Over the past weeks the swarm of small-time, amateur investors “revenge buying” stock in GameStop, AMC and other firms has sent shivers down the spine of Wall Street and led to unprecedented reactions from establishment experts, regulators and corporations. Is this the insurgency against the financial overlords we’ve been waiting for since the crisis of 2008? Or is it just a part of the very financial system that it claims to attack? Both? Neither?
On February 1st, 2021 members of the Moneylab board, nettimers and the other iregulars got together for a facilitated discussion of the causes, consequences and potentials of these historic events. Moneylab is a community of activists, artists and thinkers who, over 11+ larger events and the last seven years have gathered to dream dangerously about the radical future of money, finance and economic systems.

Topics included:

How can we contribute to this epic fight against hedge funds and the broader logics of the financial ‘markets’?
Who are the GameStop insurgents and what do they want? Is it a temporary aliiance? How about Anonymous? Is the comparison with offline talk-fest Occupy Wall Street justified and does this relate to existing forms of finance activism?
Is it also possible to sabotage high frequency trading? How about collectively shortselling Facebook, Amazon and other tech giants?
Is the ultimate aim to get rid of stocks, the stock market and shareholder capitalism as such?
Can we please also get rid of the speculative HODL bitcoin mentality?

Video documentation:

MoneyLab GameStop Debate from Institute of Network Cultures on Vimeo.