In the history of occasional comments that sound like they could mean the end of civilization, there is a stunning contender in The New Americans: The Revolution Game – especially since it comes from an investor who seems smart enough. This film, the latest documentary provocation written and directed by Ondi Timoner (Mapplethorpe, We Live Publicly), is about a new era of single stock traders — many, though not all, millennials who grew up playing video games and now invest at home as a literal extension of this exciting world. Designed as visual candy, the new trading apps are designed to give you the rush that gamers get (as well as the high that people look for in slot machines). Trying to sum up the attraction of all this for the lizard brain, an investor named Mitchell Hennessy explains: “Even if you lose a trade, confetti pops up and it seems like you are rising to a new level. 50 percent”. So you just lost half your money, but still feels like you’re a winner. It’s called drinking snake oil.

Over the past five years, I have watched and watched a number of very good documentaries about the brave new worlds made possible by digital media, such as TikTok, Boom. (about the TikTok revolution and Chinese ownership of the company), “American Meme” (about the world of influencers), “Under the Influence” (about the strangest influencer of all, David Dobrik), “The Screened Out” (about what cell phone addiction is doing to us) and Glitch in the Matrix (an exploration of the simulation theory that claims nothing is real around us, a theory that Elon Musk officially believes in). These films have done a remarkable job of not only capturing a new culture of destruction, but also giving it a new consciousness.

The New Americans: Playing Revolution in a more punkish sense feels just as exciting and important. It falls into an area that is difficult to capture and make available for a documentary (financial niceties), but Timoner, who has become a more graphically energetic filmmaker, has made a kaleidoscopic film that has us clinging to meme details. , diamond hands (hold on to stocks no matter what) and cryptocurrency. The stock market has long been driven by fantasies of wealth, but The New Americans tells the story of how intraday trading by civilians has become the new normal: a highly effective form of money management for people who basically don’t have any. All of this is based on the idea that the democratization of stock trading is a way of fighting power. It was as if everyone in the house was their own personal Jim Kramer crossed with Neo from The Matrix. They are trying to get rich with the red pill.

As shown in the film, the generation it focuses on came into the adult world with huge debts (from college), no savings, and with a system that they felt was against them. They have a distrust of everything: the government, the media, anything. Everything is corrupt, everything is false, everything is organized to mislead us and let us down. As a result, everyone wants an instant fast track to success. Life has become a fantasy of short cuts: achieving instant global visibility on YouTube or TikTok, interacting with memes, and the financial mindset of gamers who grew up trading “assets” on click.

The opportunity looms, of course, to make a killing. Statistically, the odds are slim, but the culture investing gamer encourages you to believe it can happen. And it’s not all random; this is where skill and knowledge are needed – split-second timing, which hedge funds, based on the instantaneousness of computer analysis, use to their advantage. Theoretically, this level of speed and information is now available to everyone. But this, as shown in the documentary, has also merged with a rebellious undercurrent that thinks of itself as something more than finances.

It was this, Timoner explores, that led to the headline of the GameStop saga, when a flood of investors pooling through the WallStreetBets subreddit page triggered a short squeeze that sent stocks skyrocketing. All this caused havoc in the world of hedge fund investors (who were short selling stocks). This happened just a couple of weeks after the January 6, 2021 capital riot, and the documentary says it’s no coincidence. Both were unruly rebellions, driven less by logic—GameStop, a physical business with no outstanding finances, in no way justifying a short squeeze—but by the exhibitionist symbolism of a popular upsurge. In this case: People! Raise the shares! For the video game store! And unleash their wrath on the elite!

As The New Americans shows, the world of attitude investing is entirely based on mythology. This is what he feeds, whether he deposits your bank account or not. It’s about trading stocks as an empowerment, a way to undermine the system, a way to fight the new American oligarchy. It is no coincidence that one of the key applications of the era is called Robinhood.

Jean-Luc Godard, in his 1966 film Masculin Féminin, famously showcased the “children of Marx and Coca-Cola”. The New Americans is about the kids of the 2008 financial crash and Roblox, a controversy that’s closer to a dystopian recipe. The crash of 2008 represents the collapse of our hopes and aspirations, the American dream. A burst of gaming rebellion is a way to reclaim that power. However, this is one that can be almost completely delusional. Ondi Timoner sees through the illusion, but also wants to sell its intoxication; and so the film at times seems less skeptical than it could be. On the other hand, you could say that the film’s ambivalent half-approval of these real estate rebels just adds another onion layer to the grand illusion they’ve fallen into.

The movie itself takes it to the next level, delving into the mysterious world of cryptocurrencies – and if the metaphysics of bitcoin and NFTs have you scratching your head, you’ll appreciate how exciting this section of the movie is. Timoner again invites us to plunge into the illusion, and perhaps she herself fell into it too. One of its talking heads, Raoul Pal, a former hedge fund insider turned co-founder of Real Vision, claims that the future is in cryptocurrencies. But as we begin to understand all the ins and outs, ups and downs of a currency that exists outside the system and is traded (in the case of the NFT) based on how cool the art is, the more things start to get going. look like a pyramid scheme. When the cryptocurrency market crashes and trillion-dollar wealth disappears, the question arises: did it ever really exist?

In a sense, you could say that the whole movie is about video game junkies trying to get rich – and get an adrenaline rush – through financial bubbles. I mean, this is a movie where the real Jordan Belfort from The Wolf of Wall Street is presented as a paragon of common sense and influencers like 20-year-old Instagram star Taylor Paige all say, “Look what I am did! look what you can do!”

These documentaries often end with portraits of the bad guys, and in The New Americans, the symbolic worst boor in the film is Joby Wicks, a bitcoin evangelist who was accused of tax evasion and securities fraud after running a massive cryptocurrency scheme that is allegedly , deceived three-quarters of a million people. Weeks, who doesn’t apologize, made a mint, traveled to 175 countries, met the Pope, drove his dream cars and did what he wanted. “I have always considered myself a catalyst for revolution,” he says, and the new generation is talking about it, even if they are old-fashioned greedy heads. The New Americans expose them in some way. But the film uses this rhetoric in another sense as well. What he does not want to say is that wealth, like matter, cannot be created or destroyed – it can simply be collected, scattered or lost. And one of the best ways to collect it is to convince all the people who lose it that they are part of the revolution.