Mediaboss Marketing

A group of demonstrators gathers by the New York Stock Exchange building to protest Robinhood and Wall Street amid GameStop stock chaos on January 28, 2021. (Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!

Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!

Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!

We are now barreling into our third week of financial meme hell. Video game retailer GameStops stock rose over 1,000 percent after it was championed by the r/WallStreetBets subreddit. The stock fell 30 percent on Monday, however, leading many to believe a crash may be imminent.

What started as a half-serious Reddit campaign to rally around GameStop has ballooned into something much larger. Is this Occupy Wall Street 2? Or is this a second Gamergate? Are the Redditors that are leading the movement right now populist heroes? Or is this, as Elizabeth Warren has suggested, just a psychotic Internet casino that is tearing the fabric of society apart?

What cant be denied is that a Reddit community was able to harness its scale to bend the market to its will. Thats a genie you cant put back in the bottle.

r/WallStreetBets is a 7 million-strong subreddit for stock traders. It was created in 2012 by a banking technology consultant named Jaime Rogozinski. Its userswho commonly refer to themselves as retarded degeneratesbond over edgy memes, insane bets, idiotic financial trolling, and sharing what they call loss pornscreenshots of their tremendous losses. To get a sense of where the communitys values lie, Martin Shkrelithe former hedge fund manager who became a target for public hatred when, as CEO of a pharmaceutical company, he jacked up the price of a lifesaving drug by 5,000 percent, and was later convicted of fraudwas a frequent contributor. In a 2017 thread, a user asked the subreddit why they loved Shkreli so much.

r/wallstreetbets is a community that celebrates making risky plays in the stock market (aka YOLOs) while being unabashedly pro-capitalist and lacking any sort of moral scruples. Shkreli, whos considered the embodiment of wall street greed, thus makes for an excellent idol, a user named cuminme69420 replied.

Members of r/WallStreetBets have been going long, or YOLOing, on GameStop stock for over a year now. According to r/WallStreetBets users, the struggling retailer was simply undervalued by Wall Street. The chain is also a long-standing fixation for Internet communities like 4chan and Reddit. Theres an entire genre of 4chan post about GameStop.

The fact that the retailer is operating physical stores amid a pandemic and that its business relies on selling video games, which can easily be undercut by companies like Amazon, made it a target for short sellers. By borrowing shares to sell nowand buying them later to repay the loan after a stocks price has fallenshort sellers can make a tidy profit. The problem is that prices may rise, and if, for example, a stock borrowed and sold at $10 a share in hopes that it will fall to $5which would double the short sellers investmentrises instread, the borrowed shares still must be paid back, meaning that losses for traders caught in this short squeeze could be limitless. The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that Melvin Capital, one of the huge hedge funds that was shorting GameStop, saw a 53 percent loss on its investments in January.Current Issue

Subscribe today and Save up to $129.

The subreddits first big target was investment analysis firm Citron Research. According to Andrew Left, the firms founder, redditors attempted to hack into his Twitter account, disrupted company livestreams, and made threats of physical violence against him and his family. He announced last week that Citron Research would no longer be publishing short -selling reports.

Its this two-pronged attack that makes what r/WallStreetBets is doing right now so unique. It is collectively pumpingboosting the share priceof stocks shorted by hedge funds, while also waging an information war. 4chan and Reddit pursued a similar strategy in 2016 in support of the Trump presidential campaign. These communities decentralized a political movement, rebuilding it to function better on huge social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. What is happening around GameStop right now, however, is the first time this viral reality bending has been applied to something like the financial world at this scale. The GameStop pump, like Trumpism, QAnon, or Gamergate, is also a meme first and a political movement second. And ideologies born from the Internet evolve like any other kind of Internet content.

The subreddit gained 2 million subscribers as the battle with Citron Research attracted attention. By early last week, the subreddit was going down regularly, struggling to handle the amount of traffic it was getting. It also inspired a wave of conspiracy theories about whether Reddit was trying to censor the community, which, by that point, had constructed a manifesto of sorts.

