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People have figured out that one of the ways to get to overnight wealth is to solve the collective action problem and they're getting better and better at foste

People have figured out that one of the ways to get to overnight wealth is to solve the collective action problem and they're getting better and better at fostering it and at coming up with legal ways to avoid existing regulations against pump and dump schemes. Doing it "for the lulz" to hose a bunch of hedge fund shorts. Or creating NFTs around "things" you "own" and pumping them up. Knockoff dogcoins that have nothing to do with the playfulness of the original. The sad part is that we could actually solve some real problems by coordinating collective action on, say, starting a new city that's designed around non-motorized transit within the city limits. But we don't. We get Snoop Dogg crypto instead. It's all so depressing.

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
The collective action problem that’s been solved is getting people to collectively click a button. It’s why you see tons of people upvote things or change their profile pictures in support of a movement. But getting them to go past that is still as hard as it’s ever been.
beepbooptheory 5y ago
> ...starting a new city... Curious what you mean here, and how it relates to collective action?
- 3pt14159 5y ago
  What I'm trying to point to here is that in the developed world the vast, vast majority of the value of a dwelling is how many dwellings exist around it. That's because land value is an arms race. So many people want to live in, say, Toronto that large sums are poured into mortgages. The materials cost is only a small fraction of the value of the home. But it doesn't have to be this way. People could put all this energy they're burning on crypto and apply the same principles into getting everyone to agree to some sort of better city with sustainability and low-cost-of-maintenance built in by default. That way we could have affordable housing spring up. It would take work to vet; escrows, webs-of-trust, etc. But it's totally doable in the new work from anywhere future.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    Plenty of affordable housing in depressed areas (Appalachia). The problem is the lack of jobs, or safety, or some other thing people want. People don't want affordable housing. They want affordable housing in the existing cities where they (and everyone else) want to be.
    - pavas 5y ago
      > The problem is the lack of jobs, or safety, or some other thing people want. From op: > But it's totally doable in the new work from anywhere future
      - giantg2 5y ago
        "getting everyone to agree to some sort of better city" They're talking about creating a new city, not reusing the existing empty housing. Even if you can work from anywhere (which ignores many industries), this only satisfies that one requirement. Some people might see the snow and cold as a deal breaker. Others might not want to move there because it's far from family. A typical theme on related posts of relocating for remote work is that they want some combination of educated population, technology culture/groups, and some sort of specific government/community resource. The list goes on. The nature of the housing problem is that people want to live in very specific areas and then it snowballs. Remote work today should allow a considerable number of people to move out of SV, Toronto, etc. Yet most are staying. There are cheaper and better (depending on specific desires) options, yet they are not often explored. It's basically group-think. I don't see a new city solving that, since once it becomes popular, it too will suffer from demand effects.
        3pt14159 5y ago
        Right, but like people didn't do all of that negative thinking with some random dogcoin. They poured in. If you told me there were 10k well trusted artistic people with a great deal of interest in starting a high density, non-car-centric city in the middle of Ontario I would join. I would buy the lot of land on Kickstarter. I would list my friends that I trusted. I would help solve the problems around figuring out internet and transit. But nobody in Canada is offering this to me because even though this is better for the world, this takes real work. Instead they want to pump crypto and stock market scams because the payoff is short term and because they're naturally cynical.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
> The sad part is that we could actually solve some real problems by coordinating collective action on, say, starting a new city that's designed around non-motorized transit within the city limits. In general it would seem that human beings don't actually want to make the world a better place, but if you can find a way to sell it as a get rich quick scheme it might actually work.
- WanderPanda 5y ago
  Maybe it isn‘t even a better place for the majority? Just a utopia for a few? Take into account that e.g. 20-30% of the population are smokers
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    ...I don't follow. What does non-motorized transit within city limits have to do with smoking?
kingkawn 5y ago
