The dynamics of financial subjectivity in digital subcultures on social media platforms

Abstract

This article examines how digital finance communities, exemplified by Reddit’s WallStreetBets (WSB), have transformed the cultural logic of financial participation. While earlier research has largely focused on the technological facilitation or social framing of retail investment behaviour, we foreground the symbolic, performative, and epistemic dimensions of financial subject formation in digital contexts. Through a multimethod analysis of WSB during the GameStop (GME) phenomenon, we show how financial investment becomes culturally embedded through memes, insider language, affective rituals, and shared fictional expectations. Our findings demonstrate how digital communities pluralise financial subjectivity, from ironic, self-deprecating speculators to moralised holders and conspiratorial believers in collective financial futures. Crucially, we identify a series of shifts in epistemic style and argumentation logic, tracing a transformation from rational-ironic to mimetic, morally-affective, and finally, conspiratorial forms of financial knowledge. To capture this progression, we propose an original four-phase cultural model that reveals how digital financial communities create, stabilise, and fragment shared belief systems. In so doing, we contribute to the sociology of financialisation by highlighting how subcultural formations on digital platforms generate alternative epistemologies, shared fictions, and affectively charged visions of economic agency.