These funds can manipulate the market via your network and if they screw up big because they dont even know the basics of portfolio risk 101 and using position sizing, they just get a bailout from their billionaire friends at Citadel, a user named RADIO02118 wrote last Monday. Seriously. Motherfuck these people. I sincerely hope they suffer. We want to see the loss porn.

If you like this article, please give today to help fund The Nations work.

r/WallStreetBets users have also threatened to kill reporters and Jews. Last week, the subreddits main Discord server was shut down because of out-of-control racism and paranoid conspiracy theories. Users declare love for Pepe the Frog, throw slurs around, and idolize Elon Musk. Though there are wholesome dimensions to this. DeepFuckingValue, a Reddit user named Keith Gill who had been one of the diehards going long on GameStop, is a 34-year-old dad from Boston who just loved talking about stocks on the Internet. But the architects of the Trumpian culture war like Steve Bannon have so successfully appropriated meme culture that most content that appears in normal Internet forums for young men now is indistinguishable from what you would see in a Proud Boys Telegram group.

While it can be hard to fully articulate what r/WallStreetBets stands forand this will continue to changewhat is clear is that r/WallStreetBets decided to move the market in a particular way and then did so. This is both an objectively terrifying and thrilling idea. There is a visible queasiness on the part of CNBC anchors and market experts dissecting all of this on air.

Though the GameStop pump has already reached critical mass, we are at the stage in the meme cycle where there are too many mysterious obelisks appearing to keep track of and every new one looks worse. Following the main Discord servers going offline, numerous breakaway servers appeared, organizing stranger and weirder financial campaigns, like buying stock in AMC or Blockbuster (two other firms whose struggles in the real world would frighten off rational investors) or inflating the value of the dogecoin, a joke cryptocurrency that, up until last Thursdays 800 percent spike, was virtually worthless. Its value dropped almost 50 percent over the weekend.

Were also now seeing the trading platforms that prop up this world beginning to buckle under the pumps momentum. Robinhood, one of the most popular stock trading apps in America, suddenly, last Thursday, froze all buying of a number of Reddit-targeted stocks. This is not dissimilar to Facebooks attempts at last-minute moderation to stop the carnage inside the Capitol. There is now a raft of conspiracy theories about why Robinhood intervened. It is not difficult to imagine how this could develop into a financial equivalent of QAnon.

Things will probably get weirder. r/WallStreetBets connected virality and commerce more directly than ever before. The chaotic whims of the Internet can now directly be translated into money. And like every new trick an online community learns, meme pumping will most likely be used for fun as much as it will be for terror. And the next wave may not even involve finance.

Every sector of our society is being remade in the image of the webour media, our democracies, and now our financial institutions. Most of the digital populist uprisings weve seen around the world resulted in destruction, death, and weaker democracies, though. So, yes, r/WallStreetBets could, as some cheerleaders on both sides of the political spectrum have argued, finally make the market more fair and egalitarian. But it seems more likely to be the harbinger of waves of speculation bubbles that constantly destabilize the market.

If all it takes is a few million Internet users to upend the stock market, then whats stopping other communities from organizing their own financial assaults? For instance, before Parler went offline, it had over 23 million users. Thats three times as many users as there are on r/WallStreetBets right now. Some of those users already tried to storm the Capitol. What could a group like that do to the market?

Read the rest here:
The Paradoxical Politics of the GameStop Pump - The Nation

The image of a frigid old socialist hunched in a folding chair, wearing brown and white patterned mittens and not looking particularly happy to be there, spread at warp speed across the internet seconds after it was captured at Joe Bidens January 20 inauguration. Within hours, hundreds of thousands of photoshopped versions of the image saturated newsfeeds and timelines, making it near impossible to scroll through any social media platform without seeing Bernie Sanders and his mittens.