There has been concerted action against collective action for over a century in the west. That the only way people feel comfortable expressing it now is with the cover of financial schemes is a temporary, I agree bullshit, phase. People are building cultural experiences to validate the effort to themselves and will come around to it without the need to be scamming someone. Just give them some time, the pursuit of novelty alone will solve this.
clktmr 5y ago
I was following "Roaring Kittys" Youtube Channel when he had less than 400 subscribers. This was never intended to be a pump and dump, he genuinely made a case for a better valuation. The mania and hype started right after the short squeeze in january and I a agree that the community that built around it is mostly a shitshow. However many of the original investors are still invested believing in a business turn-around lead by Ryan Cohen.
- ricardobeat 5y ago
  The stock already sits at 600% valuation, what kind of turnaround will justify a multiple of that?
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    A lot of people got in when the stock was near the peak so they were left holding the bag. They're holding, hoping for a potential return on their investment as selling now would be at a loss.
  - clktmr 5y ago
    What exactly is a "600% valuation"? In 2020 Gamestop was valued at a level that implied bankruptcy within two years.
    - ricardobeat 5y ago
      Their financials still imply eventual bankruptcy at the moment, even after the massive windfall from stock appreciation.
  - SilasX 5y ago
    I can't speak to the claims about potential profitability of GameStop's business ventures, but one theory endorsed by a lot of the /r/wallstreetbets and /r/SuperStonk redditors is that hedge funds still have significant undisclosed shorts and we have yet to see the "mother of all short squeezes" (MoASS), in which case the stock price can be well in excess of what is justified by future profitability. Related to this theory, a lot of them believe the ease of closing short positions is facilitated by shady phantom shares and are trying to stamp that out by directly registering shares with the broker Computershare. Disclaimer: I own GME stock.
giantg2 5y ago
"The sad part is that we could actually solve some real problems by coordinating collective action on, say, starting a new city that's designed around non-motorized transit within the city limits." The incentives are different. The people trying to get rich quick are not likely to do hard work to make/grow a city. Hell, it's hard enough to get people to do the simple act of voting (especially in primaries) or going to municipal or school board meetings.
- boringg 5y ago
  Agree the cost of the first statement is quite high (time and money) where as clicking to buy a stock for a couple hundred bucks is not much effort at all. While it is sad that we can't get civic engagement higher I don't think you can equate these problems at all.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    "While it is sad that we can't get civic engagement higher I don't think you can equate these problems at all." That's my entire point - you're not going to get engagement from the vast majority of the GameStop people if it doesn't involve a get rich quick value proposition.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Kalium 5y ago
> The sad part is that we could actually solve some real problems by coordinating collective action on, say, starting a new city that's designed around non-motorized transit within the city limits. But we don't. We get Snoop Dogg crypto instead. Is it perhaps possible that what's been solved is not collective action in a general sense, but transparently self-interested collective action for a narrow easy-engagement rapid-payoff set of problems? Revamping city design, or setting up a new one, doesn't meet any of those criteria. It's not easy to engage with. It doesn't pay off quickly. It's not immediately obvious why a random person would want to jump on. So, go ahead. Lament that the teeming masses have collectively made a decision that's not the one we would like them to. It is a modern tragedy. For my own part, I think there are lessons to be learned in why one decision was collectively made and acted on and not another.
- 3pt14159 5y ago
  Right, but it is righteous and still widely profitable. It's more work, but it's lasting, honest value. This is why it is so depressing.
  - Kalium 5y ago
    Widely profitable for who? For society or directly in dollars for the individuals involved? Righteous by whose definition? Honest by whose definition? How widely shared are those definitions? Rhetorical questions, please don't answer. Someone has solved a particular kind of collective action problem. Now we have a playbook for addressing a specific type of situation. It doesn't seem to be a general solution or readily adaptable to a general solution. Perhaps we could be happy that we have gained a useful tool. Even if it's not quite the tool we might have wished for. Otherwise we're essentially lamenting that all the money and effort that goes into, say, consumer goods R&D (or another unworthy cause) isn't instead used for medical research (or another worthy cause).
logicalmonster 5y ago
