Actually, it’s about ethics in games investing. Last week, an historic short squeeze over a year in the making went nuclear, GameStop stock skyrocketed, and a multi-billion dollar hedge fund was nearly liquidated by an army of redditors. The GameStop blitz ­has been called many things: a colossal troll, a right-wing mob (???), the final form of Occupy Wall Street, the final form of Gamergate, a populist revolt. While most of these are somewhat true, none are entirely correct, and some are laughably wrong. None of this had anything to do with Donald Trump, for example, and my God, please get off the internet, Twitter is eating your brain. It seems to me that what we saw last week was simple, self-interested betting, but at a scale that was close to impossible to achieve even a few years ago. A pronounced populist desire to ‘fight back against Wall Street’ undeniably electrified the movement, and that message was dramatically amplified by social media — the natural home of populism. From here, as the GameStop stock price rocketed upward, it was plain old mob euphoria, and yet another shocking outcome in what is now a global state of shocking outcomes we are apparently still unwilling to accept, let alone manage or mitigate.

Josh Gross provided the best summary of the drama through last week. In the thread below, he chronicles the story of a single investor realizing the uniquely weak position of the Wall Street short, that investor’s journey from mocked crazy person to Reddit folk hero, and the evolution of his ridiculed-if-reasonable counter bet to wildly popular position over the course of the last sixteen months:

Through last week, the story was crazy enough: a legion of non-institutional investors trading mostly on Robinhood caught a wealthy fount of Wall Street power brutally shorting a stock for no rational reason. They bet in the opposite direction, made millions of dollars, and nearly took down a hedge fund in the process. But once the story went parabolic on social media the demand for a handful of what were only recently assumed doomed stocks became, for many novice investors, obviously dangerous; GameStop at a couple dollars a share was grossly undervalued, but GameStop at four hundred dollars a share is obviously a bubble. This is around the time a couple of tech giants airdropped several hundred tons of gasoline onto a blazing wildfire.

Last Wednesday, Discord banned the WallStreetBets server, Bets went private on Reddit (with rumors flying about a ban there too), we all went to bed believing things could not get any more insane, and the following morning woke up to news that Robinhood froze buying on fifty volatile stocks, including GameStop. Anyone holding the stock would be allowed to sell, but with no one allowed to buy there was now clearly a seismic market force favoring the GameStop short. Thick in the internet fog of war, it seemed this could save at least one powerful hedge fund from bankruptcy, which of course most people assumed the purpose of the move.

It was a perfect storm of social media madness: everyone holding the stock was furious about the market manipulation, libertarians, including many prominent tech leaders, were furious about both censorship and the apparent collusion with elitist, incumbent founts of Wall Street power and wealth, right and left wing populists were furious at the apparent alliance between elitists in Silicon Valley, New York, and Washington against the “little guy,” and socialists were furious about… okay, well socialists are never really happy when people make money. From here, holding stocks like GameStop and AMC became a holy mission. This was no longer a fun circus, with very wealthy people losing money to novice investors. This was The Man at war with our beloved Reddit trolls, and everyone picked a side.

The media firestorm quickly drew in political leaders. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez smartly jumped to the defense of redditors, with dominant corporations at the time seeming clearly biased against them in favor of Wall Street. Ted Cruz co-signed.

The alliance lasted all of thirty seconds before Ocasio-Cortez accused Cruz of trying to kill her, but the consensus among the populist left and right was nonetheless established.

Rumors quickly gave way to conspiracy theories. Tech influencers shared tips from anonymous social media accounts ostensibly working at Robinhood who claimed there was a call between Sequoia, the White House, and their company that led to the stock ban. The truth, that Robinhood didn’t have the cash required to place the level of volume they were seeing, was less interesting. But with madness fully taken over, almost any counteraction could have been conceivable. It was information-induced hysteria, yet again. I reference Jump almost every week in these wires. I will probably continue to do so until the world reads it or ends, because the scale and speed at which information online is catalyzing real-world change is the most important dynamic currently at play in our contemporary world, and this dynamic is only becoming more dangerous.

