Rent Seeking and Seminars as "Class Warfare"
How "Dumb Money" and rants about "financial literacy" sells the same idea as NFTs, crypto, and every other "hustle culture" pyramid scheme sold to dupe the poor.
A recent clip of the new movie “Dumb Money” illustrates exactly the vision of “freedom” that works hand in glove with making sure actual power is never changed. For people who aren’t familiar “Dumb Money” is a movie fictionalizing the events around the recent market boom surrounding Gamestop stock. A group of users on Reddit found that a lot of big financial investment firms were shorting GameStop stock and decided to bet against them.
At the time this was framed as a grassroots bottom-up revolt against "Big Finance” which could show the way the “little guy” could outsmart the big money people at their own game and exact some measure of revenge for the current plight of society. This version of events requires a lot of elisions. Even upon cursory examination this “revolution” was going to be limited to people with disposable incomes, access to the internet, and the niche interests that draw people to chat rooms about stock investment. Even the most optimistic scenario here would’ve seen this select group of people capture most of the gains from this “people’s movement” of mass stock manipulation.
If this sounds familiar that is because this is the same structure that doomed NFTs and crypto as revolutionary technologies designed to upend the traditional financial system. Upon a cursory understanding of the model, “buy this thing and before you know it so many *other* people will want it you won’t have to work again” reveals the way the model isn’t meant to work for everyone. Even more damning is the cynicism inherent in promising this model, however limited, as a strike against the larger model of capitalism for which they’re representative. It’s like offering someone the “hair of the dog” when they’re suffering from a hangover. Even if it temporarily works you’re really only compounding the issue you’re meaning to address in the first place.
Personally, I’ve seen the way these schemes work to corrupt people’s hope in desperate straits to swindle them at what is often one of their lowest moments. I remember being forced to sit through time-share presentations as my young parents were looking for a way to afford any way to relax. I remember the despair of family members who got dressed up for their first job interview in months only to realize they were being sold a bullshit promise to sell knives and struggle with themselves as they have to talk themselves out of buying into the scam. As funny as memes like “diamond hands”, and other forum lingo may be this is the beating heart of the constant resurrection of get-rich-quick schemes that continue to be a larger and larger proportion of the US economy.
As self-defeating as the logic is it must be remarked that it is hegemonic. Even amongst the most dialectical and materialist of political thinkers a recurring feature of our discourse is that everyone seems to be addicted to yelling at people with the least amount of power to actually address the issue they’re yelling about. Our individualist mode of politics has come to suffuse our thinking to the point of severely hindering our imaginations for even rudimentary accountability and action. We’ve adopted the “Dumb Money” model of politics. Searching for one brilliant blow or insight that will upend our imagined rivals and showcase our singular genius even if it does nothing to fundamentally challenge the structures that have brought us here in the first place.
This inclines our advocacy towards attempting to dictate individual consumer attitudes instead of demanding regulations and structures to prevent exploitation and abuse. We imagine the power of our dollar or individual sentiment to be terribly powerful social forces as they allow us to opt out of taking substantive steps to demand action from people with power. We have to look at this current moment of labor action and solidarity to steer people away from buying into the narrative of the plucky investor sticking it to the large firms and towards a truly community-based model of prosperity that doesn’t depend on being savvy or self-promoting.
The ending of the GameStop saga is illustrative here. When trading houses didn’t have the capital to cover the trades that people were making on the platforms they promised were vehicles for everyday empowerment they simply stopped trading. Whether the app was named “RobinHood” or not we saw many people lose money because the system in and of itself is not designed for mass prosperity. Instead there we some winners, there were some losers, and the fundamental circumstances that prompted this “revolt” remain unchanged.