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: