Ben Mezrich - The Antisocial Network

The Antisocial Network is a dramatic, narrative account of one of the most unique moments in Wall Street history, based on dozens of interviews, multiple first-person sources, hours of testimony, and thousands of pages of documents, including records from a number of court proceedings. Though there are different and often contentious opinions about some of the events in the story, to the best of my ability, I re-created the scenes in the book based on the information I uncovered. Some dialogue has been re-created. In some instances, certain descriptions and character names have been altered at the request of my sources to protect privacy.

Although, over the years, I have spent many hours browsing the aisles of my local GameStopI was, after all, a video game junkie during my twenties, came of age in the era of Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, and have an eleven-year-old who can name every character in Fortnite and RobloxI can honestly say that I never expected to write a book that revolved around the company or, at least, the companys stock. Like many people around the worldtrapped at home during the height of the pandemicI watched the market turmoil that came to a head the week of January 25, 2021, with a mixture of amazement and amusement. There was no question that something dramatic was happening: a David versus Goliath story involving a ragtag group of amateur investors, gamers, and Internet trolls taking on one of the biggest hedge funds on Wall Street. But it wasnt until I delved deeper into the story that I began to think that it was also something significant; that what we were all seeing, from our quarantine couches and our masked-up, socially distanced perches, was the first shot in a revolutionone that threatens to upend the financial establishment as we know it.

The deeper I looked, the more I believedthe battle that drove the price of a single share of GameStop to a premarket high of $500 on January 28 had origins that dated back to Occupy Wall Street and beyond, when an anger toward big banks and the havoc wreaked in the last economic meltdown bubbled up into largely impotent protests and sit-ins. At the same time, the rise of GME could also be seen as the culmination of a populist movement that began with the intersection of social media and the growth of simplified, democratizing financial portalstech that weakened the old-world pillars propping up the financial establishment, represented by the biggest upstart in the business, Robinhood, and its millions of mostly millennial devotees.

What seems certain, to me, is that this first, revolutionary shotfired directly at Wall Street, if not from Main Street, from the basement of an amateur trader a few blocks awayis only the beginning. Those old-world pillarsprotecting the suits and ties from the rabble outsideno longer seem so firm. A sea change has begun, right alongside the crypto revolution, with very similar philosophical implications.

Its impossible to know where this change will lead; how Wall Street will respond, whether what has now been unleashed by social media can even be contained. But historically, revolutions fed by anger tend to go in the same direction. At some point, once the pillars start to shake, the walls inevitably fall.

Theres deep value, then theres deep
fucking value.

Keith Gill