> People have figured out that one of the ways to get to overnight wealth is to solve the collective action problem and they're getting better and better at fostering it and at coming up with legal ways to avoid existing regulations against pump and dump schemes. For what it's worth, Roaring Kitty's original video streams where he analyzes GameStop's stock should still be up on YouTube and probably cross-posted on other sites. He has hours and hours of commentary on the topic so if he said anything urging collective action or pumping the stock in an illegal way, somebody should be able to find it. As far as I remember, he was just doing a fundamental business analysis of GameStop and just pointed out that the stock was drastically underpriced given the upcoming new console cycle and his opinion that the actual business of selling physical games was not yet on the way out. Should commenting on a security that you like be illegal in a free society? As far as your commentary about the increase of "pump and dump" schemes, I think the technology is more useful than you seem to recognize and that we're in the very early stages of blockchain tech and better uses for it will be found, but that's a separate issue I'd rather not go into here. But as far as the pumps/dumps go, I think you're more closely looking at the symptom and not the cause. What's closer to the root cause of all of these financial schemes is the mental health crisis impacting young people. Many young people are feeling hopeless about the future for many, many reasons, and feel that financially making it through extreme risk taking is the only way to have a good life. Many are just dropping out of society. You can see this being impacted in some widely popularized stats like the number of young men not having sex, suicide rates, college attendance dropping, and many more things. What's going on with the mental health of the young is much more important to the future of humanity than the fixation society is currently stuck on.
- wonderwonder 5y ago
  "What's closer to the root cause of all of these financial schemes is the mental health crisis impacting young people." I think this is very true. I do think that it not only applies to young people, there are a lot of middle age plus people waking up and realizing they are probably never going to be able to retire without some sort of miracle moonshot. I know an intelligent 65+ year old nurse that just torched 30k on trying on a bad crypto investment. Imagine all these people that just rode the massive bull market up in stocks nearing retirement age with just enough to retire. Stocks are likely approaching a peak and suddenly these people that had enough to retire will find themselves on much shakier ground while inflation is pumping. Odds are high many of them will make a desperate gamble as well.
throwaway22032 5y ago
I agree that it's depressing that people don't realise the power of collective action. It would be lovely to see in labour markets or in rental markets for example. However, the sums of money and level of commitment involved in starting a new city are radically different to that in buying a bit of GameStop or Bitcoin or whatever. Even if you chucked in ten grand your friends might think you're crazy. By contrast that's not even getting you half of the materials of a house. Or an apartment. Even if it's a prefab with no interior. And we haven't even started talking about making a city yet, what with all of the roads and power lines and decision makers and those juicy bits. It's actually just a far harder problem to solve.
netcan 5y ago
Taking this more meta, and possibly utopian... Collective action, or rather, any effective form of organisation is (arguably) the limiting factor on human progress. Corporation, country, tribe, union... all forms of organisation. These are all very different, have very different strengths, weaknesses and abilities. Tribal chiefs are not very likely to be effective at the same things, in the same way as a CEO or a prime minister. Linux, GNU, WWW, Wikipedia and such are another form. Rare, relatively. But novel and productive. What these organisations produced is again, qualitatively different from what commercial entities produce. There's a medium-message dynamic between form and product. A lot of things are clearly doable, but our forms of organisation don't produce them. We're basically limited to the things that are forms of organisation can produce. Organisational methods are a limiting factor to the same extent that resources, science and such are limiting factors. This starts (according to YNH) at the start of history, or rather, we might define "human history" as the point at which our methods of organisation develop past biological determinants. IE, chimps operate in troops. Gorillas in harems. Geladas in a complex herd structure. Modern humans are (again, according to YNH) the homo subspecies with the ability to switch. That said, we're not that good at it. For the most part, human cooperation of this epoch is defined by working tirelessly against each other in such a way that sometimes produces emergent benefits. Within ^In a literal sense.
- notpachet 5y ago
