This week’s new Dustinland comic is about the whole GameStop saga, which I find amazing and entertaining. Honestly I could write thousands of words about it, which made it extra challenging to distill my thoughts into a few illustrated frames.
Basically, the GameStop thing itself is a great story of regular peeps manipulating the market in the same way billionaire hedge fund assholes normally do, and in fact sticking it to said hedge douches. In the bigger picture, it really sheds light on how “fake” the market can be (not always, but sometimes, maybe even often). In the bigger picture, it shows how there is a system out there where, like Matt Taibbi said, Wall Street is just a giant vampire squid sucking money away from the rest of us. And in the really big picture, it shows just how unreal much of our modern civilization really is, and how dangerously close we can get to everyone giving up on the illusions and all of it falling apart — this last party really is attached to the whole Trump/Fox misinformation era as well, in that there seems to be an unraveling of what we all agree upon as “true” and “real”. There’s also a connection to everything laid out in the book Sapiens, ie there are no border, nations or companies really… just illusions and agreements.
So yeah, big topic, and as you can see by my comic, I sum it all up by saying that while none of this is “real”, it can and does affect us all in real ways. Pain, suffering, hunger, and the reverse — these things are real. And when you’re dealing with them, suddenly all your philosophical issues melt away and you just care about not dying.
