What is it about this Reddit/WallStreetBets/Robinhood stock story that gives it such a pull on the relics of our long-distant and ridiculous past? DogeCoin, “stonks,” brick and mortar retail businesses: All these artifacts of a bygone era have been drawn inexorably into the conflagration of memes, populist anger, and endless—like, just fucking relentless—metaphors for what “shorting” a stock is. (If we have to imagine one more monkey borrowing one more banana from another monkey, we’re going to lose our minds.) Now we can add yet another long-absent god to our list of deities resurrected by this ongoing story: Jon Stewart, who joined Twitter today and, sure enough, issued this as his first tweet:
The former Daily Show host has joined in with no less august voices than AOC and Ja Rule to condemn today’s moves by several Wall Street middlemen, who moved to block user purchases of several of the stocks that retail investors have been building up as part of their efforts to fuck over hedge funds hoping to short companies like GameStop, Nokia, and AMC. (See, a “short” is like when a hedgehog borrows a micro-USB cable from a wombat…) Many observers have noted that blocking people from making the stock purchases they want to make is pretty blatantly unfair, enforcing a perception that the big companies use aggressive gatekeeping to ensure that the only people screwing over the planet with their bad stock decisions have sufficiently shiny suits.
It’s not wholly surprising that Stewart—whose last major public act was the release of his Steve Carell election comedy Irresistible last year—would want to chime in on this particular topic. After all, the 2008 banking collapses happened right in the midst of Stewart’s legendary tenure on The Daily Show, and his rage at the too-big-to-fail fuckos running the banks then (and, you know, now), and whose oblivious greed caused so much harm to so many people, was palpable throughout that era.
Anyway, Stewart’s second tweet was then far more traditional, i.e., the public statement that he probably won’t be using his Twitter account in a regular or consistent fashion. Anyway, enough about that. Hey, guess what! We were just reading this amazing thread earlier this afternoon, and it explained to us that “shorting” a stock is essentially what happens when a Dracula meets a bartender and the two of them…