Bernie showed up in famous movie scenes and iconic historical moments, alongside A-list celebrities and pop cultural ephemera. An entire genre of art historical works that include Vermonts junior senator have now sprung up. For days, the zeitgeist was fixated on Cold Bernie.

Despite its popularity, this is not the first political meme to achieve such saturation in recent political history. Just four years ago, a very different image exploded onto our screens: the punching of neo-Nazi Richard Spencer by an anonymous anti-fascist protester on the streets of Washington, DC outside of Donald Trumps inauguration.

Much like the Bernie mittens meme, the video and still images of Spencers punching were ubiquitous. Within days, millions of people had watched the white nationalist get socked in the face as he showed off his co-opted Pepe the Frog pin to an Australian television interviewer.

Spencer, who claims to have coined the term alt-right, treated the inauguration as a victory lap for his brand of Third Reichinspired reactionary politics aimed at creating a white ethno state. Media outlets from the Atlantic to Mother Jones profiled Spencer in the months leading up to the punch, providing a massive platform for his racist views. He reveled in the attention and boasted about his movement populated by memelords advancing their politics through trolling, inspired by a Dark Enlightenment philosophy built upon white grievance.

Spencer came to represent the larger white nationalist current in American politics that saw itself as ascendant alongside Trump. So when Spencer got clocked, a lot of people were very happy to watch it happen and then watch it again, and again, and again. Spencer had attempted to project strength and power to show the superiority of white male chauvinism and the growing movement he represented. Instead, he and by extension, his movement were humiliated in public.

The meme was a brief bit of comic relief in a moment of crisis and fear over the future of American democracy. Trump rode into office on a noxiously reactionary politics that promised to enshrine corporate power while targeting immigrants and other communities of color, refugees, and the poor and working class. In office, Trump attempted to make good on these promises but often failed, through a combination of his own incompetence, the fact that his ideas actually were not popular, and the pushback he was constantly met with, including by masses of people in the streets opposing him.

Today, many of those same people who protested Trump are now sharing memes of Bernie Sanders sitting masked and socially distanced at President Bidens inauguration. At the heart of the Bernie meme is the feeling felt by so many on the broad left: a great relief that Trump is out of the White House, but a lack of excitement about the warmed-over neoliberal Democrat who displaced him.

So at a pageant-like inauguration, characterized by participants like Lady Gaga sporting an enormous golden dove brooch that looked like something out of The Hunger Games, it was refreshing to see Sanders wearing a Burton snowboard jacket given to him by his son and mittens made by a Vermont teacher, looking as if he didnt feel much like celebrating when millions of Americans are out of work and a deadly virus ravages the country. Sanderss pose communicated a rejection of the political classs self-congratulations. In a single pose, Bernie seemed to take a look at Joe Biden and say to the world, Yeah, good. Ok. It was relatable.

Tens of millions of Americans are facing hunger, eviction, and foreclosure. Inequality continues to soar as the rich profit lavishly off of the pandemic. With a lack of free, publicly provided health care plaguing working people, the case has never been stronger for Medicare for All. The same goes for a Green New Deal, to put people to work building renewable energy and green infrastructure; student debt cancellation, to relieve millions from crushing debt obligations; monthly direct payments to help working people survive the COVID-19 crisis; and a break of the corporate stranglehold over our politics.

Yet the candidate who ran on this transformative agenda was not sworn in on January 20 instead, he was sitting alone in mittens, ready for the whole thing to be over with so he could get to work taking on the billionaire class.

The threat represented by Richard Spencer wasnt vanquished with his being punched. As we saw on January 6, the far right that Trump helped stoke isnt gone. Yet its also clear that the pro-Trump hordes and white nationalist hucksters represent a minoritarian fringe. Far from being ascendant, they are now marginalized. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders is the new chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, and, with both houses of Congress in Democratic control and Biden as president, he plans to be aggressive in pushing through a progressive agenda.

As the Nazi-punching meme began to spread across the internet in early 2017, Richard Spencer fretted about its potential impact: Im afraid this is going to become the meme to end all memes. But it turns out it was just the meme that ended Spencers own disgusting career. Bernie, however, is still blowing up.

