To the Moon
On meme stocks, the solar system, network effects
Everyone’s got their eyes on the skies. The US government has allocated significant time and effort to stoking fantasies – at the moment we’re not hugely concerned with whether they’re real or not, if there’s a hell we’re all gonna go, etcetera, even if they are real, they’re still fantasies in the strong sense – of unidentified flying objects. Musk and Bezos are in a deeply boring 21st century space race, role-playing mismatched Cold War scripts, further proof the conflict never ended, never will end. Leaving Gaia behind in an idiotic Sci-Fi Channel oedipal drama – renouncing earthly pleasures to the fullest extent possible, genuinely exceeding them, St. Augustine throwing pears at a pig. Astrology remains immensely popular among millennials as a kind of heterodox historiography, final-instance identification of the social’s originary engine, its hearthstone, a return to structuralism. And finally, the insistence that meme stocks go to the moon. Yes, we’re going to the moon, just like Apollo 1.
The Copernican revolution affirmed the hypothesis that the Human is at the center of the universe by disproving the hypothesis that earth was at the center of the universe. Looking up at the stars, we found new ways to see ourselves in them. In a really direct sense, things were just switched around. Post-structuralist critiques of epistemology affirmed humanity, enriched and fortified it, by sending it through problematization ringer, subjecting it to innumerable sentences of doubt. If you want to consolidate political power in the 21st century, you ought to consider mobilizing this festering atmosphere of doubt with a scorched-earth approach.
When we say “[xyz security] is going to the moon,” what do we mean? The baseline insistence is this: a population of people who want or need money will get what they want or need. In order to get to the moon, the narrative generally goes, you must exact a debt which you are owed: take back from the hedge funds – Melvin Capital is generally taken to stand in for all of them, a bit like in a Batman script – what they have extracted from the social body. On the one hand, the bigger picture affirms that these efforts are basically futile – recreationally amassing passive income through retail trading obviously affirms finance capital. On the other, the hedge fund industry lost $6 billion shorting meme securities in May alone. A vague desire for revenge mobilizes thousands of nerds to come together and buy useless stocks. These stocks’ value is not identified through a business’ price-to-book ratio, price-to-earnings ratio, price-to-earnings growth ratio, or dividend yield – they are actively engineered through the attention economy. Upvoting, subliminal retinal coordination: many pairs of eyes scanning a screen and stopping at the same place. Retail trading apps were designed to emulate video games, and now they’re being played like video games. We live in a society of gamers. The whole scenario does not defy common sense, which is interesting because once you start actually picking it apart, it doesn’t make sense. Critique of capitalism is central to the entire meme stock assemblage, but what the assemblage wants more than anything else is capital. There’s a general temptation to read everything like it’s a symptom of the end of the world, total collapse. As we know, many worlds have already been ended. It’s more accurate to acknowledge that entropy’s whirlpool continues to spin, as it always will, until it doesn’t anymore.
The central rallying cry is vague, not always said entirely out loud: “if the short squeeze happens, everything could change.” Decentralized, bottom-up market manipulation which has so far held its ground for almost half a year by insisting on the premise that the financial system is just as meaningless as it is meaningful does indeed indicate some kind of a shift. “Going to the moon” means going up in flames before you finally make it, afterimages of the fight for ideological domination over the planet and implicitly the universe, leaving earth’s atmosphere in a sublime leap of faith, insistence on the ontologically irrevocable status of mathematics. Nobody comes back from the moon unchanged. Planning to go to the moon means you do not like it here on earth. You can’t stay on the moon forever: it is fundamentally inhospitable to carbon-based lifeforms.
Hedge funds use satellite imagery to beat the market, surveilling life on earth from space in order to juice the balance sheet. In Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987), Gordon Gekko makes a prescient observation: “The most valuable commodity I know of is information.” Gekko makes all his money from the network. He’s constantly on the phone, checking various screens, identifying improbable – and thus more lucrative – trends before anyone else through ingenuity, soft power, or both. James Murdoch echoed Gekko’s sentiment in a 2007 interview with Forbes, right before the crash and the Obama era. "Information is the most valuable commodity in the world today, and this business is about giving people access to information that is relevant to their lives," he said. "I can't think of a more fun place to work." Wall Street may have access to the highest-quality information on earth, but Redditors can utilize network effects to modify the feed’s topology, improvising functional albeit volatile gains-infrastructures out of the limited information they are actually able to get their hands on.
In part, the Robinhood app derives its captivating power from its instantiation as a moving image. User experience design is not unlike filmmaking: it’s all about how you present information, guiding someone through a world. The Robinhood interface is designed to screenshot well for social sharing: you’re compelled to show off your winnings to friends, taking secret pleasure in their FOMO. The user is not supposed to realize UX is happening. One of the most influential books within the discipline is called Don’t Make Me Think.
The shapes on the wall in Plato’s allegory of the cave were moving images as well. His allegory only works if it’s able to operationalize a concept of universal truth: there must only be one kind of sunlight that can actually, genuinely be too much to bear. Information circulates in such a way now that, for the average cave-dweller, it would be incredibly hard to even know where to look for the capacitating/incapacitating sun-truth. The New York Times? Into your own heart? Is there just one sun, or many? On February 26, 2017, Trump clearly relished looking directly at the total solar eclipse – it was a way of expressing his freedom.
The moon blocks out the sun during a solar eclipse. Life on earth needs the sun. Total eclipses are a sort of preview of the only horizon we all share. The previous two total eclipses occurred on February 26, 1979 and March 7, 1970, while the next two will take place on April 8, 2024 – an election year – and August 12, 2045.
What would it mean to insist that we’re “going to the sun”? Because we are, right? There’s always the temptation to stare directly at it – to see everything.