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.

Big Data and the Prequel to Technocracy

Jill Lepore, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

Madison Avenue publicity maven Ed Greenfield had a vision: what if we could predict the future? Using the newest IBM mainframe computers and the rising principles of Cold War social science, Greenfield believed paying customers could anticipate upcoming human behaviors. He didn’t consider himself a technical genius or a manipulator. He truly believed we could optimize outcomes and make humanity better using improved technology and more data.

Harvard University political historian Jill Lepore stumbled upon the history of Greenfield’s Simulmatics Corporation accidentally, while researching other issues. What she found, however, seemed chillingly familiar, in light of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and controversies surrounding digital data collection. These attempts to quantify and exploit human behaviors seem new; but, Lepore realized, they have a tumultuous history going back over sixty years.

Greenfield, a staunch Democrat, originally had political aspirations for his advertising skills. Adlai Stevenson, a Northern moderate, failed to capture the presidency twice, maybe because he maintained a distant, scholarly posture. Or maybe, Greenfield realized, because his opponent, Dwight Eisenhower, embraced TV ads and 30-second sound bites. Greenfield originally wanted to create a better political ad, and deploy it to bring liberalism back into political relevance.

However, Greenfield’s ambitions coincided with rises in American social science. Where poli-sci professors had previously remained satisfied describing what happened in the past, the Cold War created incentives to control the future. What, academics and bureaucrats wondered, would it take to ensure the Communists didn’t take world control? Social scientists moved into new worlds of speculation and public relations, to ensure Communism didn’t gain an international toehold.

This confluence of sociology and advertising, with recent advancements in computer technology, gave Greenfield an insight: we could combine the newest social science theories, the slickest advertising practices, and the hottest computer technology, to predict the best possible outcome. To that end, Greenfield collected a brain trust of Democratic-leaning scholars in sociology, math, computers, pollsters, and even novelists, to write a program automatically simulating voter outcomes.

Dr. Jill Lepore

Simulation. Automatic. Why, Greenfield realized, we could call it…Simulmatics!

From the beginning, Greenfield’s Simulmatics Corporation made high-minded promises, but chronically underdelivered. They charged Jack Kennedy’s 1960 campaign beaucoups of bucks for a report basically advising them to keep doing what they were already doing. Nevertheless, they claimed triumph, boasting that their advice pushed Kennedy into his razor-thin plurality. This despite Robert Kennedy’s angry disavowal, based on his instinctive distrust of computers.

Simulmatics began looking for further clients. But politicians found their oracular promises specious, while advertisers had begun their own in-house focus testing experiments. Newspapers paid handsomely for Simulmatics’ promises to accurately forecast election outcomes faster than ever before, but as always, Simulmatics underperformed. Despite their technocratic optimism, Simulmatics never gained mainstream acceptance. Soon they found the only client able to support their increasingly grandiose budgets: the Defense Department.

Lepore, as an Americanist, specializes in finding evidence missing from historical documents. This book delivers on that reputation. Despite having its fingers in numerous pies, Simulmatics left a remarkably small footprint. She reconstructs its history from personal letters, government documents, and counter-information provided by its opponents. This last source proves abundant: even as Simulmatics collapsed into a grave of empty promises, the hippie Left charged its corpse with “War Crimes.”

Even better, Lepore finds the personalities which motivated Simulmatics’ hasty rise and lingering disintegration. Besides Greenfield, she identifies “Wild Bill” McPhee, a mathematician whose insights into algorithms was matched only by his struggles with madness; Eugene Burdick, political theorist and novelist, who turned against Simulmatics and wrote bestsellers about the coming technocratic dystopia; and Ithiel de Sola Pool, once disgraced by Simulmatics, who reinvented himself as prophet of the Internet.

Fast as Simulmatics arose, it shattered equally quickly. Its Manhattan and Boston offices began feuding, and its leftist inventors found themselves trapped in the increasingly right-wing quagmire of Vietnam. Everyone from Norman Mailer to Jerry Rubin denounced Simulmatics by name. But when the company collapsed, everyone forgot it instantly; it disappeared from America’s collective memory. So when Google and Facebook began repeating Simulmatics’ business model, it seemed brand new.

This is history as literature. By casting one almost-forgotten corporation against the larger scope of the 1960s, Lepore makes this book about the forces which attempt to control us, today, with varying success. History, Lepore asserts, isn’t the dead past; ultimately, it’s about us. The forces which once ignited violence so bad, it threatened to destroy America, have become so banal, we’ve forgotten about them. But Jill Lepore hasn’t, and neither should we.

