we can demand more than this
watch me tie together gamestop, ikea, and baudrillard into a giant clusterfuck
a midnight email so I can dump all of the thoughts I had in the past month onto you <3 push this to the morning if you want! plus: a request for recommendations at the end
p.s. if you have family members who are seeking vaccines and have the bandwidth/talent of a ticketmaster scalper (this is a job for alyssa)…this is for you
stonks
icymi: gamestop stock closed today at $347.51 — that’s compared to the $18.84 it was when I last sent an email. if you’re too hot to know about stocks, the tl;dr is that when hedge funds moved to short gamestop (betting $$$ on gamestop’s failure, which would then trigger other people to short gamestop), reddit (/r/wallstreetbets) moved to fuck up their bet — by boosting gamestop to the moon, even as in-person retail shops tanked during the pandemic. here’s a twitter thread of a dude explaining this on tiktok
I already thought the stock market was fake, but this turn of events only further proves it. what made me pause was the fragility of the stock market as an institution, and subsequently the precarious hold of all of the hedge funds and private equity firms and banks that leech on the economy. one of my favorite classes at rice was corporate finance (shocking I know) because my professor would teach us all the basic theories and models that drive financial markets today, and then highlight the impossibly optimistic assumptions and bad heuristics that serve as their very rocky foundation — like he was pulling out jenga blocks from the leaning tower of america’s economy.
I haven’t decided if I think the entire gamestop thing is #good or #bad but what I have started thinking about is: so much of our society is built on the idea of “pragmatism” and “logic,” when in reality most of our systems are highly idealistic at best — and in the wrong way. it is hyper-ideal to assume the united states has a free market, as companies consolidate and morph into ghastly, hidden monopolies while regulators turn a paid, blind eye. despite this, legislators, billionaires, and a lot of misled americans hide behind the guise of “pragmatism” to defend the sputtering machine of late-stage capitalism, conveniently turning to the idea of a “free market” to defend the status quo and argue against less regulation, lower minimum wage, higher hours, more productivity. in this hellishly idealistic world, only the ones with enough privilege to stay in their idealistic bubbles, convincing themselves that their work and this world are the best they could be, can really thrive.
another example is our policing system, also highly ideal at best: america believes that giving people — mostly white, mostly men, quite a few with far right ties — the absolute protection of universal amnesty and guns, will somehow inspire community and safety for all. this is clearly not the case: proven over and over again by cold, hard, “logical” data in addition to the collective pain of so many.
yet we continue to pour additional money into our failed police forces. why? “pragmatism” feels like a defense of the status quo: a status quo that benefits whiteness and capitalism and masculinity above all.
pragmatism and logic are what people hide behind when they don’t want to imagine a different world; they are why “abolish the police” changed to “defund the police” changed to “divert a couple millions for a few years until no one pays attention anymore.” it doesn’t feel “practical” to administrators who have worked at rice for over 20 years to tear down the statue of an enslaver, even as students (shout-out shifa) sit at his statue for the 125th day and dream of a world without it.
the most frustrating part of this pragmatism-secretly-idealism is that if we have already chosen to be idealistic (for fuck's sake the stock market is really a thing, isn’t it), why haven’t we chosen to be idealistic in the right way? can we, instead of being comfortable with our uncomfortably-idealistic status quo, demand better? can we acknowledge that money is fake, but food and shelter and healthcare are real — all of which we have more than enough of but “can’t” be redistributed for '“pragmatic” reasons?
our spoon-fed ideals are not looking so white-picket-fence picturesque anymore
the long-debunked ideal (or scam) of america is the obviously american dream: that anyone can pick themselves up by the bootstraps if they just work hard enough. this scam, often spouted from people who have never known financial hardship in their entire life, is an underlying assumption of american life, and one that still sways an alarming number of americans. the guise of pragmatism invokes fear in people who think dramatic, radical change will remove their chance at the american dream, as opposed to bring them closer to their ideal life.
the american dream sells this model of “pragmatism” at its finest: save up (ignoring the sub-1% APR for all banks, and the financial knowledge and time needed to invest) and work hard (spend your prime years scared to take a vacation day because you don’t want to lose health insurance or because you have debt) so you can buy a house (either when there’s a housing bubble so you lose out in the end or through a sub-prime mortgage packaged with made-up debt on debt on debt) and have children (immediately having to consider putting between $50,000 - $300,000 in the bank in case they ever want to go to college; also more money for the childcare you’ll need because you can’t take a day off because healthcare).
worse: as consumers, we are preyed upon daily for wanting to believe in a pragmatic life. when I walked into ikea for the first time, I thought about this: how the showrooms try to convince you that the key to having your shit together is a $79 MALM dresser that you can bruise a toe trying to assemble at home. or that being in debt won’t matter as long as your coffee table matches your chairs matches your lamp. or that if you mimic the eating habits and lifestyle of your favorite influencer, your life can also be pristine and clean and productive and happy.
maybe that’s what’s so exciting about this gamestop stock phenomenon: it takes this “pragmatism” and flips it over to show the rotting maggots underneath. financial news outlets report that the gamestop stock, in addition to rising amc theatres stock, show a “detachment from reality” — ignoring the fact that the stock market has far outperformed expectations while the unemployment rate rose to 15% in april and 60% of the restaurants that closed during the pandemic, have closed permanently.
the stock market has always been detached from reality — we know this now, and we knew this in 2008 when (legitimately made up) cdos crashed the market, and we know this because in the end the stock market is a construct that people dreamed up 200 years ago and now it somehow determines when I get to retire.
final aside and disclaimer: yes I did do debate in college. no I never actually read baudrillard until now. I liked these excerpts as an alternative contextualization of what’s happening, and why it feels exciting, and why it feels like everyday we wake up to a world that’s somehow imploding even more than it was yesterday.
whew that was a lot
this time, I don’t have any recommendations to offer because my brain feels like it’s re-entered the primordial slush. but I would love to read new things: please send me recommendations (either reply to this email or text me or dm or something)! I will read all of them and include all of them in my next newsletter so we can all revel in some new, interesting content.
I need to stop convincing myself that tiktok is “educational” just because 16-year-olds informed me that 1) hibernation isn’t a months-long sleep and 2) a life sentence is 15 years, not an actual lifetime (please tell me I’m not the only one who thought these things)
with love,
christina
(oh if you like lorde listen to maude latour! thanks teresa for the rec)