  > Modern humans are (again, according to YNH) the homo subspecies with the ability to switch. That said, we're not that good at it. Our species is very clearly lacking a crucial ingredient for our continued evolution: the ability to align our actions (and motivations, and rewards), on a societal scale. If we're still here in a hundred thousand years, I think the anthropologists of the future will look back to today as falling before some critical phase transition in the way our collective consciousness operates. Whether that's a hive mind, or some technological approach to consensus (which I'm almost loathe to say out loud given the Baby's First Computer approaches we're coming up with these days), or just us all waking up and realizing that we should be living life in service to one another, who knows. Our contemporary penchant for individualism, while producing many interesting emergent artifacts, is causing us to eat ourselves alive.
throwaway2333 5y ago
at_a_remove 5y ago
This reminds me of, on a very differently-colored website, someone whining, "Why doesn't 4chan's Anonymous work on cancer?" They were sad about it. You have confused a short-term low-effort collective action not much more different than a Tweeetstorm with some kind of long-term civilizational megaproject, and all over your very own pet issue. Come on.
slingnow 5y ago
> The sad part is that we could actually solve some real problems by coordinating collective action on, say, starting a new city that's designed around non-motorized transit within the city limits. But we don't. We get Snoop Dogg crypto instead. Right. And if only we could all just band together, we could create world peace and end hunger! It's so easy you guys! Just everyone cooperate! You honestly think starting a meme cryptocoin is equivalent to the effort required to build a new city!? How are these things even remotely related?
- pavas 5y ago
  > if only we could all just band together, we could create world peace and end hunger I mean, that does sound like a true proposition. So why is it that we can't band together?
  - savanaly 5y ago
    Take it up with evolution.
  - WJW 5y ago
    Because humans evolved in a tribal setting with at most ~200 people per tribe (see Dunbars number), and as social animals have a very keen instict for in- and outgroups? Any group larger than that number (and often much smaller) will start to fracture into sub-groups that then compete with each other for status and resources. You can see this effect even in groups as small as 200-person startups, where there can be vigorous "us vs them" dynamics between the dev and marketing teams or even between dev and ops.
    - pavas 5y ago
      This kinda sounds like a copout. We can escape the fatalism of Dunbar's number and in/out-groups through leadership and recursively hierarchical structures. See any large (>~200 persons) company, collective action (civil rights, wars, social movements), nations, etc. I was asking a rhetorical question tbh.
- 5y ago
mschuster91 5y ago
> Doing it "for the lulz" to hose a bunch of hedge fund shorts. Or creating NFTs around "things" you "own" and pumping them up. Well... hosing a bunch of hedge funds is at least going to give you a good laugh as a return for your money, not to mention that the entire GME saga showed once again what a house of cards the financial system is and how incompetent hedge fund managers, regulatory agencies and politicians are - while NTFs are just a plain scam.
- woah 5y ago
  The "hosing the hedge funds" thing around GME was a big scam, and it seems that people are still falling for it. The GME pump and dump had no effect on the Wall Street establishment, and it's not even clear that any short sellers got squeezed. The pump started on r/wallstreetbets, following their normal modus operandi of sparking upward momentum in stocks by coordinated options purchases. The faux-populist narrative developed as a way to pull in first mainstream Redditors and then lazy journalists. At the height of the frenzy, average people were surrounded by messaging from most media outlets that buying highly leveraged GME options was righteous and would make you rich, and anyone questioning this narrative was derided as a "corporate shill". By contrast, NFTs are refreshingly honest, even if their long term value is questionable. An NFT is the direct digital equivalent of a numbered print of an artwork, signed by the artist. There is no pretension of political righteousness, and mainstream media is inundated with messaging that they are a scam. Everyone involved knows exactly what they are getting, and has been endlessly warned of every possible downside.
pjc50 5y ago
Pump and dump is the very opposite of collective action: no real value is created, you're just fleecing a bunch of optimists in a very zero-sum game. (Mind you, a lot of high profile VC deals look like that as well! Remember Wework?)
- 3pt14159 5y ago
  It's not zero sum if you're on the winning team. That's the collective action. Beat up the nerd, steal his lunch money.
micromacrofoot 5y ago
doesn’t that overnight success come at the expense of a lot of the normal people trying to strike it rich too? seems like a few break through but it’s the same old exploitation for most
likeabbas 5y ago
>The sad part is that we could actually solve some real problems by coordinating collective action on, say, starting a new city that's designed around non-motorized transit within the city limits. I have been dreaming of doing something like this lately! The issue is where would we do it? How would we get people to move there? Who will fund it?
wonderwonder 5y ago
gm
nayuki 5y ago
> cities designed around non-motorized transit Buses and trains have engines and motors. You probably mean designing around public transit rather than personally owned vehicles.

