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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

#41

Post by PicassoCTs »

https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/93696/is-it-un...

https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/qstsdp/my_5year_g...

Better representation of anti-work- and its crime- having the hacker mentality and the audacity to execute a similar move to investors/big players without the funds.

Very few in our society are still needed to work, many who work do more harm then good (to the environment & themselves) and most of the work done today, exists to massage the egos of power-animals who can not avoid a existential crisis without a pyramid of suffering beneath them.

Remote work has revealed how obsolete that caste and its longings are. Its also has shown that work is partially used to keep the "uneducated" masses from going haywire with conspiracy theories. (6 Jan comes to mind)

Which is a psychological problem worth of solving, but not one that is actually a decent enough argument to protect this institution of self-flagellation without any reward, except continued existence in protestant-work-ethic-purgatory.

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

#42

Post by cinntaile »

wsb_mod2 wrote: post #6

Great writeup. A subreddit getting co-opted by the masses to change its intentions is a story as old as reddit. See my username for how I know that to be true. Hopefully more subreddits will wake up and realize that being included in high activity feeds (r/all, popular) is not necessarily a good thing. We have. > Speaking of unflattering stereotypes, let’s be blunt for a moment: Most of what you read on the internet…

I think this is where that phrase comes from. https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...

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

#44

Post by throwaway0a5e »

HWR_14 wrote: post #29
JasonFruit wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

>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.

This is how I read it. And in that context there's a heck of a lot to read between the lines.

Nobody gets their kids out of the house and then starts another family because the first try turned out great.

Sounds like dad doesn't want to spend time with someone. When your options are the middle aged dude putting in OT and raising more kids and the person airing their family drama on the internet who gets the benefit of the doubt isn't much of a choice.

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

#45

Post by TOMDM »

This is a great article, if I were to summarise the broader trend being analysed here it would be something like

- Radicals set new bar for discourse.

- Aligned moderates adopt and modify message

- Radicals are ousted from their own movement by the new moderate messaging

- Moderates are left to try and defend their position that is garbed in extreme optics

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

#46

Post by dilippkumar »

wsb_mod2 wrote: post #6

Great writeup. A subreddit getting co-opted by the masses to change its intentions is a story as old as reddit. See my username for how I know that to be true. Hopefully more subreddits will wake up and realize that being included in high activity feeds (r/all, popular) is not necessarily a good thing. We have. > Speaking of unflattering stereotypes, let’s be blunt for a moment: Most of what you read on the internet…

I’d love to hear your thoughts on wsb.

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

#47

Post by whatshisface »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #23

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 t…

>Principled extremists can be reasoned with. Compromises can be made.

I think you've defined that they don't make compromises when you called them principled extremists. ;) But I do agree that they have advantages over opportunists who don't believe anything: sometimes an extremist will have discovered a nugget of truth that you can take out from the rest, while an opportunist only believes things that are wholly circumstantial and unlikely to help you.

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

#48

Post by pmorici »

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…

I happened upon the r/AntiWork comments section from time to time before that Fox News segment and it always struck me as full of people who were making every excuse not to take responsibility for their own circumstances and who have a fantasy that low skill jobs should some how pay enough to be life long careers instead of viewing them as stepping stones to bigger and better things.

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

#49

Post by jasode »

belval wrote: post #18
wsb_mod2 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it never stays that way for long It can stay that way, but it's a hard decision to untick these boxes: https://i.imgur.com/E2G9SUh.png Too early and the sub dies, too late, and you'll wish it died.

TIL, I didn't know that reddit allowed mods to opt-out of /r/all.

The new option happened around 2014-07:

https://old.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/2a32sq/experimen...

Apparently, there were some subreddits that got bombarded with unwanted comments which prompted the new feature.

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

#50

Post by lukev »

I liked the factual analysis and the story of /r/antiwork.

But regarding the actual topic of work I think it sets up a false dichotomy; that one is either a sane normal person who thinks productivity is good, or an out-of-touch anarcho-communist.

There is actually a very large middle ground which represents the most balanced view towards work; that most work is a necessary evil. It's not that work is good or desirable, it's that it (both individually and as a society) is necessary for survival or to maintain a certain standard of living.

If technology and automation could allow those who wanted to have only a 10-hour work week, with the same lifestyle, that would be unequivocally a good thing.

I'm not an anarchist, but in this sense I am very much anti-work.

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