The $GME WallStreetBets phenomena won’t last but the cultural shock will have a lasting impact

If you have been on Reddit over the last few days, you may have noticed a recurring video that you see popping up in your feed. It’s a video from 2008 during the occupy wall street movement, where it records protesters down on the street whilst wall street brokers watch from their balconies, drinking champagne, and watching the spectacle before them with amusement.

Over a decade later, and with the technology we have today, people are taking their protest to wall street virtually through day trading stock apps such as Robinhood, Trading 212, Webull, and many others. If you’re here today, in 2021, you probably already know the anecdotal facts about this movement. If you don’t, please go ahead and read this article here. No time to read? Go watch this.

However, much like with all contemporary movements, I predict that these semi-organised stock purchasing habits will dwindle out once the internal rage of people who were once directly affected by the 2008 financial crisis, and resulting austerity politics which occurred over the last decade, have calmed down. What interests me here is the effect of the growing accessibility of once jargon-filled, exclusionary sectors, in virtual spaces. We need to view this through the eyes of a protestor in the information age.

In the future, due to the coronavirus and many other influences, we will most likely see virtual protests become more common-place and with younger, Gen Z and Millennial audiences. This is comparable to the storming of the white house which took place early in 2021, we may come to see this as the last hurrah of the old guard. But, this may not be so, as the contexts are entirely different, one was an attack on the US government, and this is an attack on private organisations. Perhaps we can view this as a change in tactics by an organised group, where the valuable assets of corporations are liquid, this leaves an opening for protesters to make a lasting impact, like a knife in between the ribs.

Let us go back in time to look at a few words. One being: protester, the other being: protestant. Here I refer back to Martin Luther, nailing the document to the door of a Catholic church, listing elements of the church he didn’t agree with. We could go on to discuss why, but around this time, Europe was undergoing a long progressing revolution via the invention of the printing press. This technology gave more people of the peasantry greater access to knowledge, books, etc, in a common language, as it spread across the continent. Even though the printing press was not restricted to the time of Luther, it allowed for easy development of mass-produced works of science and literature. Instead, I want to look at one book which was incredibly influential on one of the ways we view religion today which was affected by the printing press. That being, the King James Version of the Holy Bible, the third authorised translation of the Holy Bible into English.

This was important as this slowly deteriorated the authority and control of the Church of England and how we view certain aspects of Christianity. Despite this version of the Bible came way after Martin Luther, it opened the cracks further in an already split Christian religion in western Europe. The common person was able to read the Bible in a language they knew and was able to create their interpretations of the lessons which were presented to them. Before the King James version, there was the ‘Great Bible’ of 1535, the first translated Bible into the English language, meaning that before then, the teaching of the Bible was held in the hands of a few who were authorized to lead sermons and who were able to read either Latin, Greek, or Hebrew.

This upper echelon of the church in society had significant sway over the law and behaviours of European rulers and their people. Meaning that a priest’s word and interpretation of passages would have to be taken as mostly absolute. You also have to remember that those holy members of the community would have connections with holy members of other communities, and the study of theology was restricted to an elite caste (which makes me wonder how much a ‘tuition fee’ would be today to attend a monastery).

The King James Bible became one of the most commonly owned books in England and was incredibly easy to consume by the Populus, which inadvertently led to the weakening of the ‘absolute’ nature of the church. Even though it was already on the decline, this new entry into the so-called ‘pop culture’ of the day hastened it.

Today, almost everyone in the world has a smart-ish phone. This is a blanket statement which isn’t entirely true, but the idea is there. We can download day time trading apps easily from the Google Play store and we can head to YouTube to watch some tutorials on what day time trading actually is. Were the wall street brokers the priest of the ’80s? With their own jargon-filled talk and power-hungry ambition? Perhaps, or that may be what movies want us to think. Regardless, pocket societies like these are a members club, designed to exclude and to keep people thinking that they have no place in that club. Those who wanted to join had to cough up a lot of coin and had to fit in. The $GME phenomena won’t last, but as the same thing which happened to the Church's influence on English society, religion, and culture, will anyone look at wall street, the untouchable elite of society, the same anymore?