Go here to read the rest:
A Tale of Two Inauguration Memes - Jacobin magazine

Between three group chats Im in, the word pog appears 280 times. Its a term that has broken into the mainstream, and if youve talked to teenagers recently, chances are youve heard the word. But who is the man behind the now-iconic PogChamp?

PogChamp and its variations, pog and poggers, have grown from a niche Internet meme to a commonplace phrase for extremely online Gen Z-ers. The original PogChamp image (seen below) is used as an expression of joy or excitement.

The image originates from a 2010 YouTube video in which Ryan gootecks Gutierrez reacts to a cameraman almost knocking over a camera. In 2012, the emote was added to Twitchs global database, allowing the image to be easily sent in chat during livestreams. The name PogChamp was chosen due to Gutierrezs involvement in a promotional video in which Gutierrez and his co-host Mike Ross play pogs, a classic 90s toy. The ad ends with Gutierrez proudly claiming the two to be pog champions.

PogChamps reputation grew alongside Twitch, as it began growing prominent content creators and communities of its own through the 2010s. Eventually, these circles began growing into the mainstream, such as prominent Fortnite streamer Tyler Ninja Blevins, who appeared on the television show The Masked Singer. Twitch - and its unique culture, PogChamp included - would even seep into the world of politics, as politicians such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Raphael Warnock, and Sen. Jon Ossoff would use the platform for GOTV campaigns.

Throughout all of this, PogChamp remained one of the most popular emotes on the platform, and grew into a universal symbol of hype and enthusiasm. Whenever something exciting happened during a Twitch stream, viewers were encouraged to drop pogs in the chat.

While the popularity of both Twitch and PogChamp grew, Gutierrezs own reputation began to sink. Gutierrez had a history of using his platform to engage with conspiracy theories. In a 2012 video, he warned about the Illuminati and encouraged his viewers to watch the conspiracy documentary series Zeitgeist. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, his affinity for conspiracy theories would be pushed to the forefront, as he took to Twitter to espouse harmful rhetoric about the virus. In March, Gutierrez suggested that a fellow streamer that tested positive for COVID-19 take hydroxychloroquine, which at the time was thought to be a potential cure in right wing circles but had been denounced by the FDA.

In August, Gutierrez doubled down on advocating for hydroxychloroquine. He continued to cite a singular article, published by far right news source The Gateway Pundit, and insisted that mainstream media and social media censorship was obscuring progress.

In a Reddit post responding to criticism on Twitter, he referred to the ongoing pandemic as a coronacircus. As it stands, the post has 0 upvotes, and 670 comments, the majority of which tell him off for his idiocy.

User ArgenAstra stated that, whenever someone asks about the pogchamp guy theyll get sent here.

Gutierrez voiced his opinions again on Jan. 6, 2021, during the insurrection against the United States Capitol. He referenced the death of Ashli Babbitt in a tweet asking, if there would be civil unrest for the woman executed inside the Capitol?

This comment pushed Twitch over the edge, as they later removed PogChamp from the platform as a direct consequence of Gutierrezs comments. On Twitter, Twitch stated it could simply not continue to enable use of the image in good conscience.

Twitch also noted that it wanted the sentiment and use of Pog to live on - its meaning is much bigger than the person depicted or the image itself. And indeed, poggers has developed into a cultural phenomenon. Many friends of mine detached from Twitch culture use poggers conversationally. Rep. Ilhan Omar tweeted the phrase in October, asking if she had used it correctly. Few people reading Rep. Omars tweet would have connected her usage of the phrase to a right wing insurrectionist. Gutierrez had lost association with the symbol.

A few days later, Twitch announced that they would choose a new daily PogChamp by setting the emote to be the face of a different creator every 24 hours - the truest representation of the community. And although this decision has come with controversy of its own, as some creators have been targets of harassment, Twitch has left Gutierrez in the past. The symbol now stands for the community, for enthusiasm and for hype.

