It’s All Just a Joke

This week has brought a viral story that feels like it belongs back in the Trump era: members of the Reddit group r/wallstreetbets have driven up the stock price of bygone companies like GameStop, AMC Theaters and Nokia, and everyone’s freaking out about it. It’s way more complicated than that, but it feels ridiculous summarizing it here because the story is everywhere – you either know exactly what I’m talking about or you’re one of the lucky few who don’t care to find out.

I won’t write about the investing side of things – I told a friend and my boss not to buy Tesla in 2016, and look how that turned out – but I think the story says a lot about joking on the internet, and the power of platforms.

I used to rile up a friend in college by making absurd claims about his sports heroes with a straight face: “Tim Duncan was a Top 100 NBA player,” or “Chris Paul is a really good role guy.” It was funny at the time because I kept my face really, really straight. So long as my friend had more emotion in the game, he was unable to see the joke, and he’d get mad. It was great entertainment for the rest of us.

But this only worked because the rest of the group could see what I was doing. If someone else had come in the room and heard me, he would have just thought I was an idiot. Tim Duncan is one of the greatest of all time (he’s at least Top 75). There would have been no joke.

When this happens on the internet, it’s called Poe’s Law:

Without a clear indicator of the author’s intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied.

People believing stories in The Onion is Poe’s Law – unless you know it’s a fake news organization, there’s a risk you’ll take the headlines at face value – but this whole r/wallstreetbets mess is also Poe’s Law. You have an internet forum that is both a parody – “stonks,” “tendies,” and other funny ways of talking about investing – and very serious, a forum with real users who make and lose real money. Anyone new to the group has their work cut out for them trying to discern the one from the other.

Here’s a small sample of what’s going on:

Even I, in a group chat with friends, now have a hard time separating who is joking and who is not – one friend’s rocket ship emoji could mean he has actually invested, while another could be poking fun. The only one I’m sure of is myself – and how could my jokes be interpreted as anything but? GME TO THE MOON!

Now Elon Musk, Mark Cuban and all of the Barstool guys have all jumped into this, and there’s really no way of knowing if any of it is a joke. They couch what they say in humor – GameStonk and Nok Nok and straight to the moon – but there’s something serious under the surface. Or is there? I don’t know. Friday’s episode of Pardon My Take had Big Cat and PFT saying they were Gamestop millionaires, then later taking that back and saying they had helped create Gamestop millionaires, and then finishing it with an ostensibly serious conversation about how Wall Street has been screwing regular Americans for far too long. Dave Portnoy – Barstool’s chief jokester – told Tucker Carlson in an interview that “people need to go to jail over this.” Poe’s Law.

I can hear it now: “These are grown adults making the decision to buy Gamestop! Barstool is entertainment and can say whatever it likes! The real problem is the rigged financial system!”

And those people are right. The rigged financial system is a huge problem. Long term, I think it’s the primary issue in all this – why there seem to be two separate sets of rules for big money and small money. I’m not writing about it here because I couldn’t possibly add anything to the conversation. Read Matt Levine if you’re looking for that.

But remember the biggest story from a few weeks ago? A handful of powerful people used their platforms to promote a belief, among their supporters, that other powerful people had played unfairly by their own set of rules. That story ended with the storming of the Capitol building. And guess what? None of those powerful people were there, on the front steps, battering down windows alongside supporters. They were re-framing old tweets and manipulating context to distance themselves from the chaos they’d created.

Sound familiar? This Gamestop debacle (hopefully) won’t end with the storming of government buildings, but it will end with people losing money. And it’s not going to be Elon, Mark and the rest of the populist heroes who suffer. It’s going to be someone who saw a tweet like this and decided to stay put inside a house on fire:

Look, anytime money is involved emotions run hot, and if someone makes a boatload off this, that’s awesome. More power to them. I don’t see a problem with r/wallstreetbets – I think it’s dumb, others think it’s not so dumb. That’s how things work. In normal times, it’s a platform where people can share investment advice and naughty humor at the same time. They’re just as capable of finding and exploiting market inefficiencies for huge profits as anyone else, and if those risks sometimes end in financial ruin then so be it. This is America, after all. What would we be without the God-given right to get absurdly rich, absurdly quick? Even if the journey doesn’t always sound like fun:

But this is no longer just r/wallstreetbets. This “populist” movement, if that’s how you see it, has been co-opted. Powerful people have brought a bunch of newcomers to the room who can’t see the context of the joke. And this could very well end in more than financial ruin for some. The precedent is there. A lot of the major trading platforms stopped trading on these stocks for periods of time, and my charitable view of that decision is that they wanted to minimize any damage from the chaos. No one needs to be jumping on a stock that’s appreciated 500% for very little reason in a handful of days, and maybe this will dissuade some people from doing so who are risking money they shouldn’t be. As the writers at Margins put it, “whatever happens, it will be dangerous and ugly.”

