The r/WallStreetBets Motley Crew: What the History of Piracy Tells Us About GameStop and the World to Come

An analogy between eighteenth-century pirates and r/WallStreetBets sheds light on the GameStop affair — and what to expect next.

For those who insisted 2021 would be as chaotic as its predecessor, the new year has not disappointed. As we reach the end of January, here’s what we’ve seen so far: an attack on the Capitol, a second impeachment trial, and now an unprecedented attack on hedge funds organized and led by Reddit users from the r/WallStreetBets subreddit (which I’ll refer to as WSB). Redditors identified a strategy that was put in place by hedge funds to target GameStop and successfully thwarted it thanks to a wide call on the everyday man to buy GME shares. As I write, the war is still ongoing, with WSB redditors calling for shareholders to hold rather than sell, in hopes that the hedge funds will eventually lose billions from the operation.

I am not a finance expert and certainly not the best (or even the right) person to describe the mechanics of WSB’s maneuver or predict what might happen from here on. But as a scholar in the humanities, a light in my brain instantly lit up when I heard about these events and about other viral trends that have risen since the start of the year. I’m thinking, in particular, about the more inconspicuous but definitely odd and insanely widespread popularity of sea shanties. On platforms like TikTok, users have been sharing clips of themselves singing sea shanties in unison with previously posted videos; the phenomenon quickly fell into meme dynamics and reached viral levels. Sea shanty memes don’t have nearly as big of an impact as the WSB “GameStonk” operation. But — here’s the thing — they share a fundamental common denominator: they are symptomatic of the way that, in the face of exceptional misery for middle-class individuals, the internet becomes a platform of circulation where those all over the world facing similar hardships find solace in kinship. The appeal of sea shanties reveals the similarly between the internet and the ship of the eighteenth century during the boom of the Atlantic trade, on board of which sailors from different parts of the world developed a sense of community around the dreary working and living conditions and shared. Some sailors would, as history has shown us, eventually rebel and form motley crews.

The work I find most enlightening on the history of sailors, pirates, and motley crews is Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (2000). When the Atlantic maritime trade boomed and more and more sailors were needed to keep the unprecedented capitalist expansion going, the conditions of sailors degraded. As Linebaugh and Rediker explain, the “figure of the starving, often lame sailor . . . became a permanent feature of European civilization” (151) But, on the other hand, the ship became “the first place where working people from those different continents communicated,” which eventually led to oppressed sailors organizing themselves into motley crews and, eventually, pirate crews (152).

On r/WallStreetBets, redditors do not only share memes and information about the market. When one actually browse the posts there, the subreddit appears to be rife with posts in which users share their experience struggling with poverty since 2008. One notable example is “An Open Letter to Melvin Capital, CNBC, Boomers, and WSB,” posted by u/ssauronn on January 28, which received at the time that I write 131k upvotes and over 2,500 reddit awards and counting. In this post, the author describes his family’s descent into poverty after the 2008 recession and expresses his intention to get revenge for “the enormous repercussions [of] the reckless actions by those on Wall Street.” In the comment section, seven thousand replies (and counting) express their support and share their similar experiences. WSB redditors openly express the sociopolitical project animating their GameStonk operation: that is, to hit hedge funds back for the harm done to the middle-class people whose lives were upturned by the 2008 recession. This explains why, at this current moment, WSB is calling for GME shareholders to hold rather than sell: their intention is not to gain money, but rather to create as big and as long-lasting a problem for hedge funds as they can. If any gains are to be made, WSB redditors claim they want to redistribute the money to the general population, turning the logic of the financial 1% versus the rest of the world upside down. Both the exacerbated sense of belonging and fraternity between WSB redditors and their political beliefs align perfectly with those of eighteenth-century pirates.

Pirates, Linebaugh and Rediker explain, “insisted upon their right to subsistence” and tried to create on their ships “a ‘world turned upside down’” and “prove that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal Navy” (164, 162). “Egalitarian in a hierarchical age,” pirates “were self-conscious and justice-seeking, taking revenge against merchant captains who tyrannized the common seaman” (163). Much like the circulation of experience between workers made possible on ships culminated into fully organized pirate crews trying to fight the system in place, sea shanty memes and the GameStonk operation are two emanations of the same phenomenon, with the internet in lieu of the merchant ship. Similar to pirate crews who required their members to pledge fraternity to each other, WSB redditors constantly express their support to one another, often ending their comments and posts with expression of their love to the community and appeals to general kindness (for example, the subreddit’s post dedicated to general discussion about GME, titled “GME Megathread” and posted by u/ITradeBaconFutures on January 28, ends with the message: “We love you guys too. Be kind to each other.”) Like pidgin, the patchwork language of sailors of the Atlantic, redditors share a coded language with expressions, phrases, and emojis specific to their subreddit, enhancing the sense of community and belonging even more.

What do these similarities tell us? On the one hand, looking at the current GameStonk situation with this other moment of history in mind can give us clues as to how authorities will retaliate against the WSB motley crew. One of the instruments of oppression used to tackle the challenge caused by eighteenth-century pirates, besides hunting them down, was painting them as hostis humanis generis, enemies of all nations. Erasing the socio-political dimension of piratical organization out of history, authorities publicly described them as evil men with no agenda other than seeking violence and chaos for the sake of violence and chaos. The analogy still works: WSB redditors are all too easily portrayed as dumb internet trolls wreaking havoc out of boredom. Just as pirates’ radical and uniquely democratic and egalitarian agenda was lost in favor of a demonized and stultified portrait that made it easier for authorities to fight them back and keep their ideals from being adopted by the general population, we can expect, if not already witness, similar attempts to strip redditors of their sociopolitical discourse to ridicule — and deflate the threat of their revolutionary discourse — in the public imagination.

The history of eighteenth-century sailors and pirates also offers clarity on the state of the world we are living in: in this analogy, the sailor struggling to subsist is none other than the middle-class millennial, who, caught in a crushing system of debt, can’t buy any sort of property, lives paycheck to paycheck, and can’t afford to hit what boomers consider milestones in personal development, which even includes, for many, having children. The GameStonk events and the massive response to WSB’s call all over the internet (and the world) shed light on how brutally millennials were affected by the 2008 recession (and the back-to-back financial crises that followed since). This could help open communication with boomers, who are very much the intended audience of the “redditors are stupid, evil trolls” discourse.

Last but not least, identifying the analogy between pirates of the Atlantic and WSB redditors (and everyone in the U.S. and the rest of the world who related to their expressions of struggle and bought GME shares) gives us perspective. If the revolutionary impulse of motley and pirate crews in the eighteenth-century was crushed by the Royal Navy, it nonetheless preceded an intense age of uprising and profound change: cue to the wave of revolutions at the end of the eighteenth-century, be them Haitian, American, or French, and so on. At this moment in the twenty-first century, two major recessions and one pandemic in, no one questions we are living though historic times. The similarity between current events and this previous episode in history tells us that, however the GameStonk war between WSB and hedge funds resolves, it might be the beginning of a new wave of historic events rather than the culmination of what we’ve seen in 2020.

Sources

Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra : Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2000).

u/ITradeBaconFutures. “r/Wallstreetbets — GME Megathread.” Reddit. January 28, 2021. https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l71c4z/gme_megathread/. Accessed January 28, 2021.

u/ssauronn. “r/Wallstreetbets — An Open Letter to Melvin Capital, CNBC, Boomers, and WSB.” January 28, 2021. https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l6omry/an_open_letter_to_melvin_capital_cnbc_boomers_and/. Accessed January 28, 2021.