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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

#191

Post by monkeynotes »

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…

> We could already have this reality today if we just implemented a universal basic income

This is at best naieve. How can you possibly reduce all of the complexities of a nation's multiple economic wants and needs to that conclusion? This is the problem with the movement, myopic and idealistic notions of being free from work. Universal income basically drives up inflation, if you give everyone a free $10 everything becomes $10 devalued. Money works partly because it is scarce and takes work to accumulate. Other people want to exchange their effort for yours. If there is no effort, there is no value.

Even if the above is not true there are surely numerous other forces at play that don't fit in with your simplistic idealism.

If you think it's the boomers keeping you down, wait until all the YouTube and social media players get into their 40s and see how they feel about giving away their wealth. People are greedy, selfish, family first, and tribal regardless of a generation.

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

#192

Post by wutbrodo »

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…

Did you read any of the article? The whole point is that it was specifically a radical space, founded and filled by radicals, with a (somewhat) coherent radical message. The fact that there was a shift to "we should have mildly better working conditions within the same system" and "lol funny quitting text" may disqualify Doreen from being the representative, but the discussion being had here is how exactly that shift in the community's purpose is managed.

I'm extremely far from agreeing with the anarchist view of work, but your comment contains precisely the dynamic that the piece describes: a cause-focused community gains steam and followers, at which point the message is neutered (despite retaining a now-contradictory name) and those responsible for the movement's success are written out of history and ostracized as unrepresentative weirdos.

Seriously, I recommend reading the piece. It's too late to do so before commenting, but you may take away something more than "God why is this weirdo claiming that she represents antiwork when it's obviously just a board for bored teenagers to post memes about how they hate their job and tepid centrist messages about overtime pay"

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

#193

Post by izzydata »

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…

I see this trend in nearly everything online. Anything that becomes sufficiently large will eventually decline this way. A lot of niche communities intentionally engage in gate keeping behavior which I suspect is to avoid ever succumbing to the de-evolution of their niche.

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

#194

Post by dymk »

gavinray wrote: post #182
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…

>Universal basic income I'm going to sound like I'm being snarky here, and I promise I'm not. How exactly is this supposed to work? The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work? I don't say this from a place of privilege. I grew up lower class trailer trash and have been homeless. Maybe I don't understand the concept fully but it seems a bit absurd and unfeasible

You tax a couple dozen ultra rich billionaires and a couple dozen ultra profitable companies. There's plenty of money. We don't need to print more. And each doesn't need the spare $20B anyways.

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

#195

Post by qnsi »

jackling wrote: post #143
jokoon wrote: post #130

Brilliantly explained. Too few people have the humility to look like a loser, and would rather work a bad job instead. To add on the condescending tone of fox news, the whole hypocrisy of the backlash was quite surprising to me. To me it really felt like it was an attempt to shut down the sub by elaborate astro turfing (the mods did say there was a lot of new accounts brigading). I felt a lot of empathy for Doreen, a…

It's shocking to me how people just made fun of her for everything possible. IMO she explained her position well, and didn't say anything outrageous. The "laziness is a virtue" line specifically seems to be something that people point out as a terrible take, but with full context it's easy to see that she's just promoting more rest and healthier conditions. It's ironic to me how a subreddit that advocates for less to…

exactly. I heard about this interview before, hearing it was disastrous. I read this article and just then watched the interview. I thought she explained things pretty well. She was mocked for being dog walker, but why? Why is news presenter inherently better than dog walker? I guess net effect for society is better from dog walking than news.

That the community got angry at her is beyond me, and I was very sceptical of antiwork subreddit

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

#196

Post by DoktorDelta »

gavinray wrote: post #182
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…

>Universal basic income I'm going to sound like I'm being snarky here, and I promise I'm not. How exactly is this supposed to work? The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work? I don't say this from a place of privilege. I grew up lower class trailer trash and have been homeless. Maybe I don't understand the concept fully but it seems a bit absurd and unfeasible

This Stanford article provides some explanation and also references several studies for more in-depth reading: https://basicincome.stanford.edu/about/what-is-ubi/

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

#197

Post by wing-_-nuts »

jcims wrote: post #186
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…

The key to reddit is avoid any sub with >50k members. For really slow subs you can tack /comments on to the URL to see where the conversation is. Just picking something at random, /r/goldmining hasn't had a story posted in 2 years, yet there is still some activity: https://old.reddit.com/r/goldmining/comments/ (Doesn’t with with new layout)

TIL, neat, thank you.

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

#198

Post by tomrod »

gavinray wrote: post #182
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…

>Universal basic income I'm going to sound like I'm being snarky here, and I promise I'm not. How exactly is this supposed to work? The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work? I don't say this from a place of privilege. I grew up lower class trailer trash and have been homeless. Maybe I don't understand the concept fully but it seems a bit absurd and unfeasible

At face value, and with traditional neoclassical economics, it does appear to be an infeasible facade. Ex nilho creation of Robison Crusoe style goods.

From a practical reality, we already have a UBI of $0 guaranteed, and with time cost that increases if people want to seek welfare benefits. A UBI could be implemented, potentially, solely on streamlining of processes to decrease the costs of welfare benefit search.

Likely a realistic funding would be a mix of improving services delivery (lowering costs) and taxation of capital holders (offset some of the gains that put labor out of work). Under neoclassical theory, there are major differences in the two workhorse models of overlapping generations versus infinitely lived agents. An OLG model better approximates groups of people and their lifecycles.

In my view, this is a slow-burn fight w/in the optimal taxation literature, based solely on the papers themselves and having not participated in the conferences!

[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w24335

[2] https://ideas.repec.org/p/red/sed019/258.html

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

#199

Post by yk »

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 one sub I know opts out of r/all is r/nfl. Which is kinda strange for such a rather non controversial topic, but judging by the treats on r/all probably wise.

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

#200

Post by Msw242 »

wsb_mod2 wrote: post #32
BitwiseFool wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"I have no interest in /r/antiwork nor their ideologies, but they kept popping up on /r/all" The /r/popular and /r/all pages are intensively manipulated by a constellation of leftist activists. Have you ever noticed just how often the same "screenshots of tweets" submissions from people like AOC end up being reposted ad nauseum across several subreddits that basically share the same message - and most importantly -…

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.

When conservative subs (like the pro trump ones) started hitting r/all and r/popular, they were very quickly banned, using (unevenly enforced) rules.

It's well known that SRS engaged in brigading, but they'll never be held to the same standard as those with ideologies that are less sympathetic.

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