GameStop, and the False God of Wall Street

In Shirley Jackson’s 1948 short story “The Lottery,” residents of a nameless American village gather for an annual summer ritual. The characters’ meandering banter reveals this ritual serves to ensure a bountiful harvest and social stability. However, events start turning dark quickly. If you haven’t read it, skip to the next paragraph: by drawing lots, the titular Lottery determines which villager becomes a blood sacrifice to the earth.

One important theme in Jackson’s story is why, exactly, the villagers persevere in this gruesome tradition. Many nearby villages have evidently abandoned their lottery. Though old-timers prophesy doom for those villages, this catastrophe apparently hasn’t happened yet. Like Americans asserting that voting for the other party will have disastrous consequences, the doom never quite arrives. But for true believers, that only means doom hasn’t arrived yet.

News broke this week that angry Redditors, working in collaboration, had collapsed a billion-dollar hedge fund, Melvin Capital, by driving up prices on selected stock. Though that stock included multiple holdings, the emblem of this action became videogame retailer GameStop. Melvin gambled that GameStop stock, always a precarious holding, would plunge in value, and sold short. Redditors banded together to hoist prices, leaving Melvin holding the bag.

Initially, I saw this story as another declaration of how effective people become when banding together. Defenders of the status quo love asserting that banded groups of consumers—especially labor unions—constitute an unjust intrusion on market forces. Capitalism requires concentrated money, but atomized human beings. When individuals band together, their actions steer markets, which the status quo finds intolerable. Capitalists always get their fee-fees hurt.

However, this feels different. Netizen peons didn’t do what organized labor usually does, demanding better pay or executive accountability. They actively challenged capitalists in their sacred temple. Hedge funds have historically enjoyed near-total impunity for their reckless behavior, even after the stock market collapses of 2007 and 2020, simply because few outsiders understand their domain. These netizens walked in, cornered the market, and broke the system.

Shirley Jackson

Notably, just like Shirley Jackson’s habit-driven villagers, this action elicits prophets of doom. This will end in tears, some say, or your revolution is doomed from the start. Just as Jackson’s aged, angry villagers demand the young keep respecting traditions, because they’re traditions, these market mavens assert that any interruption in the way we’ve always done stocks, will bring ruin down around our ears. Frankly, we’ve heard this all before.

Wall Street brokerages frequently operate just like an arcane priesthood. Stock market votaries claim exclusive access to capitalism’s gods, and enter a poorly understood temple, emerging with the oracle’s prophecies. Until 2005, access to the New York Stock Exchange was capped at 1,366 seats, which traded at nearly $4 million each, making the priesthood literally exclusive: you couldn’t get rich on stocks without already being rich.

Just like you must already be a wizard to get into Hogwart’s.

Capitalism, like religion, dominates only because enough people believe it does. That belief derives from an enigmatic priesthood claiming to have better skill reading signs than ordinary believers. Eventually, young people raised on opaque rituals and wordy liturgy, will studiously question the beliefs they’ve been spoon-fed. They’ll ask: Do these beliefs make sense? And more important, do other believers live by the beliefs they claim to espouse?

This isn’t the place to debate whether religions are necessarily “true.” Anybody who’s studied religion or philosophy already knows that truth is a slippery criterion. But religions hold their power by the willingness of believers to accept their essential veracity. Whether that means Christianity’s “priesthood of all believers,” or the closely held secrets of Greek mystery cults and Haitian vodoun practitioners, religion gains its power from others’ trust.

Like villagers rejecting the Lottery, peons surging into Wall Street’s Holy of Holies upsets the order. Though about half of Americans own some stock, mostly through mutual funds and 401(k) programs, more than four-fifths of the stock market belongs to just America’s richest ten percent. Yet market mavens insist they have unique oracular powers, and whatever happens to Wall Street now, happens to America overall later.

In the end, Tessie Hutchinson dies to preserve the villagers’ faith in the Lottery. One year ago, I might’ve thought people willing to die for capitalism was merely symbolic. But with the pandemic, defenders of the status quo have advocated exactly that. Capitalism is truth, and truth is something we willingly die for. But Redditors said no. This isn’t labor unionism, I now see; this is religious iconoclasty.