Guest Post from Kim Mainord: Mileage May Vary

I have many thoughts on the GameStop stock/stonk play. Big movements in complex systems are difficult to write about, because many things that seem paradoxical can be correct at the same time. At different scales or frames, differing takes have validity. So forgive what may seem contradictory. For those not familiar with the topic, let’s start with this @Vox article as the baseline.

In populist movements, the participants are attracted by and manipulated through memetics. We see what begins as a meme becomes hype, then a mass network memetic swarm effect, as happens in the promotion of everything Modern Meme from Bernie Sanders to cryptocurrencies to QAnon.

That the GameStop play has appeared to hurt some predatory shorters and their hedge funds means we will see more #stonk in the future. Success breeds repetition. The latest on r/wallstreetbets is an attempt to wrestle the silver market.

Why did the subreddit readers and social media followers do it? On the face, it’s economically irrational, which is why the hedge funds and investor class didn’t understand it at first. All the investor class cares about is making money above all else. Driving up a stock to protect it from a short will only lose money in the long term. Gamestonk is willing to hold and lose big to make a statement about loving GameStop and hating Wall Street. Reddit’s wallstreetbets subreddit has nearly 4 million self-called “degenerates” alone. And that’s why the Street never saw this coming at first. The combination of paradoxical motivations for this mass behavior is remarkable. Protection, vengeance, anger, fun, gaming, bitcoin play, populism, power, anarchy. One could even say that Gamestonk is the Pokémon Go of 2021. When such a combination of emotional forces can be rallied to a single cause (see the US Capitol on January 6, 2021), anything can happen.

Now add the effect of mass network swarm activity. This can be a weapon, as in QAnon or Internet troll farms. Gamestonk is weaponized investing. When most conflict theorists think of swarms, they think of organization from a single body that sends out many agents of chaos or destruction with a single purpose, coming from every direction. But in this case, so many are in it for the lulz and all those paradoxical motivations listed above, that all they need is a single common interest: take down the Street predators. Everyone has their reasons. They don’t need to be organized.

The Street isn’t a victim. There is no logic behind markets anymore and hasn’t been for some time. Manipulation on all sides, and the decoupling of Wall Street from Main Street, and the end of fundamentals means whoever has the power to define the market does so. And usually, the big institutions run the show and get bail outs when it spins out of control. The only people who suffer are “the little guys.” But when the little guys rally as one? Especially when the world is filled with “money” and no one knows where to put it safely? Anything is possible.

Populism is a powerful and unpredictable political force. It forces reaction or reorganization by the establishment regardless of your position to the cause, because anarchy is the alternative. And institutions hate anarchy. Wall Street wants modellable certainty. No one can predict which way populist-fueled movement will go, because populism is usually about being against something. Not for building a better alternative. See the Russian and French Revolutions, and Brexit as dangerous populism that had ideals but no plans.

But sometimes a plan emerges just in time. See the American or Singing/Baltic States revolutions. Or the New Deal. The reason a populist movement succeeds long after they win is through a combination of cooperation, compromise and construction. We have to build something that benefits most of us, together, to successfully ride through a populist revolution.

If we could get all those people who threw some crypto into the GameStop, AMC or BB&B pots to swarm anew and reorganize healthcare, or law enforcement, or the rest of the predatory financial cycle, that would be something.

Senator Elizabeth Warren is already calling for financial regulation in this case, but to fight the shorters, not the social media/Mom & Pop retail investors. Let’s hope the SEC follows suit. This is part of the constructive, cooperative future, and Wall Street ignores the clean-up of their swamp at their peril.

PJ Manney is the author of the P.K. Dick Award-nominated (R)EVOLUTION, book 1 in a series with (ID)ENTITY, and the upcoming trilogy’s completion (CON)SCIENCE, as well as non-fiction and consulting about emerging technology, future humans, and empathy-building through storytelling. She was a former Chairperson of Humanity+, teleplay writer (Hercules–The Legendary Journeys, Xena: Warrior Princess, numerous TV pilot scripts) and film executive.

Jack Jetstark’s Intergalactic Freakshow is about the people who don’t fit in. The freaks who are too much like this or not enough like that for society to accept them.

I write from experience. I may not breathe fire or fly or read minds, but I am disabled. And a woman geek. And “too smart for my own good,” according to multiple teachers and psychologists. Somewhere between the first and final draft of this book, though, I realized I have another thing that makes me different.

I’m autistic.

In retrospect, it shouldn’t have been a surprise. I didn’t talk outside the home until I was thirteen, I’ve always hated eye contact, and there may have been a period in my childhood where I communicated primarily through meowing.

But I was disabled and homeschooled and so no one caught it. I was just “weird” or “difficult” or, more often than not, “no seriously, you do not want to screw with her Froot Loops, she just got them sorted by color.” If I’d been diagnosed at an earlier age, maybe I would have felt less weird, less like I was doing something wrong, but it is what it is.

(Technically, I can’t get a formal diagnosis because of accessibility barriers and because the diagnostic process is not designed for disabled adults who were raised as extremely sheltered, antisocial females, but my therapist is confident that I am autistic and I am identifying as such from now on.)

So there I am, 28, newly diagnosed as autistic… oh, and working on the final drafts of my novel. And suddenly some of my editor’s revision notes made so much more sense.

She said some of the characters acted in ways that weren’t true to themselves. I now see that one of these instances (the ending) was the result of me trying to write a really emotional scene and getting frustrated and choosing the logical (to me) solution. Another entire subplot ended up getting rewritten because, in a nutshell, my characters had more complex social lives than I could deal with.

When she asked me to add more descriptions of my characters, such as the clothes they wear or how they interact with objects, I was flummoxed. Beyond gender and race, I didn’t know what they looked like, and nonverbal communication goes right over my head.

I’ve since realized that it’s not uncommon for autistics to have trouble distinguishing facial features. Until I’m a few seasons into a TV show, or I’ve known a person for a few months, I have to rely on context to tell me who they are. (I… may have stopped watching The Expanse the first time Thomas Jane took off his hat, because he was the only character I could recognize.)

These weren’t new problems in my writing, but it’s harder to work around them when writing a novel versus a short story. It’s vital that readers stick with you for two hundred and forty pages.

Figuring out that I’m autistic, letting myself embrace that label, was empowering, both in my writing and in everyday life. I’m not just bad at characterization and socializing, I have a condition that makes those things harder than they should be, and knowing that means I can start trying to find the “cheat codes” for my brain.

People like to know what characters look like, so I’ll ask friends who aren’t faceblind for recommendations of nice-looking people, and I’ll cast them as my characters, and I’ll trust everything my editor says on them making realistic decisions. But I don’t alter my writing too much in the grand scheme.

I would never want to be — or even pretend to be — neurotypical. I’m autistic and weird and my writing is, too.

About the Author:
Jennifer Lee Rossman is an autistic and disabled sci-fi writer and editor who describes herself as “If Dr. Temperance Brennan was a Disney Princess.” Her work has been featured in several anthologies, and she co-edited Love & Bubbles, a queer anthology of underwater romance. She blogs at jenniferleerossman.blogspot.com and tweets @JenLRossman

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