Like everyone this week, I was obsessed with the GameStop story and how a group of Reddit day traders seemingly came out of nowhere wreak havoc on the stock market and take down short-selling hedge funders. I’ve been collecting dozens of links and have thousands of words in a post that will never leave my drafts because by Friday a switch just flipped for me; I was done with this iteration of the cycle we seem to be stuck in, at least for the time being.

GameStop felt compelling because it captured, or at least seemed to, so much of this exact moment in a way that for a few days was powerful and provocative. Are stock indices now as useless as political polling? Is all of this as incredibly stupid, yet funny, but also as dangerous as it seems? Doesn’t it feel good to dunk on Twitter blowhards and hypocritical tech CEOs? How much does CNBC continue to suck? Yes, but after a few days it just felt as exhausting as everything else.

John Herrman, writing in the Times, gets at a lot of this anxiety:

So what’s the joke, exactly? For The_Donald, one “joke” was that a bunch of self-described losers could help Donald Trump become “God Emperor.” (They were happy with “President.”) For WallStreetBets, the “joke” was that a group of self-described losers (their preferred real descriptors are unprintable) could rig the financial system in their own favor. The punchline was GameStop, and tens of billions of dollars in actual market activity.

The bigger joke, shared by these communities and plenty of others, is, well, everything. Everything is a farce and a fraud, and the surest, or at least most available, way to get ahead is to treat it as such. This is a profoundly nihilistic worldview, and one that in plenty of other contexts might meet hard limits, or come with terrible costs.

Candidate Trump was a joke, right up until Hillary Clinton gave her concession speech. Everyone knows the kind of abusive asshole that claims he’s “just joking” as some kind of defense against his being an asshole; the internet has long enabled that as a form of trolling that’s now spilled out into the world.

Brian Feldman sees a kind of novelty in a return to a more actively engaged internet, where shitposting at least beats being washed over by algorithms.

The front page of r/WallStreetBets is dominated by shitposts and memes and rallying cries (the associated Discord is largely unhelpful for anyone trying to learn anything as well), but to better understand the subreddit, I recommend looking at a section of it known as “DD,” which stands for “due diligence.” These posts vary in comprehensiveness, convincingness, and tone, but the best ones harness publicly available info that nobody outside of the finance industry and serious retail investors ever pays attention to. It’s tough to shitpost your way through a due diligence assessment. The DD posts read a lot like (how I remember) the crowdsourced research into the cat-bin lady did: blunt, casual, occasionally tasteless, but still, accurate or genuinely striving to be, using info that’s not tough to find online if you know where to look (or are really motivated).

Absent the infinite number of motivations caught up in the Gamestop rally (profit, justice, instability, laughs), it’s this dynamic that is most interesting to me. The modern internet is one of complacency, letting aggregators and algorithms bring stuff to you, rather than seek it out. It has made the internet worse in many ways. But I tihnk what makes the r/WallStreetBets story so novel is that it’s a lot of people doing research, plumbing data, looking for patterns, in addition to talking shit. Aside from the stuff specific to the finance industry, the Gamestop story is about people on the internet making a deliberate effort to seek out information, rather than waiting for a system to deliver it automatically. It’s the increasingly rare story of people being active in substantial ways — which then kicks off countless, mindless Robinhood transactions.

If this has all got you down, don’t worry: there are Dril tweets.