Politics, Religion, and the New Inquisition

Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco, the Italian polymath, has an important scene in his first novel, The Name of the Rose. His protagonist, Brother William of Baskerville, debates the fugitive heretic Ubertino of Casale (who was a very real person). Ubertino questions why William abandoned his prestigious position as a prosecutor in the Inquisition. William previously took charge against Dulcineans, Pseudo-Apostles, and other violent dissidents from Roman ecclesial authority.

William notes that “confessions” extracted from dissidents, often under torture, are almost verbatim identical. The accusations leveled against Dulcineans in William’s time, are indistinguishable from accusations leveled against Bogomils, Cathars, Arminians, and Paulicians in prior centuries. Why, William dares suggest, it almost appears these confessed heretics work from identical scripts, which inevitably reinforce Roman papal authority.

“What does that matter?” Ubertino replies. “The Devil is stubborn, he follows a pattern in his snares and his seductions, he repeats his rituals at a distance of millennia, he is always the same, this is precisely why he is recognized as the enemy!”

I first read these words nearly thirty years ago. They struck me then, as now, because they’re perfect examples of projection. They assume Satan demands his followers practice ritual, not as means for achieving greater metaphysical good, but as ends in themselves; and that Satan stands changeless across the ages, deaf to evolving demands placed on his followers by society, economics, and other contingent events.

Tell me that doesn’t describe the Roman church before the Counter-Reformation—or many White Evangelical churches today.

These accusations have plagued me recently. Ubertino’s accusations describe QAnon, the conspiracy theory contending that our former President holds all the cards and would, any minute now, expose and overthrow a sinister cabal of blood-drinking kiddie diddlers who control the levers of society. The fact that this overthrow kept not happening, proves, somehow, the depths of control this cabal actually has. It’s a masterpiece of self-sealing argument.

Smarter writers than me observe how QAnon precisely mimics the Blood Libel, a medieval belief that Jews control society by drinking Christian children’s blood. These same beliefs, almost verbatim, came crawling back onto dry land during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, levied not against Jews, but against day-care providers. In both cases, someone awful controlled society, in ways that, as Ubertino accused, remain unchanged across millennia.

We could apply Freudian analysis to these accusations. Correlating persistent images of vampirism and child rape, with loss of worldly control, seems so obvious, it doesn’t require deeper explication. In both cases, powerful people suck the souls from our culture’s most vulnerable citizens. Vampires (with their sexual connotations) and child rapists gain power by dominating those least able to defend themselves.

Watching today’s news, though, I notice another reiteration of Ubertino’s withered imagination. President Biden, immediately upon taking office, signed orders bringing America back into the Paris Climate Accords; and his campaign promises include a pledge to double the minimum wage. Both actions have received criticism from his opposition, which isn’t unusual. But both have achieved the same criticism.

REPORT: Joe Biden’s Proposal to Raise National Minimum Wage to $15 Could ‘Kill 3.7 Million Jobs’ https://t.co/ke4sfIEc8t

— Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) January 20, 2021

Supposedly, increasing the minimum wage will—we’re constantly warned—cause massive price inflation, unemployment, and misery. I remember hearing that in college Economics 120, and from the conservative commentators I read as a teenage Republican. Don’t hoist the minimum wage, we’re always enjoined, lest we cause economic catastrophe! Yet somehow, it keeps not happening. Almost like the premise is fundamentally unsound.

Conservatives (including my younger self) constantly cite this same crinkum-crankum scare against even the most salutary efforts to improve anything. Any change, no matter how necessary or scientifically sound, will cause inflation and unemployment. Pay workers consummate with the value they create? Inflation and unemployment. Stop dumping sewage upriver from the city reservoir? Inflation and unemployment.

✔️Biden is revoking the Trump-approved permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, which is *already under construction* by U.S. union workers.

This is, again, an alarming move in Biden's War on Energy.

This will do some damage and will almost certainly be met with litigation.

— Andrew Clark (@AndrewHClark) January 20, 2021

Like the Satanic accusations Ubertino admits apply equally to any reform-minded sect, these claims aren’t factual. Rather, let’s call them liturgical. That is, they’re words repeated, in unison, to remind believers of their shared values and precepts. Liturgy serves important purposes, when believers face a hostile world that offers constant temptations to sin. But when liturgical continuity becomes a substitute for doing right, it undermines believers together.

