Playing to Lose: Autonomic Cultural Narratives as told by some random guy on the internet

[jaredroberts]

A friend of mine sent me a screen shot yesterday of a comment left on a discussion board about the stock market. I don't really know where to find the link itself and I don't feel like trying but I will include the transcribed text in full below. The comment is really more of a short article in length but I've kept it basically verbatim, other than cleaning up some grammar. The content is obviously not a piece of professional journalism, but I think the "author", whoever it is, has some pretty interesting insights into the relationship between the free market and social narratives, and I think it ties in well with some of the other discussions about capitalism, and I'd love to hear you guys' thoughts.

The text here requires a bit of context first. The thread is about the recent and ongoing Gamestop (GME) stock buying frenzy occurring on Wall Street, and has been all over the business news. I'm not sure how well aware any of you might be with that story, so I'll try to summarize briefly.

Essentially what has been occurring is that the company Gamestop (a video game retail chain in the US) had been projected be become insolvent by this year. Lots of large financial firms and hedge fund managers on Wall Street "shorted" the companies stocks over the past couple of years (they bought insurance on the company's well being in order to get cashed out when the company inevitably fails) and were expected a big payday for the money they invested in the shorts. Over the past couple weeks, however, a surprisingly large group of amateur arm chair day traders rallied together using sites like reddit and 4chan to purchase at huge mark ups Gamestop stocks even though they knew the company is essentially worth nothing at this point. This of course caused the stock valuation of the company to soar up to the tune of $10 billion almost overnight. When this happened, the hedge funds who had shorted Gamestop and were expecting a huge payout, suddenly found themselves owing tons of money to their investors and had to continue to pay premiums of the shorts they had purchased that they hadn't exactly budgeted for. Now, all the average joes from reddit and 4chan and wherever else that had bought stock, knew quite well that it was worthless, but enough of them did it to artificially inflate the company's valuation. Basically they played the stock market to intentionally lose their own money, because they knew it would screw over large banks and hedge fund managers and they rallied enough people behind them to do it. Now the Wall Street elites are begging the government to step in and regulate against people buying stocks they know are worthless, and apparently the irony of Wall Street requesting government regulation is lost on them. As of today, nothing has really been done in a legislative sense that I'm aware of, but I do know that some major apps that amateur investors use for day trading have blocked the purchasing of Gamestop stocks, which is apparently illegal market manipulation, but the government doesn't seem to care. In all likelihood this is the beginning of the end of private citizens being able to trade stocks on their own without going through a broker, but who knows.

Personally, I don't actually follow the stock market at all or business news in general, but I found this whole ordeal very intriguing for some reason, especially within the context of allowing unfettered capitalism. What happens when enough people get together to play the capitalist game, except they intentionally lose out of spite? It's not just a hypothetical question now, its actually happening.

Another interesting thing to come out of this so far is the way its at least brought together otherwise very opposing political groups. The people that started this Gamestop stock buying campaign were mostly just an offshoot of alt-right Trump supporters looking to stick it to someone, but they garnered a lot of momentum quickly from a lot of camps. Many political figures on the more extreme left, both in Washington and in the media, are praising the tactics since they like the fact that its hurting big banks, and the alt-righters love it because they don't really differentiate between big banks and big government. Personally, I'm not really sure what I think exactly, but anything that gets 4chan incels, woke redditors, Trump sycophants, and AOC on the same page must really being striking a nerve somewhere.

Anyway, that was probably way longer than necessary as a preface, but the content of the text below is basically looking at the broader picture of what the person sees as actually occurring in the economy as a whole and how it effects American/Western culture. I'd love to know what you guys think. Maybe its just tinfoilery, maybe I just don't understand it.



