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The firstweeksof2021 sawinvestors-bothnaiveandexperienced-"YOLO" their life savings by purchasing shares of GameStop, an aging mall-based video game retailer, in the hopes of bringing down Wall Street while becoming rich in the process [see (cjjctgbhlikesDMeat, 2021) for one example of hundreds]. During this time, GameStop's stock price skyrocketed partly due to promotion by members of the Reddit subforum r/wallstreetbets (hereafter "WSB"). From January 15 to 27, GameStop stock rose from just under $40 (already a huge increase from its high in 2020) to a high of $483, back under $50 by February 10, and over $300 in early March, before "settling" around the mid-$100s in the months thereafter. In those early weeks in January, the population of WSB rose from two to over nine million, with new subscribers joining apparently due to the media frenzy around the stock. Although none of us are privy to the portfolios of all nine million "apes" (one of the least offensive self-naming terms of WSB posters), hundreds linked screenshots of their purchase orders at $300/ share or higher, only to find themselves immediately experiencing huge paper losses, some of which became real when they quickly sold the stock due to fear or (more likely) embarrassment (Rorerore92, 2021).
The outlines of this story were widely reported with blame assigned to various entities: Reddit users attempting to "pump and dump" the stock, the common Wall Street practices of short selling and options trading, or market manipulation by large investment firms and brokers such as Robinhood (see, e.g., Choe, 2021; Michaels, 2021; "Reader's Guide," 2021). My goal is not to explore the reasons for GameStop's meteoric rise and volatility; at this stage in the story, such issues are more the realm of Congressional hearing than academic paper. A more pressing question for General Semantics, as well as media ecology, would ask a large group of novice investors were convinced to invest in GameStop and other "meme stocks."1 Addressing this issue requires us to study the Internet as a media environment as well as Reddit and WSB as a culture. The Internet's many-to-many communication structure and instantaneous content delivery have, among other things, produced numerous subcultures based on everything from superhero films to investing. These subcultures generate and traffic in a language of memes, inside...