YOLO Publics: The Potential for Creative Subversion of an Online Trading Community

Abstract

Digitally mediated publics are often discussed in terms of extremism and radicalization, but it remains possible that digital communication technologies can engender new connections and conversations through “creative subversion.” This article explores the potentials of one specific instance of such creative subversion: the “GameStop rescue” as let by members of the subreddit forum “WallStreetBets” (WSB) in the early months of 2021. From a communicative perspective, what is interesting about this series of events is not only the digital platforms and affordances that enabled it, but also the reckless behavior of WSB members and the ways in which this behavior was communicated—and continues to be celebrated and facilitated by the online trading community. Members share “loss porn,” praise each other for having “diamond hands” when holding on to investments that are losing value, and celebrate the principle of YOLO (you only live once). We conceptualize WSB as a YOLO public, an online community that is loosely and temporarily formed through the common action of seizing the opportunity to wreak havoc around power. Furthermore, we understand the events of the GameStop rescue as a controversial encounter that, we argue, offers hope for digitally mediated publics to develop in dynamic relations of difference rather than as stabilized oppositions.

Not so ‘dumb money’? Constituting professionals and amateurs in the history of finance capitalism

“…Present market gyrations caused by vast amounts of ‘dumb money’ – as small private or retail investments are sometimes unflatteringly called – thrown after certain listed companies has brought the distinction between professional and amateur back into the centre of the popular discourse on financial markets (Cassidy, 2021; Duterme, 2023). There has been a recent flurry of such ‘dumb money’ incidents, with the GameStop debacle (which saw the trying videogame store company’s stock price skyrocket in early 2021) being perhaps the most widely covered in mainstream discourse (Hansen, 2022; Just and Petersen, 2023; Paliewicz, 2023). The increasing popularity of gamified online trading platforms for speculative value-generation granting easy market access to the broad public is also pushing the retail investor into the limelight and stirring up debates about barriers to market participation and what the consequences might be if some of these barriers are brought down (Davis, 2018; Preda, 2017; Tan, 2021; Van der Heide and Želinský, 2021).…”