When powerful people combine liturgy with Blood Libel, it becomes clear that politics has become religion. Half of America’s political debate isn’t arguing the best system for governing the citizenry anymore, it’s devising Inquisitions to punish heretics. Like Ubertino, who became entangled in his own accusations and vanished from history, this kind of religion always destroys itself. But not without hurting others along the way.

Severus Snape and the Backstory of Doom

Professor Snape (Alan Rickman) showing his usual patient, nurturing classroom technique

Who is Severus Snape, and why do Harry Potter fans have such high feelings about him? From his first appearance in the Harry Potter novels, Professor Snape comes across as a bully, a man-child with unresolved oedipal issues who turns his self-hatred on students. Surely I wasn’t the only reader who shrugged, remembering teachers I had like that. Some people become teachers because they aren’t done learning yet.

This weekend, I posted an internet meme to a popular discussion board, suggesting filmmakers could profitably make a film series about Professor Snape’s transition from one of Lord Voldemort’s shock troopers, to Dumbledore’s inside man. Because I don’t follow fan culture closely, I failed to anticipate the high feelings which this would generate. Besides predictable rants against J.K. Rowling personally, many fans took umbrage at anything foregrounding Snape favorably.

In fairness, I understand that anger. I remember watching trailers for Todd Phillips’ 2019 movie Joker, and reflexively rejecting the characterization. I wrote back then that giving Joker traditional motivations “devalues the character.” Besides the fact that Joker is like a hurricane, and simply destroys because it’s his nature, it also recycles a weatherbeaten writing trope. I’m tired of “nice guys” snapping because they’ve been crushed down so long.

That character arc, the broken “nice guy,” superficially applies to Snape. When Harry sees into Snape’s memories through the Pensieve in Order of the Phoenix, we witness “nice” teenage Severus trying vainly to romance the future Lily Potter, only to get bullied by tall, dashing, broad-shouldered James. Clearly, in Snape’s mind, he had the potential to become a charming teenage lover, but James and the “cool kids” denied him the opportunity.

If filmmakers wrote this story, I’d be disappointed. Not only because we’ve seen this weak story so frequently, but also because it makes Snape a reliable narrator. Please. We know Snape lies as easily as breathing. Not only does he lie to others regularly, but we learn in later books, he lies to himself. The memory Harry sees through the Pensieve has probably been edited numerous times, to offer Snape the justification he eagerly seeks.

J.K. Rowling

Rowling’s narrative emerges from her Scottish Presbyterian religious background. This requires a little theological understanding. Presbyterianism, with its Calvinist background, holds all humans are essentially sinful, or in Calvin’s words, Totally Depraved. We’re all liars, egoists, gluttons, and bigots, awaiting salvation from a merciful God whose entire being consists of everything good and beneficial in this universe. Only God can save us from ourselves.

The catechistic nature of wizard school mirrors the Calvinist journey out of sin. Three school houses encourage different virtues; the fourth teaches students to embrace their Total Human Depravity and remain sinful. Not for nothing is Dumbledore’s domicile at the peak of the tallest tower, while the Slytherin dormitories are in the dungeon. They provide two opposite aspirations… and Snape chooses the aspiration closest to the earth.

Of Snape’s many failings, foremost is his lack of self-reflection. Even after his loyalties cost Lily Potter her life, he continues whining about the unfairness to him, not to everyone Lily loved. He shows no capacity for even rudimentary repentance, because he doesn’t understand himself well enough for that. People like Snape—arrogant, convinced of their own rightness, and plush with privilege—are prime pickings for malevolent manipulators like Voldemort.

(I promise, I’m not talking about current politics.)

That’s the Snape whose backstory I’m interested in seeing dramatised. Not the “nice guy” pushed to breaking, but the deluded sinner, the self-righteous egoist who hasn’t learned to examine himself coolly and revise his faults. I want the Snape who pushes forward with the grace and discretion of a cattle stampede, failing to realize he’s the villain in other people’s stories, until he’s abruptly forced to reckon with the consequences.

I acknowledge, this justification omits many people’s most adamant objection to new Potterverse material: the person of J.K. Rowling. Her insistence on voicing opinions which her young, mostly left-leaning audience finds objectionable, isn’t insignificant. But, as I’ve written recently, it’s a mistake to expect Great Artists to be Good People. Stories like Harry Potter don’t emerge from healthy, well-adjusted minds.

Poor writing could torpedo any Snape story beforehand. Especially if the writer succumbs to sentimentality, or reaches for low-hanging fruit, Snape’s backstory could be irretrievably ruined. But if a writer accepts, in advance, that Snape’s “nice guy” self-image is a delusion, and that he’s incapable of understanding his own Total Depravity, the story produced could be engaging and worthwhile.

