“Money in, money out,” is how Tobias Deml, creator of the new HBO Max documentary miniseries Gaming Wall Street, explains the common perception of the stock market while on Zoom with the Guardian. “It’s got to come from somewhere, right? But it’s all based on belief in the future. Money’s all belief. We believe in the government, borders, lots of things that aren’t materially real, but nonetheless exist in our shared imagination. The history of humanity is driven by these beliefs.”
Stocks are fake, is what he’s saying, as in not real – “fairy dust”, to borrow a term from Matthew McConaughey’s coke-huffing trader in The Wolf of Wall Street, one of the many pop culture figures that zips by in the rapid-fire torrent of memes frenetically edited into Gaming Wall St. Shares of a company are an intangible concept that nonetheless have physical, real-world consequences in their regular minting of princes and paupers. This alchemy has long been the sole purview of high-finance types, professionals who’d have us believe that their business school educations and sophisticated Bloomberg Terminals make them masters of financial systems too hopelessly complex for us knuckle-draggers to comprehend. But in an era when a degree’s worth of knowledge sits waiting on the internet, it was only a matter of time until some normal folks realized that everyone’s making it up as they go. “Anyone who claims to know everything about how the market works is lying to you,” Deml says.
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