One moment some of my more financially sophisticated friends were joking about bidding up the price of Gamestop shares, the next moment the stock price was going parabolic.
Then came the crackdown, which looked like something out of a 21st Century cyberwarfare playbook: first communications were disrupted, the communications platform Discord suspended investors’ efforts to coordinate; then came OpEds and commentary to vilify and discredit the tech-bros and meme investors, and when that didn’t work, the platforms closed positions.