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago

The collective action problem that’s been solved is getting people to collectively click a button. It’s why you see tons of people upvote things or change their profile pictures in support of a movement. But getting them to go past that is still as hard as it’s ever been.

beepbooptheory 5y ago

> ...starting a new city... Curious what you mean here, and how it relates to collective action?

3pt14159 5y ago
What I'm trying to point to here is that in the developed world the vast, vast majority of the value of a dwelling is how many dwellings exist around it. That's because land value is an arms race. So many people want to live in, say, Toronto that large sums are poured into mortgages. The materials cost is only a small fraction of the value of the home. But it doesn't have to be this way. People could put all this energy they're burning on crypto and apply the same principles into getting everyone to agree to some sort of better city with sustainability and low-cost-of-maintenance built in by default. That way we could have affordable housing spring up. It would take work to vet; escrows, webs-of-trust, etc. But it's totally doable in the new work from anywhere future.
- giantg2 5y ago
  Plenty of affordable housing in depressed areas (Appalachia). The problem is the lack of jobs, or safety, or some other thing people want. People don't want affordable housing. They want affordable housing in the existing cities where they (and everyone else) want to be.
  - pavas 5y ago
    > The problem is the lack of jobs, or safety, or some other thing people want. From op: > But it's totally doable in the new work from anywhere future
    - giantg2 5y ago
      "getting everyone to agree to some sort of better city" They're talking about creating a new city, not reusing the existing empty housing. Even if you can work from anywhere (which ignores many industries), this only satisfies that one requirement. Some people might see the snow and cold as a deal breaker. Others might not want to move there because it's far from family. A typical theme on related posts of relocating for remote work is that they want some combination of educated population, technology culture/groups, and some sort of specific government/community resource. The list goes on. The nature of the housing problem is that people want to live in very specific areas and then it snowballs. Remote work today should allow a considerable number of people to move out of SV, Toronto, etc. Yet most are staying. There are cheaper and better (depending on specific desires) options, yet they are not often explored. It's basically group-think. I don't see a new city solving that, since once it becomes popular, it too will suffer from demand effects.
      - 3pt14159 5y ago
        Right, but like people didn't do all of that negative thinking with some random dogcoin. They poured in. If you told me there were 10k well trusted artistic people with a great deal of interest in starting a high density, non-car-centric city in the middle of Ontario I would join. I would buy the lot of land on Kickstarter. I would list my friends that I trusted. I would help solve the problems around figuring out internet and transit. But nobody in Canada is offering this to me because even though this is better for the world, this takes real work. Instead they want to pump crypto and stock market scams because the payoff is short term and because they're naturally cynical.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

> The sad part is that we could actually solve some real problems by coordinating collective action on, say, starting a new city that's designed around non-motorized transit within the city limits. In general it would seem that human beings don't actually want to make the world a better place, but if you can find a way to sell it as a get rich quick scheme it might actually work.

WanderPanda 5y ago
Maybe it isn‘t even a better place for the majority? Just a utopia for a few? Take into account that e.g. 20-30% of the population are smokers
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  ...I don't follow. What does non-motorized transit within city limits have to do with smoking?

kingkawn 5y ago

There has been concerted action against collective action for over a century in the west. That the only way people feel comfortable expressing it now is with the cover of financial schemes is a temporary, I agree bullshit, phase. People are building cultural experiences to validate the effort to themselves and will come around to it without the need to be scamming someone. Just give them some time, the pursuit of novelty alone will solve this.

clktmr 5y ago

I was following "Roaring Kittys" Youtube Channel when he had less than 400 subscribers. This was never intended to be a pump and dump, he genuinely made a case for a better valuation. The mania and hype started right after the short squeeze in january and I a agree that the community that built around it is mostly a shitshow. However many of the original investors are still invested believing in a business turn-around lead by Ryan Cohen.

