Rob from the Rich: The Neomedievalism of the Robinhood Stock App

Summary

Medieval outlaws do not often attract attention in reporting on twenty-first-century business practices. However, in the spring and summer of 2021, Robinhood Markets, Inc. was accused by the Wall Street internal watchdog Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) of “‘systemic supervisory failures’ and giving customers ‘false or misleading information’” in the use and marketing of the company’s stock trading app. Furthermore, FINRA’s filing noted that “since late 2017, Robinhood ‘failed to exercise due diligence’ before approving customers to trade options.” The company’s fine is the largest (yet) levied by FINRA on a company, and comes in the wake of a tragedy in the summer of 2020 – a young trader died by suicide after the app posted a massive negative balance to his account – and the so-called “Reddit rally” in January 2021, an explosive and deliberate stock-price manipulation of GameStop and other stocks by traders engaged with the r/WallStreetBets forum.

I contend that the startup, which began public trading of its own stocks in July 2021, deliberately uses superficial modern neomedieval interpretations of Robin Hood to attract and retain investors, to stand out from its competitors, and that this rhetoric is ultimately devalued and corrupted by its service to individual economic benefit. Furthermore, the company’s rhetorical presentation, and its famous in-app “game-ification” of trading (now reportedly mitigated), establish unconscious expectations for the company’s product that cannot be realized within the current American economic system. Indeed, it is possible that Robinhood, as a company, is itself also participating in these expectations, which fits within neomedievalism’s capacity for self-cannibalization and, more broadly, with KellyAnn Fitzpatrick’s view of neomedievalism as a continual process of building upon past representations with no intention or desire for historical accuracy. Neomedievalism reciprocally reuses and revises common cultural knowledge to provide a faint essence of what audiences perceive as vaguely medieval-ish. A neomedieval text, or cultural artifact, draws rhetorical power from that shared awareness, for example that Robin Hood robs from the rich to give to the poor, and discards other elements that do not meet the needs of the rhetor or audience. Accuracy is unnecessary. Consequently, wildly divergent interpretations emerge from the communal understanding of the core concept: