I am fascinated by the r/wallstreetbets community. No one on r/wsb earnestly believes that there is a relation between economic utility or success and the value of a stock price — most users tend to agree that the entire system is rigged in one way or another. That a highly unstable and contrived AI bubble currently underwrites almost all stock market growth, and for that matter, economic growth, is clearly diagnosed in each daily discussion thread, each new announcement of a multi-billion dollar circlejerk partnership between Nvidia and OpenAI. A common response to a user’s detailed prospectus, recommending or debasing a stock, is to reference this cynicism: “I ain’t reading all that — don’t you know this is a casino?”
There is an implicit understanding that the rich and powerful have more information, and the means to act on that information, than any plebeian in r/wsb could hope to acquire. Everyone knows, for instance, that the President is probably manipulating the stock market on a daily basis by posturing, threatening, enacting, and retracting sanctions and tariffs. Most lived through 2008, when a small group of exorbitantly wealthy bankers defrauded the rest of the country for trillions of dollars and were rewarded, rather than stoned in the streets. And everyone on r/wsb remembers, because it was their bets which created the crisis, the great GameStop short squeeze of 2021, when it became readily apparent that the ruling class — banks, politicians, and the regulatory agencies they control — play by different rules than the rest of us.
r/wsb is more than conscious of American financial power and the inequalities (of power, wealth, mobility) it necessitates. But rather than ask: what can we do to change this system? its users instead posit: when the system is so obviously rigged, what else is there to do but try and make a buck before it inevitably comes crashing down?
Donald Trump Jr. is a strategic advisor at Kalshi, the largely unregulated “prediction market” which allows its users to bet on any number of real world events — will the leader of Iran, Ali Khameini, be ousted before September 1st? Today, 38% of Kalshi users think so.
One can’t help but wonder if in the age of information overload, online schizophrenia passing for socialization, the never-ending deluge of cataclysms, each one stranger and more deleterious than the next — can we really imagine ourselves as agents in the same way? And if we aren’t agents, if numb spectatorship feels like the only path available, why not embrace the r/wallstreetbets mentality and board the riverboat casino at the end of the world?
An omen, a canary in the data megacenter, if you will. This mood of cynicism appears to be pervading more and more facets of our lives. In my lifetime, no fuck-up, war, looting of the public, or political scandal has led to any real accountability. At present, a whole sector of elites, including a former President and the current President, are implicated in a decades-long child sex-traffficking ring. No one honestly believes they will face justice. Neither did the neocon ghouls and their media allies who murdered a million Iraqis in order to line their pockets. Dick Cheney died peacefully, not in manacles, as will the financial elites who swindled, cheated and pilloried the American people in 2008. Joe Biden too will ride off into the sunset despite enabling a genocide which was carried out in full view of the world, each of us absorbing the slaughter in excruciating detail.
The mood is bleak. A great hacksaw is gnawing through the rope which connects knowing and acting. Our President kidnapped the leader of a sovereign nation, posted what amounted to imperial porn of that leader shackled, humiliated and blindfolded, and did not even do us the decency of lying about his motivations (at least Bush attempted to couch the invasion of Iraq in lies and moral appeals). He wanted the oil, he wanted to establish imperial dominion and intimidate Venezuela’s neighbors, so he did, and he bragged about it.
If our President no longer seems particularly interested in tricking us, one has to wonder what other techniques are being deployed. Gramsci argued that hegemony worked on a spectrum: ruling governments attempt to maintain power through consent, fostering a belief among the population that the ruling ideas are universal and beneficial, even though they usually are ideas which benefit a small group of elites and exploit the rest; when consent falters, the other end of the spectrum — force — takes center stage. Out come the brownshirts and paramilitaries; the shock troops of law and order (ICE recruits from the Proud Boys) descend. As a Communist Party leader in Italy, Gramsci lived through the hope engendered in the European left by the Bolshevik Revolution and the shocking defeats of the 1920s, as hope for an egalitarian future was swept aside by fascism. Gramsci himself was imprisoned by Mussolini until his death in 1937. From prison, he wrote these endlessly quoted (and misquoted) sentences: “The old world is dying, and the new struggles to be born. In the interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Zizek amended the final statement: “Now is the time of monsters.”
What replaces consent, other than raw force? Numbness? Apathy? Masochism? Can these emotions be manufactured, our political agencies beaten into submission until we are left to impotently gamble on outcomes, rather than seeing ourselves as drivers of those outcomes? Can transparent spectacles of domination replace subtle ideological manipulation?
Trump certainly revels in these spectacles of domination, spectacles that mark who is and isn’t worthy of Americanness, of citizenship, ultimately, of life. His death cult of imagery takes form in the social media of ICE and DHS. Under Trump, what was once an official government feed replete with dull press releases has been transformed into a spectacle-producing machine, dousing our timelines with sadistic – and often disingenuously edited – snuff films. Right-wing influencers like Dr. Phil, Libs Of TikTok, and the late Charlie Kirk are invited on ride-alongs with the Gestapo and leaked “exclusive footage” to amplify the effect. A Washington Post report in December, based on a review of internal ICE and DHS communications, demonstrated that the deluge of ICE content was orchestrated by the White House, under directions from Trump to “flood the airwaves,” or, as the Assistant Director for Public Affairs at ICE put it: “feed the beast.”
Trump is more than happy to feed our libidinal urges. His ever-more-absurd exploits are raw material to sustain the engagement machine. In the same breath, or tweet, he’s capable of evoking rage or pride in his base and manufacturing apathy in his opponents. Consent hardly enters the equation.
If there is any coherent message that Trump projects, it is the rule of raw force. Dog-eat-dog. The laws of the jungle. The guy with the bigger stick wins. The debased image of Maduro, posted just hours after his kidnapping, carries the same valence as the carefully curated videos of ICE raids on Home Depot. Trump’s politics are synonymous with the images which he hurls into the virtual world at warp-speed. This “aestheticizing of politics,” warned Walter Benjamin, is the trademark of fascism.
The signs of our time – the time of monsters? Perhaps. At least I got good odds on PolyMarket that the monster will eat my face off before the new year.