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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

#431

Post by glonq »

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…

Agreed, reddit was once a [r]evolutionary platform but nowadays is broken in ways that it can't/won't fix.

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

#432

Post by timgilbert »

jdrc wrote: post #76

Why does no social medium try to tailor against gentrification? It doesn't have to be always exponetial growth, it's fun in the beginning but then entropy takes over. Communities with mechanisms to ensure they keep hovering around a midpoint are sustainable.

One or two examples exist. The venerable MetaFilter is heavily moderated ans charges $5 for a (lifetime) membership, which tends to keep out drive-by commenting.

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

#433

Post by cableshaft »

bloaf wrote: post #261
gavinray wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

If you give someone a fish, they starve after a day. Teach someone to fish and they can eat + sell the fish. But if I make a fish-catching machine to catch fish for everyone, does everyone eat, or does everyone starve? UBI is essentially a means of ensuring that in a world where the robots catch all the fish, people can still afford to buy a fish.

Kind of reminds me of The Mitchell and Webb Look skits about the Angel Summoner and the BMX Bandit. BMX Bandit (the workers) want to be useful, but they just can't compete with an Angel Summoner (automation machine) that can just summon an angelic horde every time and solve the problem without hardly any effort.

[1]: https://youtu.be/zFuMpYTyRjw

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

#434

Post by bloaf »

double_nan wrote: post #406
enaaem wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still need a fish catching machine. In the literal sense. Despite all the innovations, we still need fisherman and sailors. Even if we have a fish catching machine who/what will make the fish catching machine? And there are still tons of other automation problems and a fish catching machines isn't even the hardest one. The automation challenge is often conveniently underplayed, while it's an insanely hard problem…

It's fascinating how some people view on manufacturing is oversimplified. Fish catching machine needs maintenance, it uses consumable items to work properly. To produce all of that there should be tools, transportation, mining, engineering and so on. There will be no state in any near term future when it would be possible to have work optional for any meaningful group of people. All the welfare we have right now is b…

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

Now I certainly agree that there is no realistic scenario where any significant portion of people can just choose free fish in 5 or even 10 years[1]. But the automation of work tasks is like Mike's bankruptcy: it builds slowly until we have the sudden realization that we're over the cliff. Robots making and repairing robots, people watched over by machines of loving grace, the whole 9 yards.

Personally, I would like to have the UBI parachute strapped on before we find ourselves floating Wile E. Coyote style over an economic collapse. Given the rate at which new legislation passes in today's society, the time to start the fight is at least 20 years before you really need it.

[1] Unless those singulatarian types are right, and human-level machine intelligence is 7 years out: https://longbets.org/1/

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

#435

Post by shakes_mcjunkie »

the_snooze wrote: post #251
BitwiseFool wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A far better slogan would have been "Demilitarize the Police". I do not know why so many people who want police reform want to stick to "Defund the Police" when it comes with so much baggage.

That's a good one. Maybe even demanding "competent police" would be a good aggressive tack. If there's footage of police killing unarmed people in their homes or in broad daylight, then we should absolutely demand more competence and professionalism from them. That puts police unions in a tough spot of not being able to argue against that.

But that's not what the movement is about. The "Defund the Police" and "Abolish the Police" slogans are based on even "better policing", "community policing", etc. still being incredibly harmful to communities.

> If there's footage of police killing unarmed people in their homes or in broad daylight, then we should absolutely demand more competence and professionalism from them

This happened so much. Did you see all the videos of police violence during BLM and before and after? I don't think the problem is the slogan.

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

#436

Post by sleepingadmin »

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

>How exactly is this supposed to work? The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work?

Given the tremendous inflation occurring because of non-universal benefits, UBI pretty well died as a subject. Everything the anti-UBI people have said would happen, is happening. So if it were universal, it would be worse than this.

Trying to discuss UBI is complex because every single attempt at it has failed.

There is a simplistic idea of UBI = $1000/month to every single person. Just start delivering cheques and see what happens? Everyone earns $1000 more and everyone bumps up in the progressive tax and hopefully you tax enough to keep the budget balanced and inflation under control? We know this doesn't work now. MMT is dead as a subject. We must do much more than just free money.

Lets look deeper.

What if we dismantle every single safety net. Welfare goes away, employment insurance, child benefits, old age pensions, indigenous UBI, etc. These all go away. We take those budgets and combine them and disperse equally. In essence what happens is that from a government budget point of view we aren't broke. At exactly the same time we also make a constitutional amendment requiring the government to balance the budget.

What is this exactly? It's a negative income tax that Milton Friedman recommended ages ago.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM

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

#437

Post by s1artibartfast »

yk wrote: post #244
HideousKojima wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>likewise, "no one wants to mine coal" me, I do, I wanna do that, I wanna work out the refining process, I want to lathe 1000 of the same thing. Not every personality is what the author can come up with in his head, other kinds of people exist too You may want to, but the kind of people who talk in online discussions about "What will your job be after the revolution" overwhelmingly do not.

The radical position is, if nobody wants to mine coal, then we will need to either not use coal (great idea, saves a lot of Co2), or make the coal mining job better. Of course nobody wants the dirty, unhealthy and dangerous job that capitalism designed, but that does not imply that it is impossible to design a job that extracts coal and people genuinely enjoy.

The challenge is who "designs" the job to make coal mining more enjoyable in a specialized economy.

In Capitalism, you raise pay until there is incentive to do the work.

In a communist command economy, some authority decides if more coal miners are needed and takes from some people to gives to coal workers until there are enough workers.

In a cashless anarchists society, I guess you hope that someone invents something to improve conditions?

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

#438

Post by kraftman »

batshit_beaver wrote: post #306
mlyle wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 a…

> 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. I think people both understate how splintered the US society really is, and overstate the importance of this divide. Imagine a country with a HUGE historical and current influx of immigrants that bring tons of different cultures and ideologies into the mix.…

So it's not broken or fucked up, it just:

- is splintered

- is divided

- is hard to govern

- has an economic structure that encourages division

- has an increasing dive between the haves and have nots

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

#439

Post by cuteboy19 »

GameOfFrowns wrote: post #390
seaourfreed wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't say where the money comes from.

> This doesn't say where the money comes from. Taxing the middle class.

Surely there would be some limitations to that. Eventually you would run out of other people's money

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

#440

Post by kraftman »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #213
Valgrim wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

From my own experience, and the discussions I had with my peers, the specific term "defund" does not imply advocating redistribution. I sense that in the vernacular "defund" means to stop paying for something and the implication is you are getting rid of whatever is no longer being funded. Defund also tends to be used for line-items and programs rather than organizations and departments, which adds to the confusion.

If I said "the government needs to fund NASA" or "NASA needs funding", you wouldn't assume that they currently have no money.
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