By now, you will probably have heard something about the stock market tug of war between online traders and Wall Street hedge funds over the surging stock prices of several companies, primarily GameStop and AMC. As our Tiana Lowe explains in this week’s Your Land, a handful of Wall Street hedge funds staked out a massive short position on these companies: They bet big on the stock price of GME, AMC, and others to go down. Amateur traders on Wall Street Bets, an investing-focused forum on Reddit, noticed that this position was untenable (for example, hedge funds had collectively shorted 140% of GameStop shares available) and began to buy up these companies’ stock in massive quantities. The coordinated deluge of purchasing drove up the stocks’ prices, which forced hedge funds to buy up more stock to maintain their positions, further driving up the price — known as a “short squeeze.”

The desire to make money and stick it to the fat cats is definitely a motivating factor here, but it’s important to recognize the deeply memetic and ironic motivations that helped propel this squeeze play to national significance. As Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier aptly noted, GameStop is a company almost universally loathed by gamers and Redditors. The company’s M.O. is about ripping off consumers by underpaying gamers for their used games, only to turn around and overcharge customers for those same games (often pretending they are new, not used).