one of the other many many many angles of the gamestop shit i'm focusing on is all the investment people circling around "you won't be laughing when it's your stock" and being unable to process everyone going "what stock"

people's retirement stuff moved from pensions, to 401ks, to "nobody has anything" but The Market requires constantly pretending/believing that everyone actually has more money to spend while also making sure nobody pays anyone anything but the bare minimum if that

yeah, like, the '08 bubble wiped people out and then, after that... people got even less? and/or they no longer cared about what they 'technically' had in the market because on a gut level they understood it was meaningless https://twitter.com/StochasticOoze/status/1354474998082093056

the 'recovery' was shifting everyone to worse and worse paying jobs, more gig economy shit with less worker's protections, less people have or care about stock at all than ever before but the market's functionality requires pretending it's still the 80s/90s

as ever in this subject i'm reminded of when car companies researched why young people weren't buying cars anymore. they couldn't accept the obvious answer - "we have no money" - so they decided that it was because people would rather buy things connected to the internet

after all, if people have no money, then they can't buy your products, and then your value goes down and you might lose your job. but the shareholders demand your value must always go up! so you just lie about reality because stock value is entirely based on perception

the economy at large is just people playing pretend and lying to each other and knowing they're lying but choosing to 'believe' that lie because doing so makes their value go up even as all your supposed customers have less money to spend than ever