In the Internet era, symbols often outgrow their creators - usually with disastrous consequences. Matt Furie, the creator of Pepe the Frog, resents the alt-right icon that Pepe had developed into during the Trump administration. In an interview with Time, Furie states that it's completely insane that Pepe has been labeled a symbol of hate, and that racists and anti-Semites are using a once peaceful frog-dude from my comic book as an icon of hate. Still, despite many efforts to take back his image from the clutches of internet, Pepes reputation has been forever tainted by his association with racism and anti-Semitism.

PogChamp is a case study in the opposite: a creation outgrowing its controversial creator, and developing into a representation of both pure enthusiasm and the strength of the Twitch community.

And that? Thats poggers.

See the rest here:
PogChamp and the man behind it - North by Northwestern

Militiamen showed up proudly bearing the emblems of their groups American flags with the stars replaced by the Roman numeral III, patches that read Oath Keepers. Alt-right types wore Pepe the Frog masks, and QAnon adherents could be seen in T-shirts urging people to Trust the Plan. White supremacists brought their variant of the Crusader cross.

And then there were thousands of Trump supporters with MAGA gear flags, hats, T-shirts, thermoses, socks. One flag portrayed President Trump as Rambo; another featured him riding a Tyrannosaurus rex and carrying the kind of rocket-propelled grenade launcher seen on the streets of Mogadishu or Kandahar.

The iconography of the American far right was on display during the violence at the Capitol last week. The dizzying array of symbols, slogans and images was, to many Americans, a striking aspect of the unrest, revealing an alternate political universe where violent extremists, racists and conspiracy theorists march side by side with evangelical Christians, suburban Trump supporters and young men who revel in making memes to own the libs.

Uniting them is a loyalty to Mr. Trump and a firm belief in his false and discredited insistence that the election was stolen. The absurdity of many images only masked a devotion that inspired a mob to mount a deadly attack on Congress.

Its often all a caricature it looks like military fan fiction until its not and it crosses a very dangerous line, said Joan Donovan, the research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Visit link:
How to decode the far-right symbols at the Capitol riot. - The New York Times

A series of deep dives into the weirder side of Instagram food.

In the early months of the pandemic, bakers across social media were captivated by frog bread, a trend that involved creating silly, amphibian-shaped loaves. Almost a year into pandemic life, and many fleeting food trends later, frog cakes have taken over social media: most of them featuring chubby, smiling buttercream frogs atop colorful and retro-inspired cakes.

Variations of frog cakes are popular on Instagram, and on TikTok, the hashtag #frogcake has 6.6 million views as of this writing, with many of the recent viral hits having been created within the last month. This sudden popularity has come as a surprise to Chicago-based baker Claire Ma, whose designs as Oracle Bakery, appear to be what many #frogcake bakers are imitating.

Since she started baking in the summer of 2020 to fill her pandemic-fueled free time, Ma has become well-known online for her childlike, cartoony decorating style. Heavily piped, her cakes feature pastel colors and often include pairs of rotund animal figures in a variety of scenes: frogs playing checkers or ducks with cigarettes on a rainy day. Recently, in the process of hiring a web developer to build Oracle Bakery's website, one candidate told Ma she'd seen her work all over TikTok. "I'm like, I'm not even on TikTok; I have no idea what's going on," Ma said. "I think it's definitely spiraled to something that's way bigger than me."

Ma posted her first frog cake in October: a blue cake with a happy, rosy-cheeked frog holding a flower amid a forest of smiling toadstool mushrooms. Though she admired the intricate rococo designs by decorators like Lily Vanilli Bakery and briefly gave jelly cakes a try, Ma landed on her current chubby animal style in part because of its simplicity. "[Frogs] are kind of derpy-looking so I feel like people can really relate to that," said Ma, who is a fan of frog meme and aesthetic accounts. "But honestly, another reason why I started frogs is [that] they're really easy to pipewhen you think about the anatomy of an icing frog, it's a blob of icing with two eyes on top." These designs also call to mind the retro, cartoony work of creators like @benny.cake and @good.to.seeyou.

