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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

#161

Post by Levitz »

diogenesjunior wrote: post #108
tgb wrote: 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?

It's an old idiom that people started saying wrong a long time ago, its correct, original form is "Eat your cake and have it too".

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

#162

Post by numpad0 »

zqfm wrote: post #72
kvuj wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ho…

I used to love the 4chan-style contrarian attitude until, in high school people I knew were killed in Iraq. Then I started to realize that those kinds of nihilist attitudes have real-world consequences. Since then, that attitude has become mainstream (or perhaps just my awareness of it) and following has been a constant trail of death and misery. I can't not take it seriously anymore when my friends and loved ones ar…

I feel like contrarian techniques adopted by sane mind at cooperatively manageable scale (of zero) is great, but IMO users of reactive contrarianism that eventually emerges just deserve downvotes as external means of value judgement. However that leads to communal polarization, and to solve that, regular exposure events would be necessary ... I admire Reddit, at least for its architecture.

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

#163

Post by Valgrim »

gruez wrote: post #90
BitwiseFool wrote: post #40

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…

I think it was always pretty clear that the movement as a whole advocated redistribution of resources toward less violent and more efficient alternatives to police, like better social programs and mental health resources.

Relying on the police to prevent crime is like relying on firefighters to prevent fires or paramedics to prevent injuries. Sure they have a role to play, but logically they should only be the last resort in case everything else goes wrong.

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

#164

Post by wldcordeiro »

JSavageOne wrote: post #156

I remember stumbling upon /r/antiwork a few years ago and being so happy I'd stumbled upon a thriving movement that so effectively criticized one of the core principles of society that everyone takes for granted - that everyone must effectively sell their labor to someone else (unless they're rich enough to opt out, or clever enough to create some business or invest their way out). To me anti-work is the recognition…

It's not Reddit specifically but those different subreddits growing to the point where the most "engaging" stuff wins and that always becomes the low-effort memes and stuff. Hacker News has had a slower decline in quality because it's like one specific subreddit in size and has pretty aggressive moderation of content in comparison. Your comment and the phenomenom it describes has been given the name "Eternal September" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

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

#165

Post by dgreensp »

It’s a fascinating article, but it lacks respect for people taking principled positions about this social issue. Progressives are fad-chasing sheep, supposedly, while anarchists are legit, but crazy.

It’s like the Jordan Peterson philosophy on climate change: People need to stop talking about it and caring about it, because anyone who does so is just virtue-signaling and basically being a shallow, useless idiot about it. When actually people are trying to figure out how to deal with the fact that our leaders and institutions are so out of touch with reality and stuck in their ways. But no, the important point is people in general are shallow and amoral, like me, but dumber.

Culture changes and drives change. Collective action eventually does something.

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

#166

Post by slothtrop »

dale_glass wrote: post #119
0F wrote: 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…

> The slogan is "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"

This is the fantasy.

> You're still very much expected to work

This is the reality. They contradict each other. The State will coerce you to work regardless of your "need" for it.

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

#167

Post by throwaway0a5e »

iso1210 wrote: post #92
wsb_mod2 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The site itself leans left, I wouldn't call that manipulation, simply people voting on content they like. However, you are onto something. Almost every single post on r/MurderedByAOC is made by u/LrlOurPresident, and those posts hit the front page on a nearly daily basis.

The world itself leans left - at least compared with the US Left/Right divide, and younger people (who are more likely to be on reddit) lean left. Obviously the site itself leans left.

It's pretty clear from things like Bernie, the rise of antiwork, etc, etc, the site doesn't exactly align with the mainstream DNC talking points nearly as nicely as the front page and popular subs would make you think.

If the NFL craps astroturfing all over the online sports community that still constitutes manipulation even if the occupants of the sites in question were marginally more predisposed to those ideas than the general population. What the mainstream left does to Reddit with their astroturfing is no different.

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

#168

Post by pmyteh »

vanusa wrote: post #81

I grant that the absolutist antiwork position fails to meet basic reality compliance standards. But does that give the current de-facto state religion -- cradle-to-grave workaholism (wildly out of proportion to the amount of work we actually need to do to sustain ourselves) -- a pass? Why is the promotion one position an instance of 'sanewashing', while the normalization of other (no less insane in my view) position…

The promotion of 'work reform' is not what the author is describing as sanewashing. It's the co-option of a more radical movement, followed by an explaining away of the radical parts of that movement to make it mainstream-acceptable.

As someone who is sympathetic to anarchist positions while being temperamentally a reformist I can see the merit in both positions. But if I held the radical one and saw its slogans appropriated just as it had begun to get traction I'd be cross too, I think.

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

#169

Post by skybrian »

tgb wrote: 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…

Anarchists are going to have a hard time accepting this, but I think the lesson here is that you can't have a coherent community focused on its original subject without quite a lot of gatekeeping.

On Reddit, r/AskHistorians has a good approach. The blogging model (as revived by Substack) also seems to work.

These are explicitly non-democratic. AskHistorians gives historians higher status. A blog is about whatever the blog author wants it to be about.

Hacker News has good moderation but it's a lot more anti-tech than it used to be and that's a reflection of the broader culture. If they really wanted to resist that then it would require stronger moderation at the expense of growth.

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

#170

Post by Levitz »

helloooooooo wrote: post #38
kvuj wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ho…

It probably has to do with the post incentives. On Reddit, if you get downvoted into oblivion, your post disappears even if you get thousands of comments. On 4Chan, the more active the post, the more it gets bumped to the top. So being inflammatory on one makes your post disappear, and on the other it sends it to the top of the feed.

Reddit is grossly overmoderated. You have a vote system that enforces a hivemind by itself, on top of a normal moderation system that deletes an enormous amount of content, on top of automated moderation banning posts if you use this or that word, on top of a shadowban system on top of a global content policy system.

The result is that only stuff that the majority of users allow will get displayed.

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