A richly-produced podcast with Bari Weiss. A must listen.
En passant, he connects meme stocks to The Revolt of the Public.
Around minute 23, he talks about people metaphorically being mutilated as they go through the rite of passage of joining an online tribe. Maybe that metaphor is a stretch?
Meme stocks definitely feel like a unique event that speaks to where we are in the world right now. I’ve been following a couple of the meme subreddits for a few months and it’s fascinating to watch folks make business cases for trades and to see how folks act and discuss them.
All walks of life are there. Left and right, rich and poor, smart and stupid. It’s offensive and disturbing one minute and touching and supportive the next minute.
GameStop vs. 1/6.
I was more than willing to bet our host a few months ago as to which would outlive the other in terms of significance. I’m still long 1/6 and short GameStop. Anyone willing to bet the other side?
My philosophy: never underestimate the value of really really bad optics. They stormed a modern day holy shrine and the other side will leverage it to its fullest extent. AOC is still suffering from PTSD.
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3. I meant what I said about the Wall Street riot being more significant than the Capitol Hill riot. I don’t watch television, which is why the Capitol Hill riot did not make a big impression on me.
https://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/emh-and-gamestop/
I like Gurri but for the most part either think his insight is overrated (because vague) or I don’t know what he’s talking about.
I think you have to hash through the whole long, repetitive book to get at his core ideas.
Unfortunately much of it does not come out in his interviews and short pieces.
For instance he seems go take true a epistemological humbleness approach to complex societal outcomes, eco/social policy prescriptions, and any kind prediction; yet this is not overly evident in his interviews. There’s explicit complexity theory via Alicia Juarerro and Paul Omerod, and a lot of Hayekian decentralized bottom-up knowledge in the book. See here for a link to 2 articles of his in this vein: https://twitter.com/JoeRini6/status/1392130098585800709?s=19
Previously, Anold tried to summarize him here in 6 points: https://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/shorter-martin-gurri/ but I think this is still the interview/blog Gurri. Furthermore, Arnold’s points 5 & 6 just don’t seem to be part of Gurri’s thesis:
“5. Society requires authority. But the existing authorities can seemingly do nothing other than hope for a return to the 20th century when they had closer to a monopoly on information. And they seem to be completely incapable of dealing with the digital world. They cannot operate at Internet speed (it takes the bureaucracy too long to react to events) or at Internet scale (the Obamacare web site fiasco).
6. Maybe a new generation of elites and/or institutions will emerge that is more adept at dealing with technology and sufficiently humble to deal with a situation in which information is more dispersed than it was last century.”
I think Gurri is actually more pessimistic – no new set of ‘elites’ can reverse the tech/media/truth fracturing we are living through. Here it is helpful to read Gurri in tandem with Andrew Mir (with his kind of Marshall McLuhan vision that the media forms we now have are so fundamental to how we communicate and make sense that splintering and subjective truth are now a permanent feature of the news & political landscape).
Disappointing
I am not sure the WSB/meme stock “movement” is the same thing as BLM.
I listened to most of the podcast. Good production. Intelligent conversation, but like many peoples pet theories, eh, doesnt work for everything.
I would not be surprised if WSB wasnt 90% male. More if you take the pros who are trawling it out. Does this matter?
Gilets jeunes – mostly male? I looked for demographic info on it.
Best quote:
“Ok you won. What do you want?”
“Faaaaaarrrrrrt!”