Young people and the digital finance hustle

I first encountered the digital finance hustle on social media in 2019. At the time, I was attending a digital methods course and decided to start doing research on how young people were portraying themselves in relation to cryptocurrencies on Instagram as my test data set. 

I quickly became fascinated by how young people were acting out the crypto-investor lifestyle. I had, it appeared, inadvertently stumbled into a space of untold wealth, if the visual culture I encountered was anything to go by. Young 20-somethings cavorting around fast cars, fast boats and decked out in designer gear hashtagged their way through this emerging fintech investor space, promoting their lifestyle and themselves. The get rich memes were thick and fast and images of women contorting their bodies for the viewer quickly populated the most active hashtags. 

I showed my colleague sitting next to me and asked, “what do you think of this?”. She gasped and giggled, shook her head and together we agreed that what we saw was some serious hustle, twisting and contouring itself for the gaze of the viewer. This viewer, we speculated, was likely to be predominantly male, 17-25 year olds, and risk ready. 

While women in crypto-related posts can be objectified, in this image we see the combination of gender, empowerment language and a finfluencer persona.

If you search for these images yourself you will no longer find them, as Instagram and several other platforms have since banned sexually explicit content. But it’s worth thinking about what the images meant for the younger generation. Why would young people want to consume this kind of content? Why are they attracted to the crypto-hustle?

First, young people are fast jumping on the investment bandwagon. Data from Commonwealth Bank's share trading platform CommSec shows the number of first‐time investors in Australia  jumped by 125% since the start of the pandemic, and the majority (83%) of these first timers were made up of Gen Z, millennials and Gen X. A recent report on Australian young adult investors and digital finance cultures identifies that Australians aged 19-30 are motivated by the goal of financial independence and security for the future. 

Our youngest generation to be entering the financial markets have been profoundly shaped by growing up in an environment of always-on technology, issues of violence, a volatile economy and social justice movements (Seemiller & Grace 2017). Generation Z investors, born from 1997, are social media savvy and know how to read the online environment for trends and opportunities in ways that I do not. 

Aspirational wealth accumulation and the signifiers of a luxury lifestyle are commonly associated with crypto-finfuencer imagery in social media.

The ASX Australian Investor Study 2020 identified that younger investors are using digital channels to become more informed. They found that younger investors, in particular, favour YouTube videos on investment information and digital investment platforms, such as micro-savings apps. 

For me, the question that arises from these social trends is how shifting digital financial cultures and markets both feed upon and offer the hope for pathways out of financial precarity for our youngest generation of investors. 

This is the generation for whom freelancing and precarious work is the default option and owning a home is largely aspirational. Previous analysis of US Federal Reserve data on how different generations fared financially at different points in their life cycle has suggested that for the millennial cohort, there is a substantial wealth gap and that their financial circumstances are relatively dire. 

One can only imagine what this means for Generation Z. One thing we know with this generation is that money culture is evolving, particularly in the ways it will be expressed through social media. The younger generations also know how to use social media to disrupt finance. The recent events around GameStop illustrate the ways in which money culture - including disrupting it - is evolving for this new generation of investors

Earlier this year we saw the social media platform, Reddit, used by Gen Zs and proximate cohorts to launch a coordinated attack on hedge funds by day traders through the subreddit r/WallStreetBets. Platforms such as Reddit, through subreddits, provide a repository of discussions surrounding financial practices and have been the go to context for my millennial accountant to talk shop and observe trends, for example.  

However in this instance the subreddit, with over 8 million subscribers, coordinated via the trading app Robinhood to instigate a “short squeeze” by buying stocks at scale, such as electronics retailer GameStop, to expose professional short sellers. In an unprecedented fashion, Reddit users managed to drive the share price of video game retailer GameStop from US$20 to US$380 (see Figure 1 below). James Doran observed at the time that the price surge in GameStop shares, driven up by Reddit users and with a little bit of Elon Musk, drew the attention of the US government, and led to calls for regulation from the head of the NASDAQ exchange. 

GameStop shares price peak during the short squeeze instigated by Redditors.

Beyond questions of regulation (which are important) is the key question surrounding the money culture of this new generation of investors. Why did they do it? As Jason Potts observed of the event, the swarm behaviour frightened global financial markets. However, he notes that a fascinating cultural aspect of the meme-centric culture on Reddit was how many users were having fun. Drawing in the rise of meme-coins such as Dogecoin, Potts observes that 

“Some people participate in financial markets as a form of consumption — meaning for entertainment, leisure and to experience community — just as much as they do for investment.” 

Circling back to the question of how shifting digital financial cultures and markets both feed upon and offer the hope for pathways out of financial precarity for our youngest generation of investors, we must remember that there is always an element of loki style fun at play that leverages off the memetic and viral nature of digital cultures. 

Within digital cultural parlance, this trickster style fun is referred to as ‘doing it for the lulz’. In the aftermath of this event, this new cohort of so-called Robinhood investors are now associated with both the popular US trading App that took centre stage in the Gamestop saga and their entry into the markets since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.

From this discussion of young people and digital finance cultures we can see that the hustle has many aspects to it for this new generation of investors. Through their engagement with social media we end up with an aspirational hustle that is all about performing wealth, but also this kind of playing in financial markets as a way of getting power of some sort. Either way, rather than the demonstration of naivety, the way they hustle shows quite a sophisticated understanding of the financial game.