The r/wallstreetbets ‘war machine’: Explicating dynamics of consumer resistance and capture

Abstract

Following the recent #GameStop ‘market disruption’ where r/wallstreetbets ‘rogue’ traders were able to momentarily topple billion dollar hedge funds, we employ Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘war machine’ concept in order to comment on the potential of consumer resistance when matched up against global financial markets. While most extant theory follows the Foucauldian tradition in asserting that consumer resistance is a reaction to power, we use Deleuze and Guattari’s immanent theorisation of desire to make the case for thinking of resistance as primary. Far from a hagiography of affective affirmation, our immanent perspective draws attention to how state and corporate forms are readily able to co-opt consumer resistance. Ultimately, we make the case for reorienting consumer resistance research away from seeking out ruptures and breaks in stable structures of power to asking a more difficult question: how can resistance be organised to avoid capture?

Revenants in the marketplace: A hauntology of retrocorporation

“…Third, and relatedly, unlike the Derridean revenant that resists any sense of reconciliatory closure under capitalist hegemony, the marketplace revenant – because of its co-optation – functions in the service of capitalist hegemony. The marketplace revenant aligns with Jones and Hietanen’s (2023: 227) recent discussion of ‘an apparatus of capture’ which explains how capitalism readily co-opts (or ‘captures’) consumer resistance before it is imagined. For Jones and Hietanen, the desire to resist is often fuelled by affective excitements whose radical intensities necessarily become overtaken by that which is controllable and predictable, ensuring that ‘the seeds of capture are present from the start’ (Jones and Hietanen, 2023: 231).…”

“…Marcuse, 2002 [1964]), we propose for critical marketing scholarship, a contemporary diagnosis of the allure of surpassed worlds. Understanding the appeal that derives from that which no longer exists despite, or perhaps because of, its negation by the hegemony of consumer culture, we argue, can tell us more about the temporal dynamics of capitalism’s ‘realism’ (Cronin and Fitchett, 2021; Fisher, 2009; Hietanen et al, 2022; Jones and Hietanen, 2023).…”

“…What is less clear is what is to be done with this guilt, let alone how it might be harnessed, suppressed, or repurposed when there is nothing on the political or economic horizon to suggest the imminent re-emergence and reintegration of the ghosts of disappeared Others . Capitalism’s veteran hegemony has shown itself to be adept at absorbing and rechanneling, rather than reckoning with, the feelings and desires of its subjects to ensure its continuity (Hietanen et al, 2022; Jones and Hietanen, 2023). To explore how revenants can be made to work in the service of capitalism, we must first consider the possibility that market co-optation functions retrospectively.…”

“…Precorporation is predictive, future-looking, and terminal, reflecting a perverse reconstitution of libidinal desire itself (Ahlberg et al, 2022; Jones and Hietanen, 2023). It presupposes that those who are opposed to capitalism will self-limit their imaginaries to what is possible and desirable under capitalism: ‘Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable’ (Fisher, 2009: 8).…”

WallStreetBets: An Analysis of Investment Advice Democratization

“…Fuelled by the 2021 GameStop hype on WallStreetBets, recent research has provided a number of insights on the dynamics and background of the matter. This includes studies on the social dynamics within the WSB community that led to the hype (Lyócsa et al, 2022;Schou et al, 2022) and on the idea of retail investors fighting against Wall Street (Chohan, 2021;H. Jones & Hietanen, 2022).…”