GameStop, Internet Guerillas, and DIY-Psyops: Praxis for the Terminally Online
Sometimes change and miracles come from the most unexpected places and you see the weirdest people being ‘based’ and doing ‘based’ praxis. Think a broken clock is right twice a day but for politics. And this time it was the Reddit ‘trolls’ who through coordination managed to cause millions of dollars of losses for hedge funds and other figures.
So what actually happened?
What happened is that in Jan 2021, a man called Cohen and two of his associates ended up on some board of GameStop. The details aren’t really important but what matters is that the stock was turned into ‘cult-stock’ and that the day after Cohen joined, the stock plunged by 50%. And this is where institutional investors, including apparently one well-known hedgefund, took out massive short positions in the millions. Apparently, according to the Slate, those investors just assumed that the amateurs would see Cohen’s big name and would just ignore all the difficult fundamentals. So this meant the professionals could borrow stock, sell it high, buy it back low and then pocket the difference.
But of course, nothing ever works out how’d want to and this was spotted by r/WallStreetBets (WSB). In September, a Redditor who had posted a treatise on how to bankrupt institutional investors featuring GameStop. And then this Redditor then predicted that the short sells would be forced to abandon their positions according to Slate and that buying stocks would drive the price up. And then voila WSB ran with this, hype bubbling up over weeks. For those who don’t understand but by driving the price up, the stock’s multiple at insane amounts and when it was time for the companies borrowing, they’d have to pay for the stocks at the market price, therefore resulting in millions of dollars in losses.
These Redditors were motivated by many things, ranging from profits and riches in the millions. But some were motivated by the desire to screw short shellers who “by definition rooting for shareholders and companies to suffer”. I’ve seen users from WSB who wanted nothing more to stick a finger in the eyes of Melvin Capital (who was shorting GameStop) and Citron. Others who have said it’s them against the 1% and that these companies got greedy and made it easy for them to lose billions and that the goal of WSB was to bankrupt these firms. And look what happened, Melvin Capital is down 15% on the 22nd of Jan which required the fund to take a $2.75 billion rescue package and that on that day alone, the short sellers against GameStop lost $1.6 billion according to S3 Partners.
The best thing about all of this that it’s borderline impossible to regulate against this. You can’t regulate against random Reddit ‘anons’ and nor can you stop people talking about it on social media. And the best thing is that social media is very decentralised and that many places have a bad track record with banning things. It’s only until recently that Reddit has started actually banning subreddits though as this article was published, the WSB subreddit has been put on private for whatever reason. But even it does get banned, they can always migrate elsewhere. They can go on 4chan or host their own site to coordinate these though these sites could be regulated against.
And what’s very interesting is that WSB probably did more praxis than you, reading this or most online leftists and for that, I applaud them. Though it is also important to remember that even though this feels like an OccupyWallStreet, it’s probably nothing more than a one-off thing which will result in them going broke instead of actual repeats attack on the stock market. Lightning doesn’t strike in the same place after all. It was just simply a strange set of coincidences which resulted in warring stock traders.
Internet guerillas
I think an important message we can learn from this is that we often forget the power of internet guerillas since we often forget that yes actually the internet has the ability to affect real life, from everything to terrorist attacks, political radicalisation and the word “cringe” ending up in the Italian dictionary. And we’ve seen it before that communities have harnessed their power to change politics for better or for worse. Some examples of this would be the barrage of 4chan /pol/ users who aided Trump in his election by filling social media with a barrage of pro-trump memes and anti-Hilary Clinton memes about her being a criminal and so on. But also we have the TikTok teens who managed to buy out a trump rally. So it’s not like the terminally online can’t do anything and there is something anyone can do, no matter their technical level.
It’s very easy to become your own psyop, many people already do it. And there’s pretty much written guides on how to do it and books published on how to manipulate the media. You can easily make a new account and join far-right groups, causing discourse which holds their community in a chokehold. All you need to do is be really dumb, antagonising, create rumours and attention-whore. But you can also spread misinformation on their boards and communities about how the things they hate are good actually with things like rumours. Here is practically a how-to guide on how to become your own Leandro.
But if you wanted to, with your community you could organise and perhaps DDoS a site, hijack the boards and communities of other sites, or do real-world things like buying out trump rallies. To be honest, I can’t really list any examples of any real-world things you can do since it’s really one of those situations where you don’t really think about it until it happens so just pure opportunism. It’s a bunch of decentralised and unorganised normal people to hijack something and wreak havoc, just like how GameStop was just regular people who ignored all market fundamentals and managed to force firms into bankruptcy overnight.
And for those of a higher skill level, you have things like counter economics, the use of black markets to combat the state’s white markets. Even if you don’t like markets and you’re just a simple Anarcho-Communist, using the black market is still far better than the white market. You can’t escape capitalism so you might as well pick the less-lethal poison. And the same thing goes for state currencies vs cryptocurrency. I know a lot of Anarcho-Communists and just leftists in general have a general knee jerk reaction to anything market-related but counter-economics is good actually. Please look into it, I implore you.
Or alternatively, the Crypto-Anarchist manifesto is a 5-minute read, detailing anarchism founded on cryptography. Its purpose is to defend against surveillance of computer networks and communication. So things like dealing with government surveillance, the evasion of censorship, and of course counter-economics. And why is this important? Well, we live in the growing age of the internet. The internet blossoms like a flower, it’s the most beautiful flower you’ve ever seen. Unfettered, unregulated, and uncontrolled. It is a wild flower. But in that same meadow, we have the gardener with his big sheers, coming to cut down your beautiful flower. This is the state. This is the corporations who will sell your information to companies for a quick buck.
Also, we’re forgetting that we’re entering the age of fourth-generation warfare. This is the merging of the combatants and civilians and decentralisation. And this is happening on the internet and you can use it to serve your own purposes, whatever they may be. I’m not going into details for legal reasons but people have the potential to purchase malware on some parts of the internet and to make their own, declaring war on whoever they want without being a combatant of the state. People have the ability to make this malware and it has become the new gun they keep under their bed. Warfare has entered cyberspace.
So in conclusion, this has just been a big reminder that we need to stop underestimating the power of unwashed ‘trolls’ and the internet in general. But also to perhaps think before you shove an Agorist in a locker or give that particularly annoying Left-wing Market Anarchist a swirly. You can do your own praxis online without ever having to leave your house. Just because it’s not ending capitalism doesn’t make it any less ‘based’. And honestly this is great for people who have issues leaving the house because of mental illness, so-called STEMcels, and for those who are terminally online.
