The 'stonks' meme is surging in the internet economy amid the GameStop stock saga. Here's how it rose to notoriety.
- Internet day traders have worked to push up the stock price of companies like GameStop and AMC in January.
- The entire saga has played out online, and the "stonks" meme is a crucial part of the discussion.
- The meme began circulating in 2017, and captures the surreal sentiment of the moment.
In the midst of an ongoing, whirlwind saga involving video games retailer GameStop, a Reddit forum known as r/WallStreetBets, and multiple hedge funds, one word has been on the tip of everyone's tongue: "stonks."
An intentional (and admittedly pretty funny) misspelling of the word "stocks," stonks started as a meme in the latter half of the 2010s and has become a fixture online since. As Slate's Jordan Weissmann wrote, "stonks" has become a popular word in the discussion around internet-fueled boosting of the unlikely stocks such as GameStop.
It's little surprise that the meme has become emblematic of the ongoing saga, which has been dominated by a David vs. Goliath narrative of Redditors banding together to skyrocket the value of GameStop stock at the expense of hedge funds who had bet on it falling. In the time since GameStop's stock began to meteorically rise, day traders have targeted other companies including AMC, Nokia, and Bed Bath & Beyond.
While the meme has witnessed its biggest explosion yet in 2021, it's been around since 2017 and has circulated in financial meme circles (and broader internet culture) for years.
First off, 'stonks' is just a funny way to say 'stocks'
You can't talk about "stonks" without talking about why it's funny in the first place: it's a ridiculous way to say "stocks." Similar dramatized mispronunciations have been around in meme culture for ages. The funny pronunciation is part of (if not essentially the entire) joke, and it lends brevity to the concept of stocks, and money, in general.
The actual, visual "stonks" meme features a face known as "Meme Man," a smooth, bald facsimile of a 3D human head that reportedly emerged on 4chan and spread online in the latter half of the 2010s. The stonks meme gussies Meme Man up in a suit, places him against a blue background of assorted percentages, arrows, and numbers, and juxtaposes him against the word "stonks" with an orange arrow vaguely pointing up.
Know Your Meme reported that the meme began to circulate online after Facebook page Special meme fresh posted it on June 5, 2017. From there, it spread online, appearing on the subreddit r/Ooer in July 2017, and later spreading to other social media platforms as well. The meme has continued to circulate online in the years since.
'Stonks' has been used to express ill-informed financial decisions, and had a resurgence in 2019
"Stonks" came to be associated with vague financial transactions, the grand machinations of our capital-driven society, and the people who pretend to know anything about how it all happens. As MEL Magazine reported in 2019, the joke of the entire meme is that anything related to money is "stonks."
The meme had a resurgence in 2019, after Reddit user u/_renji posted a fake text exchange on r/GoodFakeTexts. "Please don't do this, I seriously can't live without you, I didn't cheat on you," the texter pleads, before accidentally sending the stonks meme.
Other factors have kept stonks alive in the zeitgeist, from a 2019 Elon Musk tweet to a dramatic TikTok reading of u/_renji's text exchange in 2020. "Animal Crossing: New Horizons" also tied the meme to the in-game "stalk" market, which saw players buying turnips and attempting to sell them for higher prices later in the week.
'Stonks' became a fixture in financial meme circles online, and has become synonymous with the GameStop saga
Financial meme pages like @litquidity and @finance_god regularly invoke "stonks" memes, and in communities like WallStreetBets, which was launched in 2012 and has since become a hub of meme stock discussion, "stonks" is just part of the vernacular.
The stonks spirit has only been fanned over the course of the pandemic, during which, as Vox reported, there's been an uptick in trading activity. Slate economics writer Jordan Weissmann wrote that, anecdotally, "stonks" has been "seeping further into common parlance" since the market tanked amid the pandemic, with personalities like Barstool founder Dave Portnoy championing its use online.
The fact that "stonks" is already deeply entrenched language both in r/WallStreetBets, which has borne the heaviest scrutiny as of late, as well as internet culture writ large, meant that people were indubitably going to use it to describe the current GameStop saga, which feels like one giant meme (albeit one with very real implications) and has been driven by a community in which many apply a "YOLO"-style mentality to investing.
In addition to being directly applicable to the situation at hand, "stonks" perfectly captures the je ne sais quoi of the situation. No matter whether you're one of the traders involved in the short squeeze or someone merely trying to understand what the hell is going on from the sidelines, one thing is clear: the entire thing is very "stonks."