ricardobeat 5y ago
The stock already sits at 600% valuation, what kind of turnaround will justify a multiple of that?
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  A lot of people got in when the stock was near the peak so they were left holding the bag. They're holding, hoping for a potential return on their investment as selling now would be at a loss.
- clktmr 5y ago
  What exactly is a "600% valuation"? In 2020 Gamestop was valued at a level that implied bankruptcy within two years.
  - ricardobeat 5y ago
    Their financials still imply eventual bankruptcy at the moment, even after the massive windfall from stock appreciation.
- SilasX 5y ago
  I can't speak to the claims about potential profitability of GameStop's business ventures, but one theory endorsed by a lot of the /r/wallstreetbets and /r/SuperStonk redditors is that hedge funds still have significant undisclosed shorts and we have yet to see the "mother of all short squeezes" (MoASS), in which case the stock price can be well in excess of what is justified by future profitability. Related to this theory, a lot of them believe the ease of closing short positions is facilitated by shady phantom shares and are trying to stamp that out by directly registering shares with the broker Computershare. Disclaimer: I own GME stock.

giantg2 5y ago

"The sad part is that we could actually solve some real problems by coordinating collective action on, say, starting a new city that's designed around non-motorized transit within the city limits." The incentives are different. The people trying to get rich quick are not likely to do hard work to make/grow a city. Hell, it's hard enough to get people to do the simple act of voting (especially in primaries) or going to municipal or school board meetings.

boringg 5y ago
Agree the cost of the first statement is quite high (time and money) where as clicking to buy a stock for a couple hundred bucks is not much effort at all. While it is sad that we can't get civic engagement higher I don't think you can equate these problems at all.
- giantg2 5y ago
  "While it is sad that we can't get civic engagement higher I don't think you can equate these problems at all." That's my entire point - you're not going to get engagement from the vast majority of the GameStop people if it doesn't involve a get rich quick value proposition.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Kalium 5y ago

> The sad part is that we could actually solve some real problems by coordinating collective action on, say, starting a new city that's designed around non-motorized transit within the city limits. But we don't. We get Snoop Dogg crypto instead. Is it perhaps possible that what's been solved is not collective action in a general sense, but transparently self-interested collective action for a narrow easy-engagement rapid-payoff set of problems? Revamping city design, or setting up a new one, doesn't meet any of those criteria. It's not easy to engage with. It doesn't pay off quickly. It's not immediately obvious why a random person would want to jump on. So, go ahead. Lament that the teeming masses have collectively made a decision that's not the one we would like them to. It is a modern tragedy. For my own part, I think there are lessons to be learned in why one decision was collectively made and acted on and not another.

3pt14159 5y ago
Right, but it is righteous and still widely profitable. It's more work, but it's lasting, honest value. This is why it is so depressing.
- Kalium 5y ago
  Widely profitable for who? For society or directly in dollars for the individuals involved? Righteous by whose definition? Honest by whose definition? How widely shared are those definitions? Rhetorical questions, please don't answer. Someone has solved a particular kind of collective action problem. Now we have a playbook for addressing a specific type of situation. It doesn't seem to be a general solution or readily adaptable to a general solution. Perhaps we could be happy that we have gained a useful tool. Even if it's not quite the tool we might have wished for. Otherwise we're essentially lamenting that all the money and effort that goes into, say, consumer goods R&D (or another unworthy cause) isn't instead used for medical research (or another worthy cause).