So will r/wallstreetbets and the GameStop rocketship ruin the world? No. Of course not. It’ll fizzle out like everything else, with a couple of big, vocal winners, and most likely a lot more, less vocal losers. The reality is that the bulk of Americans still have no stake in Gamestop and no interest in any of this. Half the country doesn’t even own stock.

But I think there’s some individual responsibility for where we’ve led ourselves. And let me be clear – I am more responsible than most. I love this type of humor, despite the fact that I can see it for the shifty, dishonest thing that it often is. Poe’s Law exists because it’s funny to puppet extreme beliefs you think are stupid. I’m just no longer sure that it’s appropriate. Remember that Trump and his fans often said that he was only joking. That what he said couldn’t be taken literally.

Which brings me back to platforms. We should expect more from the people we’ve given podiums and microphones. We need what Czech president Vaclav Havel, in a speech to Harvard’s Class of ’95, called a “renewal of human responsibility”:

“Whether our world is to be saved from everything that threatens it today depends above all on whether human beings come to their senses, whether they understand the degree of their responsibility and discover a new relationship to the very miracle of being. The world is in the hands of us all.”

“And yet some have a greater influence on its fate than others. The more influence a person has, the greater the demands placed on their sense of responsibility and the less they should think merely about personal interests.”

Because if these Pied Pipers really cared about the inequality in our system, they’d address it for real. They would leverage their platforms to actually take down the “fat cats,” instead of goading a bunch of people into some long-shot stock bet for the lolz. They could mobilize their base to lobby Congress. They could organize a boycott of Robinhood instead of just tweeting that it should “die.” Big Cat and PFT could have Matt Levine on their show, instead of making jokes about dogecoin. There are plenty of options.

Instead we continue to expect the bare minimum. Tweets and sarcastic GIFs are enough to show loyalty. Ted Cruz and AOC can go back and forth on Twitter and it’s considered some sort of political action:

And beneath all of the extremes – whether they be claims of voter fraud or market collusion – are millions of people driven to action by these public figures.

As Peggy Noonan said to Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz in the aftermath of the Capitol riot, “look on your mighty works and despair.” I think that’s a fair judgement to level on anyone who wields their platform irresponsibly.

Undercover

I’ve been working on a short story about two FBI agents sent into Western Canada by the Trump administration to “monitor subversive activities.” Progress has been slow, but I’m hoping that a short teaser here will commit me to finish it:


“Wake up.”

Lennox groaned and pulled a pillow over his head. He hated adjoining rooms. “No.” He was too old for this shit.

“Wake up. Why is it always me getting your ass out of bed?” Avery kicked the nightstand and the rotary phone clanged. Lennox groaned again.

“Alright, I’m up. That fucking phone, man.” He rubbed his temples. “I feel awful, Ave.”

“What’s new?” Lennox had chosen the bigger room, with the couch, and that’s where they spent most of their nights, the beer cans piling up in greasy burger bags until the cleaning lady came. The shades were drawn, but Avery could see that last night’s bag was leaking onto the carpet, and it was only Friday – she wouldn’t be back for two more days, and the room smelled like old ski boots. “Not much longer now til we’re home.” He kicked the nightstand once more and left.

By the time Lennox made it down to the lobby, his partner was already on his second bowl of fruity cereal. He hated the motel’s breakfast, but it was nothing compared to spending a night sober. Their per diem only went so far. So they’d agreed to eat cold food off styrofoam plates, under the lobby’s fluorescent glare, and to save the rest for their drinking. Besides, they made the thirty minute drive into Cochrane enough as it was. Lennox grabbed two slices of white bread and a handful of butter packets, and took a seat on the far side of the room. Avery didn’t look up from his cereal.

Canada.


More to come on that soon-ish.

Stay warm out there.

– Emmett

What I’m Reading:

Welcome to the Department of Salads – Emily Nunn
“I won’t lie to you. I have been using salad as a drug. And it works.”

What I’m Listening To:

Brené with Melinda Gates on The Moment of Lift – Unlocking Us
“I learned how to play the game. I knew how to do that, it turns out. But I didn’t like myself very much. I would start to find that when I’d be driving home in my little Honda Prelude and going to the grocery store, I wasn’t very nice to people, and I didn’t like who I was becoming.”

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