Turns out that one of the big winners is (drumroll): a hedge fund, Senvest Management,
which made a profit of $700 million from selling Gamestop shares that it had cheaply
acquired in September to Gamestop/Robinhood players:
Absolutely any observer of the financial markets could predict that the majority of small investors would eventually lose their money to larger, faster, more experienced professionals. It was necessarily going to end like that: the stock would necessarily go down, and anyone who bought it while it was climbing and then hung on would necessarily be the loser. There is no mystery to this. What's more, anyone who recalls that the Tea Party movement was launched from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade is likely to doubt the democratic merits of small investors seeking to make money like the big ones. Any hopes placed in that system are misplaced, period.
What's interesting on the contrary is the "platform populism" diagnosed by Morozov. He distinguishes it from the familiar image of Trumpian populism, but I don't know why. The latter was Twitter plus in-person rallies, whereas here we have Reddit + Robinhood + the NYSE. The lesson is that platform populism exerts social effects - and most often, becomes a social pathology - when it is hooked into a major real-world machine, such as a presidential campaign or a stock market. This is what distinguishes it from the usual hapless narcissism of individuals caught in the targeted advertising trap.
To further analyze platform populism, one would have to look at the sociological categories of the people involved. What kind of agency do they have in their daily life? Are they supported by charismatic figures from other social classes? What aims are they seeking to fulfill, and why? These questions cannot be reduced to the mere existence of social media platforms, or to their specific characteristics (important as these may be). Most sociological categories have implicit ideologies, which become explicit and undergo transformation during social movements. A bunch of day traders supported by Elon Musk looks like the exacerbation of middle-class greed to me. It's just louder libertarianism.
Finally, why not call BLM populist? To me it looks like a classic platform populist movement. However, it has a tremendous variety of social classes involved, firstly among Black people themselves - where the social-class differences can be huge - and also to the extent that it is a multiracial movement. The difference between BLM and the above-mentioned dead-ends is this wide range of adherents, which continually push the movement into internal negotiations that increase its political sophistication and ability to deal with the rest of society. It would take a lot more research and conceptualization, but my hunch is that BLM could be defined as progressive platform populism - a winning formula whose characteristics might be emulated by others, at least to some degree.
best, Brian