https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3460-282X
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ABSTRACT
This essay analyzes the rhetorics of social and economic protest surrounding the 2021 short squeeze where swarms of gamers-made-investors used the popular trading app Robinhood to create artificial demands for shorted stocks such as GameStop and AMC. Fueled by populist rhetoric on subreddit forum, r/WallStreetBets, the movement created a short-lived bubble that cost hedge funds billions. I argue that investors were subjectivized by market-based agencies through anger and nostalgia during a COVID-19 period when many were feeling powerless. Through market jamming, investors temporarily used the market, and its neoliberal rationalities, against itself and created new spaces for agency. While market jamming comes with real financial risks, such as a rhetorical panic, it also shows how investors can use détournement in the marketplace.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks Emma Bloomfield for her feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Importantly, anger is not neutral. As Winderman (2019) argues, modulations of anger can “perpetuate and contes[t] epistemic injustice” considering the regulated volume of public anger that determine whose anger is justified and legitimate (p. 330). While this kind of market jamming assumes certain financial and technological privileges that may perpetuate other injustices, this essay speaks more generally to audiences interested in how movements can strategically use irrationalities to detourn those hegemonic systems for agency and social change.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Nicholas S. Paliewicz
Nick Paliewicz is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Louisville. He studies environmental communication, public argument, and social change and teaches related classes.