Platform freedom: Financial subjectivity at the nexus of investment and social media

Platforms enabling individuals to invest in stocks, cryptocurrency, real estate, and other assets have proliferated globally. Meanwhile, narratives of financial freedom and investment content spread rapidly on social media platforms. As platform infrastructures play an increasingly significant role in changing financial markets and mediating individual behaviors and aspirations, we suspect they are also shaping the financial subjectivity of retail investors. Combining qualitative and computational methods, we analyze a large corpus of Reddit conversations to study how individuals navigate social media and investment platforms. We find that the financial subjectivity of retail investors is co-created through investment platforms, where individuals allocate capital and enact their investment decisions, and social media platforms, where they share information and debate and question investment decisions. The effort to claim agency and control financial futures plays out within shifting and stratified infrastructures that are also subject to algorithmic control. In this sense, the goal and practice of financial freedom is “platformed”: exercised through, conditioned by, and fleshed out within platform architectures. Always-on, platform-mediated markets call for further scrutiny and methodological innovations to ground their inner workings and algorithmic logics in everyday life. This paper charts a path to study the production of economic knowledge and the mundane, sociotechnical construction of financial markets in ways that both theoretically acknowledge and methodologically center the role of platforms and digital technologies in circulating capital, constructing assets, and shaping financial subjects.