gamestop, but make it personal
Those of us who grew up in the 1990’s remember GameStop as the place you went to get the latest videogame, sheathed in plastic. They were a feature of malls, indigenous after the fashion of food courts and Claire’s and Abercrombie outlets. To hold the really hot new releases, you had to ask the disaffected college kid behind the counter to unlock the case for you. It was the kind of place to linger in while your sister bought another pair of jeans. Or at least tried them on.
The 1990’s now began a full third of a century ago, and 90’s nostalgia is a full blown cottage industry: Pogs, Tamagochis, Discmen, AIM and yo-yos have become totems of a different era, one awkwardly and endearingly perched on the seam between the analog and the digital. There were computers and there were screens, but there wasn’t really *the Internet.* For people my age, these were what we mean when we said the good old days. I remember the red light of my Blackberry making promises against the deep dark of my nighttime freshman dorm room.
All of this makes it surpassingly strange that GameStop, a precarious survivor from a different age, set both the internet and Wall Street on fire this week. What happened is both exceedingly simple and extraordinarily complex: outrage over large hedge funds betting on cult classics like GameStop and Blockbuster failing led an army of amateur investors on Reddit to buy stock, a populist putsch that forced the white shoe hedge fund brahmins to take heavy losses on a property they thought was a good bet to stay moribund. By propping up GameStop, small fry investors toppled the giants, at least for a day. Goliath eventually fought back, as he usually does.
I don’t trade stocks, and this essay is not announcing any newfound Reddit fortune. But wild oscillations, feelings of loss and gain, hands full of everything and then grasping at nothing: these are things I have been feeling in my bones lately.
In the wake of the GameStop wildness, there has been a search to understand just what type of story lies behind the sound and fury: Occupy Wall Street redux, a stock singularity, another upsurge of populist pushback against a system that too often seems to be heads I win, tails you lose. After a year that has upended so much, seeing solid hedge fund returns melt into air provided additional proof that we are all skating on an only thinly frozen pond.
All that seems right, and perhaps GamestopGate offers a glimpse of a radically different and decentralized financial system, chaotic and disrupted. As in politics, the trick will be getting the balance right between energies from below and order from above. The metaphor is not so much going long or going short as it is threading the needle. Finding the right intersection between Main Street and Wall Street means working without a map, and with a counterintuitive sense of direction.
I’ve been thinking about how the swings of the GameStop pendulum rhyme with the bets we make with the beat of our heart. How wild those can be, how they can leave us feeling like bulls and bears over a span of minutes or days. Yet that feels like living, like life itself: to be big and gorgeous and messy, to double down and not hold back. Shorting a dream can feel like a crime, even if it cashes out in prudence.
When it comes to love, everything in me resists investing in the equivalent of pensions or bonds or mutual funds. I want the vision and the variance, the choice that can transform GameStop into an improbable titan. I made a bet like that recently, on a person I loved, pushing in chips I’d been holding for years, so worn from my fingerprints that you nearly couldn’t see their denomination. And it paid off, for a while. Those returns felt real, because we both shared in their gains, making and spending as we went.
If you lose all that money, did you ever really have it? Is happiness always provisional, flirting not only with joy but also revocation? If you hold something in the palm of your hand and then lose it, is the way it rested against the crease of your thumb just another phantom impression? Did you dream the scent of her hair, or the numbers in your bank account and where they could take you?
GameStop is the same as it was last week, with the same structural flaws and lagging business model and vulnerability to the relentless wolves of e-commerce. Thousands of people believing in it changed everything and nothing. If you walked into a GameStop, not a single thing would feel different. Maybe that is part of the story too: belief can be the most real thing in the world, stickier than krazy glue, but it can also melt away like yesterday’s snow. It can tilt the world on its axis, and not alter a damn thing.
The great loves and the great art would have us live the GameStop life, but sustaining that is stupendously hard, if also strangely addicting. Bankruptcy and brokenness might make for good material, but we first of all have to get through the day, commuting between the world as it is and how we would like it to be. The trick is to weave the improbable into the sensible, the miracle into the mundane.
And yet: Go long. Always. How could you not?