logicalmonster 5y ago

> People have figured out that one of the ways to get to overnight wealth is to solve the collective action problem and they're getting better and better at fostering it and at coming up with legal ways to avoid existing regulations against pump and dump schemes. For what it's worth, Roaring Kitty's original video streams where he analyzes GameStop's stock should still be up on YouTube and probably cross-posted on other sites. He has hours and hours of commentary on the topic so if he said anything urging collective action or pumping the stock in an illegal way, somebody should be able to find it. As far as I remember, he was just doing a fundamental business analysis of GameStop and just pointed out that the stock was drastically underpriced given the upcoming new console cycle and his opinion that the actual business of selling physical games was not yet on the way out. Should commenting on a security that you like be illegal in a free society? As far as your commentary about the increase of "pump and dump" schemes, I think the technology is more useful than you seem to recognize and that we're in the very early stages of blockchain tech and better uses for it will be found, but that's a separate issue I'd rather not go into here. But as far as the pumps/dumps go, I think you're more closely looking at the symptom and not the cause. What's closer to the root cause of all of these financial schemes is the mental health crisis impacting young people. Many young people are feeling hopeless about the future for many, many reasons, and feel that financially making it through extreme risk taking is the only way to have a good life. Many are just dropping out of society. You can see this being impacted in some widely popularized stats like the number of young men not having sex, suicide rates, college attendance dropping, and many more things. What's going on with the mental health of the young is much more important to the future of humanity than the fixation society is currently stuck on.

wonderwonder 5y ago
"What's closer to the root cause of all of these financial schemes is the mental health crisis impacting young people." I think this is very true. I do think that it not only applies to young people, there are a lot of middle age plus people waking up and realizing they are probably never going to be able to retire without some sort of miracle moonshot. I know an intelligent 65+ year old nurse that just torched 30k on trying on a bad crypto investment. Imagine all these people that just rode the massive bull market up in stocks nearing retirement age with just enough to retire. Stocks are likely approaching a peak and suddenly these people that had enough to retire will find themselves on much shakier ground while inflation is pumping. Odds are high many of them will make a desperate gamble as well.

throwaway22032 5y ago

I agree that it's depressing that people don't realise the power of collective action. It would be lovely to see in labour markets or in rental markets for example. However, the sums of money and level of commitment involved in starting a new city are radically different to that in buying a bit of GameStop or Bitcoin or whatever. Even if you chucked in ten grand your friends might think you're crazy. By contrast that's not even getting you half of the materials of a house. Or an apartment. Even if it's a prefab with no interior. And we haven't even started talking about making a city yet, what with all of the roads and power lines and decision makers and those juicy bits. It's actually just a far harder problem to solve.

netcan 5y ago

Taking this more meta, and possibly utopian... Collective action, or rather, any effective form of organisation is (arguably) the limiting factor on human progress. Corporation, country, tribe, union... all forms of organisation. These are all very different, have very different strengths, weaknesses and abilities. Tribal chiefs are not very likely to be effective at the same things, in the same way as a CEO or a prime minister. Linux, GNU, WWW, Wikipedia and such are another form. Rare, relatively. But novel and productive. What these organisations produced is again, qualitatively different from what commercial entities produce. There's a medium-message dynamic between form and product. A lot of things are clearly doable, but our forms of organisation don't produce them. We're basically limited to the things that are forms of organisation can produce. Organisational methods are a limiting factor to the same extent that resources, science and such are limiting factors. This starts (according to YNH) at the start of history, or rather, we might define "human history" as the point at which our methods of organisation develop past biological determinants. IE, chimps operate in troops. Gorillas in harems. Geladas in a complex herd structure. Modern humans are (again, according to YNH) the homo subspecies with the ability to switch. That said, we're not that good at it. For the most part, human cooperation of this epoch is defined by working tirelessly against each other in such a way that sometimes produces emergent benefits. Within ^In a literal sense.

notpachet 5y ago
> Modern humans are (again, according to YNH) the homo subspecies with the ability to switch. That said, we're not that good at it. Our species is very clearly lacking a crucial ingredient for our continued evolution: the ability to align our actions (and motivations, and rewards), on a societal scale. If we're still here in a hundred thousand years, I think the anthropologists of the future will look back to today as falling before some critical phase transition in the way our collective consciousness operates. Whether that's a hive mind, or some technological approach to consensus (which I'm almost loathe to say out loud given the Baby's First Computer approaches we're coming up with these days), or just us all waking up and realizing that we should be living life in service to one another, who knows. Our contemporary penchant for individualism, while producing many interesting emergent artifacts, is causing us to eat ourselves alive.

