Internet cultureInternet cultureIt’s hard to keep up with internet culture, but don’t worry: every week we tell you the best of what you need to know.
This week the internet is all about the possibility of great harm. Maybe it’s a hangover of “Just do whatever, who cares?” Sentiment for the past four years, but for whatever reason, all I see are flashing red danger signs, from financial goliaths owned by Internet Davids to bad game night guests to the myriad of troubles you get into if you repeat what you do see see on TikTok.
This week in internet warnings
There is never a shortage of “don’t do what you saw on the internet” stories, but this week the scolding is reaching a fever level. So I’ve prepared a list of things online that could hurt you, your children. and western civilization.
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This week in High Finance: GameStop stonks
It’s rare for young people to be interested in the stock market, but this week the internet bankrupted nearly a billion dollar stock fund. Here’s a quick rundown of the situation (from a man whose entire understanding of the stock market came from seeing Trading Places in 1996): Recently, day trading on Reddit’s has subsided Wallstreetbets The forum found that a hedge fund was short selling GameStop’s stock. This may have been a good bet for the fund, given the financial hardship GameStop was in, but when Redditors saw this, they began buying GameStop stock at the low, low short price. This drove up the price. With every tick toward the sky, the hedge fund was losing money.
Then big investors noticed and bought into the bubble. With a tweet, Elon raised the share price from $ 147.98 to $ 230, and on further purchases it rose to nearly $ 350 per share and then fell to “only” $ 200 per share. It had traded at around $ 4 a few months ago, up eight thousand percent from the lowest to the highest point. With price in the stratosphere, the hedge fund was as badly hit at the end of the trading venues as the dukes, and it will (presumably) get worse when they are forced to buy back the stocks they cut.
Day trading apps like Robinhood prevented their users from buying GameStop stock, which was considered bad by politicians from AOC to Ted Cruz. Poorer people made money and richer people lost (for now, anyway), and how it all ends is unclear – maybe the rules on short selling will change, maybe Reddit will crash the international economy and put us in Mad Max style Post- Economy hell landscape where we buy stocks made of guzzolene and metal spikes for shoulder pads.
Celebrity You’ve Never Heard Of Before: Riyaz Aly
Before the internet, hardly anyone in the US would have heard of Riyaz Aly. The seventeen year old lives with his family in India and enjoys synchronizing himself with other people’s music, wearing nice clothes and dreaming of being a Bollywood movie star one day. It almost piled up too 48 million followers on TikTok. That’s roughly the population of South Korea … all for a random kid in India who syncs with their lips.
He’s a charismatic young man sure, but the fact that your kids, me, and now you know his name must mean something, but I’m not sure what. Modern fame is so damn weird.
Viral Video of the Week: Game Night Stereotypes
It’s been almost 38 years since anyone had a game night that wasn’t about Zoom or Discord.Game night stereotypes”To the top of the YouTube trend chart. The comedy video by Age perfect was viewed 11 million times in a few days and describes all the annoying types of people who would come over to play boggle if it was still a thing to come over to play boggle. So if you are missing out on the Forever Dice Roller, Poker Poseur, and I’m Always Red, this is the video for you. Make sure you stay at the end of the video so you can remember a sequence about the destruction of the room. (By the way: You are all invited to Settlers of Catan to see me as soon as you can present some vaccination papers. I miss the game night.)