Okay, so back in the day some computer nerds made machines that would take in a bunch of outside data, process it, and try to predict the future. To fund it, they predominantly sold the information to people who wanted to buy and sell stocks. Enough people started doing this that they started making the machines send out stock reports themselves, which other machines took in as data to further sell, and report on stock themselves.
This eventually created a massive feedback loop of stock data being managed by autonomic intelligence (not the same as artificial intelligence) that outright blocked out the human element, and right now the open secret is that the market is out of human control. If anyone tried to remove these data loops, even one out of sync chain link could cause the world economy to collapse overnight.
So basically, in tandem with this technology, the internet happened and a load of marketers started moving to “content marketing”, which is the idea that the product and the marketing are the same thing and that you’re selling a lifestyle story, which is why if you pay attention, most companies that used to just sell a product have made massive investments into media space. This is fine in and of itself, the 80s had a similar version of this. The problem is that the easy proliferation of consumer data reaches these autonomic intelligences, and they begin to report on what kind of narratives sell vs what ones don’t. Simple, right? Well, not really. Y’see, we live in a post hypernormalization world, a Soviet term for propaganda that keeps saying things are something when the reality is different. When you mix in marketing and propaganda with feedback loops, and add on top of that Google’s ad program that essentially bubbles people into feedback loops, and only give them what they want to hear so you can sell them something, it basically creates a mass psychological dissonance between different groups of people that, consciously or not, have their life’s context formed around media narratives. It’s one reason why the social justice stuff is hitting so hard now despite the fact that America is an otherwise pretty prosperous country with no major problems causing anyone to starve.
Anyway, the implication is that you basically have cultural narrative context being created by literal abstract machinations who may or may not be intelligent. That’s no good, because there’s no moral parameter to stop the data from trying to get everyone to kill each other. See, people keep thinking the robot revolution is going to be Terminator, but it’s going to be more like The Shining.
So people have their lives contextualized by inhuman machinations, which, okay, it’s pretty bleak but not outright destructive, right? Just a bunch of consumers being taken for a ride, right? Well no. You see, the consequence of religion more or less falling out of style in the public consciousness is that there’s no longer a single common cultural narrative. So you just don’t get to see Timmy at Sunday school, so what? Well the larger point of contention is that there’s always been a considerable percentage of any population that gives way to fanatic behavior, which in antiquity meant religious fanaticism. But if the narrative of religion is weakened, and the only other alternatives to the narrative are autonomically generated content marketing narratives too shallow to really make a lifestyle out of, you run into a phenomenon where a percentage of the population essentially migrated between brands in a pseudo-idolatrous methodology. When you really come down to it, a fanbase is literally just the same thing as a cult. They both act as a community that brings people together to discuss a specific narrative. Except the religious ones actually at least try to offer the illusion of being beneficial to society at large while the autonomic models are there purely for profit and offer hedonistic sensory overload to compensate for any shallowness.
Did you ever stop to think about how we live in a world where a bunch of people do crazy shit over cartoons, harass people, send death threats, sell cars for chicken nugget sauce, etc? Do you really think that’s just normal behavior? No! Those sorts of people would have been in a monastery a couple hundred years ago. They’re fanatics, pure and simple. Nothing wrong with being a fanatic if it’s constructive, but these narratives don’t have any interest in mind.
So, to put it quite bluntly, we quite literally live in a society where abstract mathematical formulas are in charge of a market that pretty much doesn’t sell products anymore, and is more focused on selling narrative scams based on parameters from these algorithms, and a bunch of wackos who in another lifetime would’ve been witch burners who have nothing to spiritually satisfy their intrinsic obsessive tendencies, who are now replacing a common cultural narrative with many different smaller ones. This is how you end up with Nazis and Commies in a prosperous capitalist country thinking the end of the world is next week, literally creating their own problems.
One could argue that we have too much freedom of choice when it comes to information about narratives, and it’s actively harming society. The Russians use avant garde techniques in their propaganda to give their population so much bizarre data to sift through, they just conform with no goal in mind. The Chinese just censor and have less overall data fed to their population. But Americans simultaneously have too much data, and too little diversity in the data, making it easy to context to corral them into a specific mindset. All it takes is a pair of eyes to see that the current mindset for American populations is apathetic vs messiah complex murderousness.
The silver lining is that these marketers don’t know they’re playing with fire. I don’t think its entirely out of the question that some day soon a crowd of angry people will actually lynch content creators for not towing their own narrative complex, and very soon they may begin to live in fear. People think this Gamestop stuff is a big happening, but I think its only going to be a drop in the bucket that’ll be the 2020s. If not apocalyptic, they’ll be at least interesting times.

[Ondrej]

I am somewhat familiar on the Gamestop story.

(they bought insurance on the company's well being in order to get cashed out when the company inevitably fails)

My understanding is that shorting a stock is when you borrow it from someone on the promise to give it back at a later date. Typically what is done is the borrower sells the stock, invests in something else he thinks will do better and when the time comes, he sells the investment, buys the shorted stock back and then returns it to the lender. If the shorted stock went down in value relative to whichever other stock was invested in, then the bet paid off.

day traders rallied together using sites like reddit and 4chan to purchase at huge mark ups Gamestop stocks even though they knew the company is essentially worth nothing at this point. This of course caused the stock valuation of the company to soar up to the tune of $10 billion almost overnight.

