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/r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

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Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#21

Post by BowBun »

My only question is, prior to the 'my manager sucks' posts and people getting encouraged to stand up for their rights/humanity, what exactly was r/antiwork _doing_? I feel like a majority of users still want to abolish wage slavery without the extreme anarchist association. Demanding better pay and treatment from our employers is an actionable item on the road to that. Besides just not working and living in poverty, I'm not sure what else the plan is.

If a group has to choose between an idealized echo chamber of non-action and a washed-out version of the same thing but with real change in peoples' lives, I would take the latter.

Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#23

Post by throwaway0a5e »

You know, for all this shitting on extremist anti-work anarcho communists, I find that their ideological consistency makes them quite tolerable even if I think their ideas would be laughably useless when taken to the extremes they advocate for.

Contrast that with the (to use TFA's terminology) "gentrifiers" who blow like ideological tumbleweeds and hold beliefs simply based on whether those beliefs are advantageous to hold (Stalin would be proud).

Principled extremists can be reasoned with. Compromises can be made. Progress can happen. Unprincipled faux-extremists are like herding cats. You give them one thing and they show up the next day bitching that you gave them the wrong thing. I know who I'd rather deal with.

Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#25

Post by kvuj »

belval wrote: post #8

> How exactly did it happen in /r/antiwork? Casuals found it. You know — the people who use the internet to laugh at funny memes rather than treating every post as a blow in a grand ideological struggle. That's the very force of the reddit hivemind. I have no interest in /r/antiwork nor their ideologies, but they kept popping up on /r/all, so they get a constant influx of people aligned with the reddit mean opinion,…

> That's the very force of the reddit hivemind. I have no interest in /r/antiwork nor their ideologies, but they kept popping up on /r/all, so they get a constant influx of people aligned with the reddit mean opinion, which in turn changes the original community.

That's what I like about 4chan. In a sea of ungodly acidic garbage lies a golden heart of contrarianism. The posters will argue for a side one day, and 2 hours later will vehemently adopt opposite arguments. Some of the best leftist arguments I have ever read came from /pol/.

4chan argues for the sake of arguing, and I think that is absolutely beautiful in today's environment of everyone taking everything so seriously.

Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#26

Post by [deleted] »

BowBun wrote: post #21

My only question is, prior to the 'my manager sucks' posts and people getting encouraged to stand up for their rights/humanity, what exactly was r/antiwork _doing_? I feel like a majority of users still want to abolish wage slavery without the extreme anarchist association. Demanding better pay and treatment from our employers is an actionable item on the road to that. Besides just not working and living in poverty,…

[deleted]

Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#27

Post by throwamon »

belval wrote: post #16
Besticle wrote: post #5

It takes one bad experience to ruin a reputation. Guy went on Fox news (against the communities) wishes and made millions of people's first impression of r/AntiWork to be negative. In the modern world optics are EVERYTHING and that cannot be understated. Imho the first thing they need to change (which they have with their move to the new subreddit) is renaming it from r/AntiWork to r/WorkReform. Most of the sub (I'd…

It's against the rule to say that you did not read the article, so I won't say it, but: > In the modern world optics are EVERYTHING and that cannot be understated. Imho the first thing they need to change (which they have with their move to the new subreddit) is renaming it from r/AntiWork to r/WorkReform. /r/WorkReform exists already. > Most of the sub (I'd wager >80%) are Americans asking for workers rights that ar…

> It's against the rule to say that you did not read the article, so I won't say it

Maybe it should be against the rules to say you know it's against the rules, and so on recursively. This loophole is often exploited to make these remarks equally useless and extra snarky.

Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#28

Post by tgb »

I think this article is trying to have its cake and eat it too. If the sub has been sanewashed and overrun by average left-of-center opinions and become wildly popular, then how can it be true that Doreen still represents the movement? The movement changed, as the article points out, and therefore Doreen was a terrible choice of representative. The fact that she predates the change is exactly the reason she is not representative. Instead the article tries to argue opposite. I have to admit that the author appears to be doing everything possible to make me assume this is due to their partisan bias as hardly a sentence goes by without a verbal jab.

Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#29

Post by HWR_14 »

JasonFruit wrote: post #19
whatshisface wrote: post #9

I think this post may be, in its parlance, "sanewashing" workaholism. For example, let's take this post from the subreddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/lo6wov/my_dads_a_... > "My dads a “working class hero” I wanna punch him in the face, we wanted to visit this weekend, we haven’t seen him in 2 months due to covid, we have three kids and so does he (6, 8 and 9) his wife passed away 2 years ago, and he’…

I see 50 hours a week as work, nothing more. "Haven't seen him in two months" sounds, in that context, like dramatic hyperbole. Dismissing someone's hard work to support a family with an age-related slur doesn't breed sympathy for a position, either.

I'm pretty sure the issue was more "I'm visiting my dad for the first time in months so my kids can play with their similarly aged uncles, and he's skipping our planned trip to do overtime" that he's reacting to, not the 50 hours a week regularly part.

Although his siblings are being raised by a single dad, so maybe he needs to not work on saturdays?

Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#30

Post by djbusby »

causi wrote: post #11
Besticle wrote: post #5

It takes one bad experience to ruin a reputation. Guy went on Fox news (against the communities) wishes and made millions of people's first impression of r/AntiWork to be negative. In the modern world optics are EVERYTHING and that cannot be understated. Imho the first thing they need to change (which they have with their move to the new subreddit) is renaming it from r/AntiWork to r/WorkReform. Most of the sub (I'd…

In the modern world optics are EVERYTHING and that cannot be understated. Imho the first thing they need to change (which they have with their move to the new subreddit) is renaming it from r/AntiWork to r/WorkReform. That was the biggest thing in my opinion. AntiWork was too open to the type of people who don't care about workers' rights and were just there because they think the world owes them a living. NEETs are…

NEET, an acronym for "Not in Education, Employment, or Training"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEET

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