Ignoring my emails should be illegal, tbh. Chaos is increasingly our culture as, in a sense, we become Twitter. This transformation poses new and significant challenges — many with which we are clearly and publicly grappling, from the historically-unprecedented cultural dominance of single social media influencers, and the negative externalities innate of influence at that scale, to what appears to be social media’s addiction-based algorithmic pull to conflict. But select reporters not having unique, privileged access to high-profile businessmen? Sorry, not a risk to society.

Alas, our currently red-hot tech press subplot: should Marc Andreessen literally be forced to talk to me?

A chat last week between Margit Wennmachers and Sonal Chokshi, representing venture capital firm A16z’s much-discussed new media company, and a handful of tech reporters illuminated the most pronounced point of disagreement between many in tech and many in the industry’s niche press: what is actually the role of media?

Most people in tech will tell you they value sober, accurate reporting. But they also believe the technology industry’s impact has been generally positive, and generally negative coverage of the industry is therefore, in aggregate, essentially dishonest. This is perceived by many in media as a desire for nothing but fawning puff pieces, which, in the case of a few tech leaders, is — let’s be real — probably true. Meanwhile, the most well-intentioned journalists covering tech aren’t really focused on the birds-eye view at all, they’re just reporting. Many of them aren’t even focused on startups, they’re focused on mature companies exercising significant influence and power, and the technology industry is, by the way, no longer an underdog. It’s gigantic, and globally dominant. It’s also often lacking in transparency on policy, decision-making, and functionality that impacts the entire world. Journalists who “expose the truth” believe they are providing a valuable public service. In some cases, this is true.

But not all tech coverage is created equal, and there is a huge difference between reporting on Amazon, Apple or Facebook and making fun of a luggage startup CEO’s Instagram stories, or opining in a long-form blog post on your contempt for this or that particular tech personality, who you admit, openly — in the piece — you just don’t really like. Then, is this sort of shit necessary:

The purpose of behavior like this from members of the press becomes especially difficult to understand, my God, when it becomes obvious they are clearly more interested in the dunk than the actual subject at hand:

For years, when met with criticism, writers who engage in this kind of performative public contempt for the industry they are meant to be professionally covering have hidden behind the work of actual reporters, and many in tech have been perfectly willing to accept the false equivalency. Speaking in generalities — which I am guilty of myself — has probably been one of the major drivers of the endless tech vs. media telanovela. But as the global bleed between personalities and professions continues apace, another driver of conflict, more obvious now than ever before, might just be simple, timeless, professional jealousy.

The chat surrounding A16z’s media company was tense, if polite (mostly), and one writer in particular was very upset with Marc Andreessen for not taking interviews from “real” journalists. He wasn’t saying Marc had to take interviews with him, he insisted, he was only saying it was not ethical for Marc to avoid interviews conducted by someone… with whom this writer agreed. 

Kevin Roose, a writer for the New York Times, challenged the position himself, if also subtly insulting A16z’s project: there have always been trade publications, and if this is just that, he asked, who really cares? But Roose is a columnist. His job is to have an opinion, and a lack of access to Marc Andreessen doesn’t critically impact his work. For a certain kind of tech writer, however, “access” to industry leaders is kind of the entire paid subscription sales pitch. For this sort, the problem is abstractly framed, on behalf of society, as non-combative Marc Andreessen interviews, but really the problem is personal, and quite specific: if you are selling yourself as close to Silicon Valley power and you can’t deliver interviews with powerful industry leaders, you will not be seen as an insider for very long — which of course you aren’t.

Yikes!

Monday, the topic boiled over when Elon Musk accepted a rare interview with Sriram Krishnan and Aarthi Ramamurthy — a pair of actual industry insiders who’ve recently been hosting popular live chats. A handful of journalists really, really didn’t like this! The problem? The chat took place on Clubhouse, and Marc Andreessen was also on stage. The presence of Andreessen inadvertently added insult to injury, as everyone he has ever blocked on Clubhouse — including many journalists, both real and self-defined — would not be able to listen to the conversation. At least, this was the argument. And a conversation out of reach for any journalist, for any reason?