When you short a stock, you borrow it from someone who wants to keep it and then sell it anyway. This has the effect of artificially decreasing the value of the stock if it is done by hedge funds that can put pressure on the market. The stock is not really not wanted, but it appears so if large amounts are being shorted. So its somewhat of a self fulfilling prophecy if you are big enough. You sell a bunch of it, the price dips a little bit, the market notices and sells a bit more freely because they are nervous about the dip. Poof, stock value drops even more. Then you buy back and return what you owe.

But, if the stock decides it's not going to drop, there's nothing stopping you from selling your investment and buying the stock back right away so that when you have to return the stock to the person you borrowed it from, your losses are minimal. You can probably see what happened. 4chan/redit decided to make the stock go up by buying it even though it was predicted to go down (i.e. being shorted by lots of hedge fun types). Well, when it started going up instead of down and the shorters realized they were going to lose out, they also bought it back driving it up even further.

artificially inflate the company's valuation.

Artificial in the same sense as a short sale is. It is the perception of what the stock is going to do in the future that sets the value. For example bitcoin as an investment. It's not that you're betting on bitcoin producing anything. You're betting on it being of a certain value.

Basically they played the stock market to intentionally lose their own money, because they knew it would screw over large banks and hedge fund managers and they rallied enough people behind them to do it.

But they didn't lose. Nobody would be up in arms if they had lost. It would seem it was a very shrewd investment if you only knew how the market was going to go.

stocks they know are worthless

According to who? Apparently they are upset that they are not worthless like they though they would be.

major apps that amateur investors use for day trading have blocked the purchasing of Gamestop stocks, which is apparently illegal market manipulation, but the government doesn't seem to care. In all likelihood this is the beginning of the end of private citizens being able to trade stocks on their own without going through a broker, but who knows.

Yeah, apparently "robin hood" a trading app only allowed you to sell, not buy, which is blatant market manipulation. My understanding they reversed the decision but there is already a class action rolling out.

I have no idea how Washington will react. I've seen it being spun as though it's "trumpism" that's responsible so if that narrative catches on I wouldn't be surprised if it was "prudent to protect the average trader from unexpected losses". It will be, naturally, to protect the little guy that regulations get put in place.

except they intentionally lose out of spite?

But they didn't. They won. That's what the upset is. If they had lost everyone would be happy about their good investments. They are upset because THEY thought the stocks were going to go down and they were wrong.

right now the open secret is that the market is out of human control. If anyone tried to remove these data loops, even one out of sync chain link could cause the world economy to collapse overnight.

I think that is quite a bit overstated as exemplified by 4chan/redit throwing a wrench into things. There have been flash crashes in the past over trading bots reacting to each other but human traders noticed immediately and bid things back up. Of course a lot of money changed hands in that time but it didn't mean the economy itself took a hit. It is important to distinguish investors taking a hit from businesses going out of business.

It’s one reason why the social justice stuff is hitting so hard now despite the fact that America is an otherwise pretty prosperous country with no major problems causing anyone to starve.

Yeah, rage bait. But it's not machines that are doing that. We are doing that ourselves. We write it, we click it. The machines may be making it easier but it is not them behind it.

You see, the consequence of religion more or less falling out of style in the public consciousness is that there’s no longer a single common cultural narrative.

I think it's worse than that. If everyone at least professes to be a Christian they, at least in principle, bow to a higher common authority. Within that confine you can argue about the details of the Bible but it can only be stretched so far before it is in obvious contradiction. So there is a certain level of trust, or good will, you can extend to everyone. You may not quite get where they are coming from but you can impart them with charitable intentions in your mind even if you think they are terribly misguided. If they do not even claim to stand on those same principles with you then reconciling your differences because much more difficult. Where do you even start to understand one another.

One could argue that we have too much freedom of choice when it comes to information about narratives, and it’s actively harming society.

Yes I get the feeling this is a common thought. I think it is wrong. In so far as people communicating with one another and drawing their own conclusions is desirable. The truth is down there. We had better find it.

Americans simultaneously have too much data, and too little diversity in the data, making it easy to context to corral them into a specific mindset.

Maybe in the main stream media. But we also have the internet. It's never been easier to tell people what you think.

I don’t think its entirely out of the question that some day soon a crowd of angry people will actually lynch content creators for not towing their own narrative complex, and very soon they may begin to live in fear.

There are probably many examples like this. Andy Gno comes to mind. Not a lynching but certainly getting roughed up. There was a guy who was shot for being a Trump supporter. No altercation or debate about exactly what happened just this guy is a Trump supporter and bang! Yes, this prediction is pretty spot on.


