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have been kinda riveted by what's been going on with g*mestop stock over the past week, it almost feels like a financial g*mergate in a way
g*mestop if you do not know is a US retailer focused on "core" gamers. they sell consoles, physical copies of games, and t-shirts and action figures. their model used to be based around buying and selling used games but these days a lot of games are sold digitally
the company's stock was very low even a couple of months ago, owing to a widespread perception that gaming's future is digital/cloud-based and that the whole concept of gaming hardware retailer such as g*mestop is outdated
i won't get into the specifics because i'm not a finance person but basically what's happened over the past month is that the market has become incredibly polarized between establishment traders who think the company will fail and musty redditors who believe it will succeed
the battle between these two factions - institutional short sellers betting the stock will go down and a populist mob of bulls relentlessly buying during dips in the price to drive it back up - has sent g*mestop stock to prices that feel stratospheric
it's a bit like what happened with t*sla in 2018. institutional actors believed the stock was worth too much relative to traditional automakers and shorted it, t*sla superfans kept buying it anyway. the populist mob won that one handily, as i'm sure you can guess
i think actually people who are confused about the cult of t*sla may not be aware of how much the stock price has risen in the past few years. of course people are mindlessly devoted to that company - it was the center of a financial culture war that made them all rich
anyway the mob of pro-g*mestop bulls feels similar to the cult of t*sla, and also to the communities that spearheaded g*mergate. their cause has seeped into their identities as human beings. it's become part of who they are and why they're motivated to organize and fight
pro-g*mestop bull posting often reads just like dispatches from the deepest, mustiest corners of the gamer internet. cries of "they don't understand our culture!" and "those out-of-touch elites have underestimated us for the last time!" abounding
and at the moment, the bulls are winning. as i write this, g*mestop stock is soaring to $43 a share. in early december, it was trading at $13 a share. establishment finance actors are starting to get on board, staving off the crash that short-sellers are hoping for
the long-term bull case for g*mestop involves a transition to e-commerce under the guidance of the CEO who built chewy, the website i use to buy my dog food. bulls believe a high quality e-commerce platform focused on core gamers can compete with amazon and best buy
i don't really know how i feel about it personally. it feels like a culture war. a lot of bulls are motivated by a desire to demand that the market recognize the value of their culture. the parallels to g*mergate seem very obvious to me, maybe not to others
i wonder if this situation is heralding bigger, more impactful happenings to come the way g*mergate sort of prefigured 2016 in a lot of ways. i think the true scale of the impact of political polarization in america has not yet dawned on us. so much still left to polarize
i'm not an expert, i just find stuff like this interesting, but even so i feel like this is evidence that we are not moving away from polarization, we are trending towards bigger and deeper and stranger forms of polarization than we've ever seen before
