campaign, felt like an alternate reality, one where a Donald Trump presidency was not only possible but inevitable. At some point Tuesday evening, the board’s Trump-loving, racist memers began to realize that they were actually right. “I’m f—— trembling out of excitement brahs,” one 4channer wrote Tuesday night, adding a very excited Pepe the Frog drawing. “We actually elected a meme as president.”
Trump, with his calls for protectionism and opposition to immigration, was compared throughout the campaign to previous presidential candidates like Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan; the reason why Trump was successful, though, was because he managed to infiltrate and take over infrastructure — the Republican Party — that already existed.