As far as the Gamestop debacle is concerned, you bet it would go down, you lost. That's how it be sometimes. Other people can have different opinions than you and they are free to buy what they want. That's none of your business. You are not upset that a failing company just got infused with a bunch of cash, you are also not fearful that these novice investors will lose all their money. You are pissed that you lost all of yours when you are convinced you shouldn't have. Welcome to life. If it hurts, maybe learn to not put yourself in that position in the future. Don't take it out on the people who had their ear to the memes and "knew" what was going to happen. Isn't this the same as due diligence?

[jaredroberts]

Thanks for clarifying about how the shorting of stocks works. You're probably right about the exact mechanisms at work there. I admittedly don't know all the protocols. I was just trying to explain the best I understood it what was happening in case people weren't following it.

But they didn't lose. Nobody would be up in arms if they had lost. It would seem it was a very shrewd investment if you only knew how the market was going to go.

I guess what I meant by "lose" and the stock being "worthless" is that the business models of the companies as they exist now wouldn't be projected to stay sustainable in the current economy. Technically you're right. The stocks aren't worthless anymore. Obviously they have been infused with a huge amount of cash, but unless they pivot into something completely different, they'll just sink that cash into the same losing business model and the people still holding the stocks will lose money. However, I do agree that it could end up being a shrewd investment if these companies figure out a way to somehow use this newfound infusion of cash to pivot into something more profitable, which would be great. Brick and mortar video game stores and movie theaters have slowly been going obsolete anyway, and COVID has pushed it past the brink of recovery possibly. Also, I assumed the average Joes buying the stocks were planning on losing money mostly because of the few people I know who engaged in some day trading via Robin Hood told me they didn't care about the fact that it was wasted money in the end so long as it screwed over the hedge funds. That's not to say that people out there aren't making money off of it, it just seemed to be the narrative I was hearing about why the phenomena was occurring. It still seems to me that the long term plan of most of the people buying the stocks, or at least the impetus behind the investments, is to engage in sort of populist schadenfreude, and not about making a profit. That's what I meant by "playing to lose".

In terms of the content I attached, I pretty much agree with the points you made about the utility of the internet in sharing ideas, and the problem of the demise of religious narratives in society. I do think, however, that it's important to recognize that although it has never been easier to share with other people what you think, it's also never been easier to streamline to other people what to think. Obviously the internet can be used as a quite literally inexhaustible source of education and exchange of ideas, but you have to choose to do so. It's also a quite literally inexhaustible source of dopamine producing relaxation and placation. While many people obviously use it for the former at times, absolutely everyone uses it for the latter, and most people exclusively so. This is where I think Anon's assertion was about having too much freedom of choice. It's not about freedom of choice of ideas, it's about freedom of choice of cultural identities. The multiplicity of these identities, fueled by cultural narratives in an sort of endless feedback loop, creates a social dissonance that otherwise wouldn't be a problem if people simply didn't have the choice because they didn't know any better. I'm not advocating for the destruction or even the demise of these myriad cultural narratives necessarily, I just think that the very fact of their existence makes it quite difficult to maintain social cohesion. Granted, there are obvious agendas being pushed by these narratives, but the sheer variety and scope of what the internet has produced makes me truly wonder if the people pushing the agendas are truly the one's originating them. And even if they are, I don't think they are in as much control of them as I has always assumed. I guess that's what makes the idea of market driven culture narratives so intriguing to me, especially when comparing it to the place that religion traditionally has had in society. It's like people imbue their online social media experiences with inherent meaning because the religious template of human psychology is looking for intrinsic meaning in the data. Everyone is pushing their own personal culture narrative agenda, but no one stops to think about where they got their agenda in the first place, how, and why they care about their agenda. This is probably why many of these narratives, so far, have had an overall corrosive effect on society. It's not that they had ill or misguided intentions, it's that they fundamentally never had any intentions to begin with, like Heath Ledger's Joker. I suppose the sheer absurdity and randomness and multiplicity of all these narratives is what makes the concept of it being unintentionally derived from autonomic market driven data a pretty coherent explanation to me.

[Ondrej]

Yes, this is like the Peterson quote (that's probably not originally from him but where I remember it from) "you don't have ideas, ideas have you".

I think this may be the "principalities and powers" that the Bible talks about as well. Or at least partly.

I don't think AI is driving it. It is just helping us find what we want. Rage bait gets clicks not because AI is pushing us to it but because we want to see the injustice and be outraged.