throwaway2333 5y ago

at_a_remove 5y ago

This reminds me of, on a very differently-colored website, someone whining, "Why doesn't 4chan's Anonymous work on cancer?" They were sad about it. You have confused a short-term low-effort collective action not much more different than a Tweeetstorm with some kind of long-term civilizational megaproject, and all over your very own pet issue. Come on.

slingnow 5y ago

> The sad part is that we could actually solve some real problems by coordinating collective action on, say, starting a new city that's designed around non-motorized transit within the city limits. But we don't. We get Snoop Dogg crypto instead. Right. And if only we could all just band together, we could create world peace and end hunger! It's so easy you guys! Just everyone cooperate! You honestly think starting a meme cryptocoin is equivalent to the effort required to build a new city!? How are these things even remotely related?

pavas 5y ago
> if only we could all just band together, we could create world peace and end hunger I mean, that does sound like a true proposition. So why is it that we can't band together?
- savanaly 5y ago
  Take it up with evolution.
- WJW 5y ago
  Because humans evolved in a tribal setting with at most ~200 people per tribe (see Dunbars number), and as social animals have a very keen instict for in- and outgroups? Any group larger than that number (and often much smaller) will start to fracture into sub-groups that then compete with each other for status and resources. You can see this effect even in groups as small as 200-person startups, where there can be vigorous "us vs them" dynamics between the dev and marketing teams or even between dev and ops.
  - pavas 5y ago
    This kinda sounds like a copout. We can escape the fatalism of Dunbar's number and in/out-groups through leadership and recursively hierarchical structures. See any large (>~200 persons) company, collective action (civil rights, wars, social movements), nations, etc. I was asking a rhetorical question tbh.
5y ago

mschuster91 5y ago

> Doing it "for the lulz" to hose a bunch of hedge fund shorts. Or creating NFTs around "things" you "own" and pumping them up. Well... hosing a bunch of hedge funds is at least going to give you a good laugh as a return for your money, not to mention that the entire GME saga showed once again what a house of cards the financial system is and how incompetent hedge fund managers, regulatory agencies and politicians are - while NTFs are just a plain scam.

woah 5y ago
The "hosing the hedge funds" thing around GME was a big scam, and it seems that people are still falling for it. The GME pump and dump had no effect on the Wall Street establishment, and it's not even clear that any short sellers got squeezed. The pump started on r/wallstreetbets, following their normal modus operandi of sparking upward momentum in stocks by coordinated options purchases. The faux-populist narrative developed as a way to pull in first mainstream Redditors and then lazy journalists. At the height of the frenzy, average people were surrounded by messaging from most media outlets that buying highly leveraged GME options was righteous and would make you rich, and anyone questioning this narrative was derided as a "corporate shill". By contrast, NFTs are refreshingly honest, even if their long term value is questionable. An NFT is the direct digital equivalent of a numbered print of an artwork, signed by the artist. There is no pretension of political righteousness, and mainstream media is inundated with messaging that they are a scam. Everyone involved knows exactly what they are getting, and has been endlessly warned of every possible downside.

pjc50 5y ago

Pump and dump is the very opposite of collective action: no real value is created, you're just fleecing a bunch of optimists in a very zero-sum game. (Mind you, a lot of high profile VC deals look like that as well! Remember Wework?)

3pt14159 5y ago
It's not zero sum if you're on the winning team. That's the collective action. Beat up the nerd, steal his lunch money.

micromacrofoot 5y ago

doesn’t that overnight success come at the expense of a lot of the normal people trying to strike it rich too? seems like a few break through but it’s the same old exploitation for most

likeabbas 5y ago

>The sad part is that we could actually solve some real problems by coordinating collective action on, say, starting a new city that's designed around non-motorized transit within the city limits. I have been dreaming of doing something like this lately! The issue is where would we do it? How would we get people to move there? Who will fund it?

wonderwonder 5y ago

nayuki 5y ago

> cities designed around non-motorized transit Buses and trains have engines and motors. You probably mean designing around public transit rather than personally owned vehicles.