Wall Street Bets and the Future

Efforts to take on Wall Street hedge funds fizzled out as quickly as it started, and it left many with negative balances in their bank accounts. But even though the effort was a bust, the spirit that led many to invest their personal savings in the time of pandemic to bring about financial justice remains alive and well.

Reddit’s Wall Street Bets had a measurable impact that could only be countered by the financial establishment, which rigged the game against the common man. Not only did Robinhood, the investment app that many used to buy stocks in GameStop, AMC, and other companies to “squeeze” the hedge funds, temporarily terminate user access to buying new stocks, so too did the Biden administration’s Securities and Exchange Commission threaten to take action against amateur investors.

The message that the establishment was sending is clear: they’re afraid, and they know you know they’re afraid.

While the average Joe may not have much of a chance to take on the billions of dollars that empower Wall Street and its cronies in the government, efforts to do so - no matter how disastrous - show a growing awareness of the amount of control that the elites have over our finances. It’s obvious: they control the system, and any attempt to use their own systems against them is immediately thwarted, especially when it becomes evident how effective these efforts truly are.

Unlike Occupy Wall Street, which saw billionaires laughing at unwashed protesters while sipping thousands of dollars in champagne, efforts by Redditors in their parents’ basements sent the elites scrambling.

When threats against the Redditors failed, the elites tried tears. They cried on national television, presenting themselves as heroes who took on bad stocks and protected the public from bad financial investments - rather than as opportunistic parasites who feasted on weak companies for the sake of turning a quick buck. Those poor billionaires, won’t anyone cry for them?

Worse still, the elites turned to their allies in the media to present sob stories about their supposedly heroic efforts.

Forbes ordered its readers to “Ignore The Populist GameStop Hype. Short Sellers Are Heroes.”

“The good guys in the GameStop story? It’s the hedge funds and short-sellers,” remarked the Washington Post.

The media attempted to set a narrative: the good guys were those ripping off the public, and the bad guys were the public attempting to stop themselves from getting robbed.

But the narrative isn’t one that took hold. Thanks to four years of constant lies about President Donald Trump, the effort to demonize the public fell flat on its face, and the media were exposed as shills for the very establishment it was formed to oppose.

The establishment thought it could get away with lying to the public in the same way it has done for the past few decades, but it made a critical miscalculation in failing to realize that the very tools it uses to monitor and control the masses could be subverted by the masses to hold the powers-that-be accountable.

In past decades, information wasn’t easily accessible even for those with the wherewithal and the desire to look for it. But with the advent of the Internet and social media, we are free to scrutinize absolutely everything that the elites are involved in.

“We can remain retarded for longer than they can stay solvent,” the motto of Wall Street Bets, rings true. With the right amount of “weaponized autism,” no stone goes unturned.

Much as the slaves in the Roman Republic came to recognize their strength in numbers with the rise of Spartacus and the Third Servile War, so too have the masses come to recognize their ability to reclaim their financial destiny from the hands of the Wall Street elite and reject the media that serves to propagandize for the establishment.

It’s for this reason that the media has been raising calls to shut down free speech and regulate the freedom of information online. They’ve done so by attempting to demonize populist investors as “white supremacists” - the same label used against populists in the MAGA movement who went against the GOP and Democratic establishments whose interests are vested in Wall Street.

Simply put, they’re afraid.

While the masses are at a disadvantage in the establishment’s own playing field, efforts to take on Wall Street have since offered other possibilities for advancement, notably through decentralized finance or DeFi - made popular by rogue billionaire Elon Musk, who has cheered on the use of Bitcoin and its offspring, Dogecoin.

Dogecoin may have begun as a meme, and Musk may have ideas about turning it into a currency because “history loves irony,” and it may even remain a meme for the foreseeable future, but the possibilities it offers are endless. Rising interest in cryptocurrency and DeFi have awakened the public to legitimate alternatives to the financial establishment.

Alternatives exist, and the masses are becoming aware of them, and quickly adopting them, as evidenced by the rise in market capital for numerous DeFi tokens like Ethereum, Cardano, Chainlink, Polkadot, and AAVE in the days (and now weeks) following the populist surge against Wall Street.

Wall Street Bets may have turned into a Wall Street Bust, but that doesn’t mean the fight has ended for the common man, who are now woke to the collusion that goes on between the government and the financial establishment. They say knowing is half the battle. And knowing that Wall Street, the media, and the government are all a part of the same, diseased structure gives us the means to fight back and tear it down – if we so choose.

You can follow Ian Miles Cheong on Twitter @stillgray