I'm not going to pretend I understand the complexities of the stock market. But, after working in the tech world for over 20 years, I do understand how this GameStop situation underscores how technology is democratizing everything. A thread to demonstrate.

Years ago, before there were 20 farmer's markets every weekend and food trucks were treated with skepticism at best, if you went to a farmer's stand or a taco truck, you paid with cash. Period.

Any kind of public show selling jewelry or Christmas decor or whatever, you laid down some Benjamins or you, God help us, wrote a check. It wasn't because no one had credit cards or debit cards. It also wasn't because there were no mobile credit card machines.

Believe it or not, you could get those back in the '90s. This was particularly true after cellular technology took off. I once had a bulky credit card terminal with a literal antenna on it, but you practically had to be outside to use it.

The reason very few vendors used them is because they were impractical. The terminals were pricey and acquiring a merchant account from a bank was difficult with credit checks and sometimes even the need to maintain a high bank account balance to get one.

That was on top of the percentage charges from the bank. They could be high and they varied depending on the credit card a customer would use. AMEX was higher than Visa, for example.

There were also fees depending on how many charges you had per month. If you had less than X amount of charges (typically a pretty high dollar figure), you were on the hook for both per-transaction fees and a monthly use fee for the account.

That was likely on top of renting a terminal. Bottom line: it was not cheap and generally unaffordable for any one who didn't bring in a LOT of revenue. This was also why some small brick and mortar shops resisted credit card acceptance for a LONG time.

Then, someone much smarter than me figured it out. As Neil Young once said about Woodstock, a bunch of Wall Street guys saw the lines getting into that festival and thought, "Look at that...market."

On the other side of things, younger people were becoming entrepreneurs. Young people who grew up with smart phone technology or, at the very least, a robust internet.

These young business owners were demanding better and more flexible ways to sell their homemade hemp candles at Brooklyn street fairs or whatever. Along came Square and others that gave them the ability to take cards anywhere there was a decent cell signal.

No more terminals. Just a phone or a tablet. No more rental fees, subscription fees or varied pricing models. You got a percentage charge and that, mostly, was it. And these companies were happy to just send your money to your bank account. It was easy.

It opened up the vendors to more business and created an exploding market for companies to fill. What banks had long ignored as too-small investments were perfectly suitable for companies preferring loads of small customers to a handful of huge ones.

What does this have to do with GameStop? Well, day trading was not something the average person could do decades ago. You simply could not do it even if your company turned your pension into a 401k without warning.

You were at the mercy of big banks deciding if you made or lost money. And even if you were able to get a broker, those choices cost money in big commissions.

Remember Eddie Murphy in Trading Places? "Sounds like you boys are a couple-a bookies." He wasn't far off. Duke & Duke, like so many other rich guys smoking cigars and waring monocles, had dominated Wall Street, leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves.

Never mind the insane complexities of the market and its rules and regulations. You might read the Motley Fool or have a little group that traded penny stocks, but you had no real power to change anything about your financial future when it came to investing.

Today, it's completely different. Companies like Robinhood and their "commission free investing" model have changed the game for everyone. And you can find detailed information everywhere from your TV to your phone, which has fueled the radical expansion of the market.

The subreddit coup with GameStop was the first really public example of the kind of power large groups of individual investors can exert over the stock market, which must scare the living crap out of the people who have controlled that world forever. It probably should.

This is all the result of technology being literally put in the palms of our hands every day. It is changing everything and everyone - companies, people, governments - are scrambling to keep up. And this is still just the beginning.