This ease of replicating has certainly helped the frosting frogs spin off. After her "Friends Forever" frog cake in November, Ma started noticing an influx of "fancakes," images of which people would send to her or tag her in. "I never intended to make a viral or gimmicky cake initiallyI don't really want it to be seen as a gimmick, to be quite honest," she said. "It's cute, it's something new. People just really seem to connect with those frogs." Now, creators riffing on Oracle Bakery cakes imagine their frogs in many ways: solo and holding a heart; slightly taller and posing with a star; as a pair dressed in overalls or sitting above rainbows; and so on, as frog cake fans try to make the format fit their decorating experience.

Baker Janaya Felder found that her Instagram Explore page was "completely overrun with frog cakes" at the start of this year, and she was especially drawn to the version by baking blogger and cookbook author Amy Ho of Constellation Inspiration. Through Ho's caption, Felder learned that frog cakes were big on TikTok, and she found Oracle Bakery's designs. "I had never seen so many adorable cakes and instantly fell in love with her work," said Felder, whose childhood obsession with the children's book characters Frog and Toad made the frogs especially appealing. She tried her hand at the frog cake as part of a New Year's resolution to try new techniques, and it's one of her favorite cakes, to date.

Oracle Bakery cakes have inspired fans outside the food world. Artists on Instagram have recreated Ma's designs in a variety of styles. "Theres just something so happy and wholesome about that colorful little frog friend telling you it's all okay," said illustrator Laura Coppolaro, who recently shared a piece based on an Oracle Bakery cake. Just this week, soapmaker Soap Sud Buds posted frog cake-inspired bars of soap. Large frog meme pages like @frogoclock have turned Mas cakes into memes: around one cake, it reads, "Pretty pls can this be us? This could be us."

Frogs have been in an "internet golden age," Insider's Palmer Haasch wrote in June of last year. "They're such a weird animal because they're not cute in the fuzzy kitten kind of way. They're cute in the oddball, sort of awkward way," Ma said. "That's what I like about them." To Haasch, this growing interest has helped frogs transcend the association of Pepe the Frog and become wholesome icons instead, especially amid the growth of the cottagecore and goblincore aesthetics. That wholesome nature is clear in the use of a frog cake image by @mollyskattberg; it's present in a meme that suggests looking at frogs might help get one through hard times, and another that lists a series of personal affirmations.

The online frog world ("frogcore") is full of even-more-specific niches, and frog-themed cakesthose that don't resemble Oracle Bakery's designshave long been an object of fascination. In November 2018, two parents in Australia went viral after they requested a cake with a big green frog and received a green sheet cake piped with a "pathetic" smiley face and the number three. (In 2020, the frog-focused Instagram creator @pixieeeshop turned this design into limited-edition earrings.) The popular cake account @_hoe_cakes_ shared "a year of froggy face cakes" for its one year anniversary in late December. Global oddities curator Gastro Obscura has highlighted the individual-sized, fondant-covered frog cakes that have been popular in Australia since 1922.

The current wave of frog cakes are a niche within a niche within a niche. Likewise, the online cake world is growing and increasingly developing its own micro-trends. Pandemic life in particular has spurred the rise of small, cake-focused side projects, new styles, and specialized Instagram accounts.

While Instagram especially has started to feel more and more like a marketplace, these small trends and the moments they convergewhen the cake world collides with the frog world, for exampleare reminders that the soul of social media is still its ability to connect, even over the smallest thing. At its most wholesome, social media is a place to express our most niche interests (Frogs! Cakes! Whatever suits your fancy!), find fellow weirdos online, and come togetherall over the worldin these rare, wholesome moments.

Follow Bettina Makalintal on Twitter.

See more here:
Frog Cakes Are the Best Thing Online Right Now - VICE