A couple of days ago, I referred GameStop to a lottery windfall. Today, let me talk about the possible political ramifications of GameStop. In English, the word ramification implies something unwelcome following a particular event. GameStop is such an event. To a certain extent, GameStop also echoes the Arab Spring. Both events have a common link: the Internet.
The Internet is about everything, including political changes real and imaginary. The Arab Spring of 2011 took place where the Internet took off. Arabs might hate America ideologically, but they love America technologically. Technology is nothing if not revolutionary. Ideology is nothing if not political. When a technological revolution like the Internet becomes global, America --- fairly or unfairly --- will be treated as a source of danger and opportunity, which is the classic definition of crisis. The Egyptian youths in Cairo’s Tahrir Square did what the Chinese youths did in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. But the Egyptian youths were hooked on the Internet in 2011. The Chinese youths had no such luxury in 1989. The Internet counts.
In the age of Facebook and Twitter, you bet that a dictatorial regime would instinctively turn off the Internet in a political crisis. Myanmar's military junta just did that the other day. In 2011, Hosni Mubarak’s Egyptian government was no exception. The only difference was that Mubarak did it a bit too late. The Internet had already created a critical mass of Egyptian youths and their adult allies for removing Mubarak, who was indeed removed. However, the political change brought about by the Arab Spring was a change of regime and very little else. The Internet can only do so much.
Still, the Internet induced the so-called Reddit Revolution, which received a bonus of publicity thanks to Tucker Carlson on Fox News. The Reddit Revolutionaries wrote the script for the GameStop episode, which Carlson shared with his fast-expanding audience sympathetic to working-class populism. Fair enough. The only problem I have with the Reddit Revolutionaries is this: Wall Street, in all likelihood, can and will weather the hedge-funding storm allegedly engineered by minutemen-like small investors. Browsing their online chats, I came away with the impression that they were quite determined to debunk the “Too Big To Fail” myth. But, can the GameStop success story be repeated often enough to raise an American Reddit Revolutionary Army to defeat the Wall Street Empire? Losing money is no fun, mind you.
Meanwhile, Hong Kong has caught the GameStop fever, thanks to the Internet that connects the city with the outside world and America in particular. In the long shadow of Beijing, however, political oppression, financial woes, and the pandemic are possibly coalescing into a lava stream below the surface of an uneasy calm in Hong Kong. Friendly to the Myanmar junta, Beijing is likely revisiting the role of the Internet in Hongkongers’ unsuppressable interest in GameStop and the Reddit Revolution. Hong Kong is not Myanmar, of course. But what erupts in Hong Kong may spill over into its Mainland neighbor. For Hongkongers, 2021 is going to be a year of living dangerously. They know that nothing can stop Beijing from erecting a Great Firewall in Hong Kong overnight. Given what they have experienced since mid-2019, no Hongkonger will underestimate Beijing’s paranoia about “Color Revolutions.”
America is a global magnet. For this, America is bound to be blamed for everything and anything Beijing paranoiac about.
--- by Lingyang Jiang
