Batya Ungar-Sargon

It’s a month before publication day for my second book, Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women. I start an Instagram account in the hopes of drumming up interest in the book on a new platform. I post a few clips of TV hits from recent weeks and follow a few friends. Instagram immediately recommends an article about how to grow your Instagram following, and I click on it and learn that consistency is key on Instagram. Roger that. Later that day, I find myself arranging my overachiever elder millennial self into an artfully nonchalant pose while stirring a lamb curry I’m whipping up for my regular Shabbat dinner salon. “There once was a Batya,” my husband mutters on his way to the fridge. “Now there’s a content creator.

It was an uprising of “retards.” That’s what they called themselves, anyway. When followers of the Reddit forum r/wallstreetbets organized en masse to buy shares of the video-game chain store GameStop, they did so in the self-deprecating spirit of very online weirdos. Since digital downloads had taken over the gaming market, billionaire hedge funders had “shorted” GameStop, meaning they’d bet on its brick-and-mortar model to fail. The company’s sudden windfall caused such panic among the good and the great that the ensuing furor ended in a congressional hearing. Impressive for a bunch of dorks who gleefully referred to themselves in meme-laden pep talks as “apes” and “autists.” In January 2021 this was a marquee event.