 

On related topics:

• Harry Potter and the House Elf Manifesto
• What J.K. Rowling Says About You and Me
• Harry Potter and the Butt-Plant of Destiny

The Artist As Public Monster

Phil Spector, during his murder trial

Music legend Phil Spector’s death, this weekend, has reinvigorated the now-common question: how do we remember great but awful people? Is Spector the gifted music producer whose “Wall of Sound” technique changed pop music in the 1960s, molding legendary songs for the Beatles, Ike & Tina Turner, and Connie Francis? Or is Spector primarily the murderer who lured actress Lana Clarkson to his house on false pretenses, and shot her?

I’ve contemplated this question before. When considering art, must we also consider the artist’s moral résumé? This goes double when art remains under copyright, and artists continue drawing residuals. If an artist also commits atrocities, as Spector certainly did—even before murdering Clarkson, Spector’s first wife Veronica “Ronnie” Bennett credibly accused him of physical and psychological torture—does that disqualify his art?

Prior generations seemed willing to accept their artists’ moral failures, which were often egregious. From the hyper-machismo of Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer, to the wild sexual escapades of John Lennon and Elvis, to the self-destructive tendencies of Kurt Cobain and John Belushi, the artists whose work defined their times, frequently left trails of destruction behind them. This was just considered the price of being an artist.

It doesn’t escape me that such “tortured artists” are overwhelmingly men. While much attention accrues in online circles to J.K. Rowling’s belligerent TERF opinions, and Carrie Fisher’s violent swings of addiction and mental illness are legendary, they remain outliers. We can debate whether women artists are socialized to be more compliant, or whether we’re more tolerant of men’s abusive behaviors. But historically, we’ve let male artists be abusive.

Today, apparently uniquely, we have the expectation that Great Artists must also be Good People. The haste with which American audiences, and the entertainment conglomerates which need them, have abandoned, say, Woody Allen, attests that we demand artists represent our values. The Internet has made the public more aware than ever of artists’ personal lives; and we’ve responded by passing moral judgement on their work, measured by our billfolds.

But good people don’t make great art. They never have. Art emerges from some form of tension, whether it’s the narrative tension of a Scottish king usurping the throne, the cultural tension of teenaged musicians rebelling against postwar conformity, or the personal tension of comedians turning their private trauma into public art. Nice people getting along peacefully don’t have raw material for art, much less the motivation to pursue their public.

Roman Polanski, Bill Cosby, and David Bowie:
three great artists who left a trail of destruction behind them

This became clear for me, surrounding two famous addicts. James Frey, whose memoir Oprah endorsed before it became clear he’d fabricated nearly everything, made his reputation spilling the beans about his toxic personality. Stephen King, whose career-making books from the 1970s were mostly written in an alcoholic haze, scolded people for getting upset about this. Addicts, King reminded us, lie about anything. Frey’s fevered imaginings arose from his damaged personality.

One can make laundry lists of famous artists, again mostly men, whose great art emerged from their damaged personalities. I absolutely love Hank Williams, but it’s impossible to separate his melancholy, autobiographical songs from his drunken, philandering life. Sylvia Plath and John Keats, two of my favorite poets, made their undying reputations by exposing their inner torment, before both dying young. One need only mention Vincent van Gogh’s name.

Please don’t misunderstand me: Phil Spector killed a woman in cold blood, apparently off his medications for bipolar disorder. He committed a violent crime, and deserved every moment of his punishment. And his art certainly wasn’t interrupted, as he’d been living in semi-retirement since 1974. Nothing I say here should serve to excuse any criminal for harming others. If anything, we need to more stringently punish criminals with high public profiles.

Phil Spector had bipolar disorder; so did Patty Duke. Both turned their inner suffering outward, transforming their pain into generation-defining art. But both, in indulging their damage, also allowed their inner torment to fester. Both mostly disappeared from public around the same time, making occasional, insignificant returns. Patty Duke handled her pain through addiction, self-harm, and sex. Spector chose to harm others; that’s the only real difference.

Let’s just accept that healthy, well-adjusted people don’t make great art. We couldn’t have Phil Spector, the innovative, pioneering record producer, without Phil Spector, the bipolar patient who resisted treatment, and hurt others to muffle his own pain. We’ll have to accept this balance. And we’ll have to decide, collectively, how much suffering artists can inflict, before it becomes more harmful than the benefits of their art.