Last night I told my mom how when I was breaking up the snow on my car with a broom and letting it fall I kept thinking, that’s what I should do, where that was go to a glacier and wait for it to fall. Going down with the ice caps before everything else around them, essentially because I’m sick of watching all this, I don’t want to see it anymore. “Maybe,” she said, “you should drive down here for a few days.” I told her she must not have been listening at all because if she was she would understand that all the snow previously on top of my car was now surrounding it – impossible for me to drive anywhere, much less Alabama. Also, the plague, though today she and my dad got vaccines and I obviously don’t care about my own life anymore. But I told her if I was going anywhere I was going to the Arctic, and that I had to go because I needed look up flights, which I would need her to pay for, my one-way trip to melt with the ice caps, and she seemed weirdly nonchalant about this – “You mean Antarctic, actually” – but after we hung up I found out you can’t fly there at all, it’s a whole process, so I assume that’s why.
There are other places I can and will wait to melt before the rest of the world, including the chair in the apartment I live in that sits next to a big window where I sat last Friday and talked to a man who runs the accounts of everyday wealthy people. He confirmed what I sort of assumed and also kind of knew, which was that absolutely nothing about the GameStop fiasco did anything to change or really affect the world at all. He, like most people who handle what are referred to as “portfolios” instead of “my stocks,” considers RobinHood and its cohorts to be gambling, though he was very impressed by the people who at the start had managed to raise the value at all. It was likely these people, he told me, who were yelling don’t sell, don’t sell. “When someone’s saying that,” he said, “generally they’re selling.”
This is the difference between investing and gambling, according to this broker who works in New York City and handles accounts beginning with “a few hundred thousand dollars” and going to the millions: investing is when you make money without selling. That is to say, if you’ve gambled you’ve only actually made money when you take it out. And you can pay off a bill, but now it’s gone. The money came and went. With investing, the money stays. If you invest when things are going well, it grows.
This is what Ryan Cohen, the founder of Chewy who joined GameStop last fall and made something like 1 billion dollars off Reddit’s big heist, said was the secret to building a successful pet product delivery service: “If an angry customer called to complain about a late shipment or a case of exploded cat litter, we used those opportunities to turn them into brand advocates. We figured we could turn their anger into passion for our company.”
I don’t think Cohen meant to tell the world that he figured he could turn the master’s tools into passion for maintaining the master’s house but he did, and he has, though certainly not alone. There’s a lie people who say they’re dismantling something they’re actually trying to break into use, which is that this thing isn’t actually real. You can see and feel the damage of this thing, always, but they’ll tell you to your face that it’s a trick being played that only they’ve figured out. And three weeks into the second year of our horrible pandemic existence, the lie I think took on so much power because it felt like an incantation: money isn’t real.
“It’s only not real,” said the broker, “to people who have a lot of it,” and I understand what he’s saying, but I think the truth is that money is the realest thing in the world to all of us; its reality is wholly inescapable. Nothing about overtaking GameStop and jamming it up and down was anti-capitalist, in my view, because although it’s fun to poke holes in the sanctity of money, it’s a moral and frankly philosophical failing to warp its brutality into mirrors and smoke.
On an individual level, the reality of having or not having a lot of money shows itself in security, in safety, in ability to jam yourself up and down with just as little consequence as these video game stocks. But on a larger level, money is death, blood, pain, rainforests burned, icecaps burned, people for centuries and centuries enslaved and I do not mean metaphorically, children taken, elderly abandoned, 400,000 Americans dead when they should have survived, millions whose lives cannot bounce back. When Elon Musk winks and says that all of this is fake, that he can name companies what he wants and mess with the markets to the delight of people who genuinely, seriously, truly find it wild that he tweets even though he’s rich, he’s not sharing a secret you don’t already know. He’s not telling you he holds onto something that doesn’t really exist, he’s telling you he doesn’t care about its existence. Because this idea that money and markets and numbers, that all of this isn’t going to hurt someone, somewhere, hurt them deeply, this is what it means to think money isn’t real.
My understanding of how to dismantle something unreal is that you cannot. My understanding of how to destroy something is to feel every inch in your own grip, and then squeeze. But obviously the trick of capitalism is to take that force which could squeeze away, to turn their anger into passion for the company, to confuse enough people into cheering on hoards of people gambling and briefly think we were embarking on a revolution instead of continuation of the same system we’re still supporting.
Last year the world fell apart enough that it felt like something new might spring up but just before it could what I noticed is that we instead chose to crush everything back together. This patched-up version is neither crisp nor clean, and the failures of its repair are jutting out on all sides. Now when you walk down the sidewalk which belongs to you, you make room for dining that exploits every aspect of the labor that goes into it. When you leave your house for one thing you’re encouraged to take on more, to support local businesses as much as you can, because for these things to survive rather than choke the beasts killing them we’ve chosen to breathe slowly into them ourselves, as if enough air for both could possibly exist. And all of this is fine because it’s temporary, or convenient, or, in the case with my car, which every time I drive I find myself horrified in, because how could I be using this thing I shouldn’t have to use, this thing that even though it’s a hybrid is melting ice caps I can’t even drive to to die with, but here it is anyway, it’s this security I own to leave the city if I need to without hesitation, in my hands since April. The farthest I’ve taken it is to see an owl on Long Island.
This is what imagination looks like to the man with the second most amount of money on Earth: you are in a car and you do not have to drive it. You are in a rocket and you can go to Mars. You are very rich and you also smoke weed. You are getting richer and you name your baby after physics. You are getting richer and you do not make things better. You are getting richer and you do not see the problem. You are getting richer and the problem is not enough people can become rich too. You are getting richer and you are trying to figure out how to take your brain and preserve it, eventually, because all these ideas are just too good to lose.
When my car was nearing the end of its clearing my neighbor who had been smoking a cigarette on our stoop called out that maybe I could just turn the car on and let the snow melt off from the internal heat. I answered that what I really wanted to do was just not have a car anymore, since all I ever do is sit in it during street sweeping and shovel things off it, and also that I was pretty sure turning your car on while it was covered in snow poisons you. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe it does.”
Later I found out that it’s not true that it poisons you, but that it wouldn’t really melt the snow either. All it actually does is waste.
You are so good. Every syllable fit together like a thousand piece puzzle!!!
lily this made me a little sad but I still love it so much okay bye