Reddit Revolutionaries
First, are the Reddit revolutionaries new populists descended from the radicals of Occupy Wall Street? No. They’re basically a bunch of dudes upvoting memes with cash. Or, to be more generous, they represent an extremely online evolution of Big Finance itself, a kind of decentralized hedge fund duking it out with other hedge funds. The typical day trader is a pretty well-off man in his 30s, and various reports so far show that some of the Reddit group’s leading members are current and former finance workers, some of whom make enough money to live in gated communities. By using a message board to move markets and cream billionaires, they’ve done something truly fascinating. But while some Redditors made millions recently, the largest holders of GameStop stock, like the giant asset manager BlackRock, made billions. None of this has anything to do with “the little guy”—a moniker that, by any reasonable definition, refers to the roughly 50 percent of American adults with no money whatsoever in the stock market and who probably shouldn’t kick off their investment career by buying into a mania.
This is an accurate take, and I think it points out something interesting. It was the press that made them into a populist movement, and I think the populists picked up that banner and ran with it. I still think that they were closer to Gamer Gate than the Occupy movement.
Also, doesn’t Occupy Wall Street feel like a lifetime ago?