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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

#111

This reminds me of "Defund the Police", wherein supporters would try to convince others that the slogan did not literally mean what it says. Like AntiWork, It seems to have been started by those who genuinely wanted to abolish the police. But as time went on people joined who instead wanted to reform the police by dramatically cutting back what they were meant to respond to. But the slogan stayed, and was very mislea…

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

#112

What is "sanewashing"? English is not my native language and I am having genuine trouble locating the definitions. The top 1 result in google is this very linked article.

For what it's worth, English is my native language and I was unfamiliar with the term. I couldn't figure out the definition without more context either.

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

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> should be provided by others who do. No, I don't think this is accurate. They wanted to abolish work for everyone, not for a select few.

What would provide for people? It seems to me we would either all starve and die, AI would do it for us (impossible in its current state), or we rely on effectively slave labor of poorer countries (which would mean work is not abolished for everyone).

Here's Doreen's website. A lot of early posts on the sub were from here: https://abolishwork.com/about/

They use a specific definition of work, so they maybe aren't necessarily anti-work in the way you are thinking.

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

#114
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The spirit of the rule isn't that you can't point out when the article addresses the exact questions that the parent is asking: > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that." My comment sole focus is not that parent didn't read the article. Instead, I chose to answer the comment's question with the answers f…

Your comment:

> 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.

Could have been shortened to

>> 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.

And it would have been better.

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

#115
post #90

This reminds me of "Defund the Police", wherein supporters would try to convince others that the slogan did not literally mean what it says. Like AntiWork, It seems to have been started by those who genuinely wanted to abolish the police. But as time went on people joined who instead wanted to reform the police by dramatically cutting back what they were meant to respond to. But the slogan stayed, and was very mislea…

> This reminds me of "Defund the Police", wherein supporters would try to convince others that the slogan did not literally mean what it says. I have a hard time figuring out whether: 1) all the people who are saying "no we don't really mean defund the police" are just the moderate elements battling it out with the extreme elements (eg. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol... ) 2) most of them…

"Defund" can be a relative term that doesn't necessarily mean to fully remove funding. E.g. we've had decades of hyperbole where relatively small cuts to defense funding are referred to by opponents as "defunding" US troops.

We spend a whole lot on policing compared to most other developed nations, and we're not getting terrific outcomes either on civil liberties or crime rates. It might be time to take a different approach where we spend a lot less on direct policing, and redeploy a lot of those resources to fight crime in other ways.

The developed countries that spend more or similar amounts tend to do it by spending on more highly trained officers than we do.

On the other hand, maybe we're just so socioculturally fucked that it requires massive authoritarian investment to keep a crummy level of peace. I'm undecided.

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

#116
post #28

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 re…

>have its cake and eat it too whenever i have cake, i tend to eat it also?

Once you eat the cake, you can no longer possess it

EDIT:

Let me make it more clear, as English may not be your first language, if you're asking this question in truth (I sometimes miss sarcasm online, sorry).

Cakes can be beautiful things which people (of a certain time period, especially) wanted to show off as a sign of their wealth, as refined sugar was expensive. Once it was eaten, you could no longer display such wasteful extravagance.

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

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you want to know? I think r/wallstreetbets is still a fantastic place and more or less true to its purpose of finding interesting and novel trades. Much of the discussion has expanded, to discord (600K users, the limit) as well as the daily reddit talks (Think clubhouse but for reddit). The daily thread is still fantastic for a very quick list of interesting topics, which you can jump into and have a conversa…

I preferred it before GME and all that craziness. So before 2020. Just not the same anymore.

2020 was marked by a 10x increase in comment volume, largely coming from both incredible, pandemic driven, market volatility as well as stimulus checks and stay at home orders.

It is very unlikely (I hope) that this environment will happen again.

Nonetheless, can you express exactly what it is that "just [isn't] the same anymore"?

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

#118
This is a really well-written and insightful piece, and makes a lot of sense of the dynamics and personalities of fringe SRs.

Pure gold:

   You’ve come across the gentrifiers before, I’m sure. They browse the front page of reddit and the trending tab of YouTube, buy Ruth Bader Ginsberg figurines and wear Che Guevara T-shirts. They vote for Bernie in the primaries and Biden in the general, first outraged that anyone could want Biden and then outraged that anyone could not. They share articles about how the 2020 BLM protests were overwhelmingly peaceful and then hop online to cheer “ACAB” and “F — — capitalism” graffiti and pictures of burning police precincts. They shout “Defund the Police” while angrily asserting that nobody wants to abolish the police. They manage to boldly stand at once for every fashionable cause and against every unfashionable cause, embracing the aesthetics of radicalism while denying complicity or knowledge whenever that radicalism gets too real. And /r/antiwork was the perfect community for them to turn into a cause celebre.

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

#119
post #22

[flagged]

Communism isn't really about "free shit", though. The slogan is "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" -- not that you get to sit on your butt and somehow everything still works out. You're still very much expected to work, in fact if you have any ability it's probably illegal for you not to.

Now whether communism actually works or not is another matter, but I don't really see where you get the "free shit" angle.

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

#120
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are a lot of low skilled jobs in a service economy. I imagine that a significant fraction of all jobs are low skilled ones. Not everyone is chasing the hustle or whatever either, so there's a significant amount of people will be working those low skilled jobs their whole lives. What quality of life do they deserve? Does society want a permanent underclass that are treated miserably?

There's also a lot of overlap between these jobs and ones that were essential to keep society running during various lockdowns, so the value these jobs provide doesn't seem to be reflected in the remuneration.

What I don't understand is why many see it as acceptable for any business to pay less than a living wage under any circumstance, it's just a roundabout way of making taxpayers pay for a businesses labour force

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