Best short explanation of the GameStop phenomenon I’ve seen so far. https://twitter.com/mrbrowneyes2020/status/1354517067240771584

I suppose that my main takeaway from this is that r/wallstreetbets has enough collective consciousness to constitute something like a loose investment coop, something between a building society and an independent stock traders union. Robinhood have just poked this new beast.

Not saying this is a positive social formation, but it is new, and very interesting indeed. The current conjuncture is defined by private platforms exerting power over their users through network effect monopolies and similar positional niches. Coops are an implicit threat here.

It is very, very hard to alienate your user base so drastically that they flee, let alone that they spontaneously bootstrap a competing platform. But this is as close as I’ve seen to a company poking this particular bear. Especially as the user base are *cooperating investors*.

The major obstacle to the user base flipping in this way would be getting licensing for a coop Robinhood alternative, the political nature of which is the reason why Robinhood have turned on their users in this way. But, stranger things have happened, and these are strange times.

The other major factor is that the market is itself more likely to boot competitors in the short term, e.g., Robinhoodlikes wanting a piece of the pie they’ve just decided to give away. Still, there’s collective consciousness here, and someone could step in to inflect it.

Interested to see other people’s thoughts on this, as I don’t have enough of a reading on the anthropology/sociology of the community or the legal/political obstacles they’d face in articulating an investment platform for themselves.