It could not stand.

Do certain important people, defined here as people some subset of journalists find compelling, owe the professional media class a seat at their table? The question is interesting. Politicians and business leaders were once forced to travel through the establishment media’s gateway to reach the masses, and as I’ve been writing for months social media influence at scale does pose unique and concerning challenges to society. Our world is different, now, and different doesn’t necessarily mean better. But no one ever engaged with the media because the media was especially moral, or True. People engaged with the media to reach the media’s audience. As an audience is no longer unique to the media, we are left with innate media goodness as a defense of a media discourse monopoly, which strikes me as… less than persuasive.

In Lessin’s argument specifically we see the added implication that Marc and Elon must be stopped from “shaping the narrative.” By media. Now, perhaps no one should have a direct line of communication to hundreds of millions of people (in this particular Clubhouse chat, including spillover chats, we were probably looking at something closer to ten or twenty thousand). But the implication here is this sort of social firewall should apply to everyone but media personalities, who now assume the role of thought police, and must — for the sake of the Republic! — speak unencumbered to their own audiences at will. This would be a spectacular assumption of power, yet I see no apparent defense of the power. It is just assumed to be necessary. But who even is the media? How long do you have to be working in media before you’re equipped to police the speech of a few celebrity businessmen? What is it about “the media” opinion (is there a media opinion?) that we all need to hear? And then, in the age of the internet, policing speech at scale is an incredible responsibility. Over all of us.

Do we get to vote on these people?

Anyway, I do at least respect the honesty. Much of the criticism leveled against Krishnan and Ramamurthy was not that. There were questions pertaining to the spread of misinformation — who would correct Elon when he committed the grave sin of imperfectly recollecting “facts” as according to pre-approved, on-message bloggers? Then, without a “professional” journalist moderating, how could an interview even be possible? Like, technically? Interviews are really hard!

This is all, no offense, bullshit. In the first place, Elon is free to say anything on Twitter that he says in a Clubhouse chat, the only difference being that on Twitter he is speaking to 44 MILLION people. Where’s the outrage? Then, a professional journalist is not imbued with any special live chat moderation skills. Reporting and moderating what is essentially a talk show are completely different tasks, requiring entirely different skillsets. Joe Rogan is the most successful interviewer alive, and he did not cut his teeth in a newsroom. Rogan is a curious comedian with whom listeners tend to empathize, a quality without a metric — charisma. Last I checked, they don’t hand that out at journalism school, and most reporters — in fact, many of the best reporters — tend not to have it.

But the most ridiculous assertion of all, that this was a public chat journalists could not access, was of course immediately disproven by the live response of these same journalists, which took place in real-time on Twitter. They had access, they just couldn’t listen from their personal profile, which... okay? Is this really a problem?

I should note there was one especially interesting take from the press. Via Nellie Bowles:

First, an honest admission of antagonism, and we stan a rude queen who owns it. But more importantly second, an honest read of the audience, including many in tech: we enjoy the drama. The battle is part of the fun, and in a real test of wit our favorite thinkers tend to shine a little brighter. Just look at Twitter, the thirst for conflict checks out. There’s just the uncomfortable follow-up question: is this healthy?

The verdict is still out on what media will look like in five or ten years. But the good news is you’re still legally allowed to write, podcast, and become the titan of press you wish to see in the world. Look at me, seven months in and I’m a real ass billionaire media tycoon. Easy! Don’t focus on the people who block you, focus on the people who dig your writing. And if you really want an interview with that VC you say you “hate” but can’t stop talking about? Do yourself a favor and look around. Are a lot of people not really interested in talking to you right now? Consider for a moment there may be a reason for that, and adapt. Because the truth is, plenty of journalists have access. Just not you.

-SOLANA