Hackers are spamming businesses’ receipt printers with ‘antiwork’ manifestos
vice.com
vice.com
What clicked is that the idea of being oppressed and dominated by other humans is the sacred axiom of a faith that defines an identity, and a subculture that is becoming a new world religion. Questioning it is like asking someone who believes in God why they can't just choose to be a better person, and maybe not only is it unncessary to believe in what appears to be a kind of divine North Korea to be good, but perhaps that aspect is even getting in their own way. That axiomatic gap is what makes views so irreconcilable.
I had some anarchist friends in the 90s who would go to socialist rallies and chant, "Lon-ger chains! Big-ger cag-es!" This went over as well as you might expect, but these antiwork people seem similar. If they persuade people to learn to negotiate for themselves, good on them, but if they convince people to sacrifice their agency and autonomy in the name of appeasing an idol that represents human domination, to me they're just another cargo cult. Still very funny though, well done.
I don’t know what line of work your friends were in, but prior to the current economic dustup, negotiation wasn’t a thing for most jobs. And I don’t mean that it was hard or rare. I mean you literally had no option to negotiate. Companies job offers were take it or leave it.
That sort of widespread treatment of workers as cogs and not an individual is part of the anger of the antiwork movement
>Anti-work people as well as punks at least to some extent usually strife for a world of generosity and what comes with it.
I see a lot of expectations for others to be generous to them not the other way around, its the have nots that are complaining, the haves are able to fund this dream of making this true through charities or social experiments like places here. https://www.npr.org/2021/03/04/973653719/california-program-...
>I like the idea of a world full of generosity
I do too, I like the idea of world peace, no crimes, and kindness everywhere. I've lived in places that had that kindness in poorer areas than where I live in "shitty countries". If you localize and select, its not impossible or even rare.
>I currently live a happy stable privileged life and would still love to see my income to support a basic income for example.
In Denmark, your dreams can come true, they tax at high rates (over 50% sometimes), have great social support, and then internet tells me it has some of the lowest corruption rates or is the lowest.
I don't see that at all. If you follow the /r/antiwork subreddit, then it's really not about people expecting free stuff or generosity for nothing in return. People just don't want to be treated like shit by their managers.
People expect not to be fired because they refused to come in on their day off for the 3rd time in a row. People expect to be able to attend family events that they told their boss weeks in advance. People just expect to be treated decent by their employer.
Nobody seriously expects stuff for free. Anti-work is about people saying, if you keep walking all over me just to feel good about yourself, then go do the work yourself, I don't need the paycheck enough to deal with your abuse.
AKA expecting others to be generous.
>People expect not to be fired because they refused to come in on their day off for the 3rd time in a row.
They could take days off that aren't scheduled if they were skilled or non disposable workers or if they chose a job without a shitty boss. Whose fault is it to work with a shitty boss? If you stay in an abusive relationship, who chose to stay?
Not treating someone like shit isn't the result of generosity, it's the result of not being an arsehole.
That’s rude and presumptious, like the very behavior you dislike.
My default is not to expect others to be nice and generous, like if you work for an asshole do you expect them not to be an asshole? Is that an intelligent assumption?
I have realistic expectations.
For a line cook at McDonald’s, yes, replacement is easy so wages are lower and fixed.
For an account manager in a highly relational field, it is much harder to replace this role and so that individual could leverage that skill-scarcity into better wages.
Religious or spiritually oriented people don't have this issue as much, as their primary relationship and identity is to something greater than their circumstances, and this gives them faith in alternatives, which means leverage in that bargaining relationship with the world.
They're not just tugging on a leash and calling it freedom, as for them faith itself means there is no leash. There's an underlying belief in the punk and antiwork mentality that unless someone has suffered like they have, we can't understand their truth, but this ignores that nobody would choose to suffer like they did unless they had first given up their identity as having been created by someone invested in their happiness (e.g. being actually loved). It produces some great music and culture, but it's based on a solvable problem.
The whole punk ethos is predicated on an appeal for dignity by people who first believe they don't have it because it was taken from them somehow. Someone made them rage, probably with shame or humiliation. The political beliefs that flow from it are a full psychosexual orientation. I'm not saying they're wrong, but I am saying it is a distinct experience that can't always be shared, and that's what makes reconciling it with opposition almost impossible. Didn't expect to go there, but it's all pretty Freudian.
> A corpse rules society – the corpse of labour. All powers around the globe formed an alliance to defend its rule: the Pope and the World Bank, Tony Blair and Jörg Haider, trade unions and entrepreneurs, German ecologists and French socialists. They don’t know but one slogan: jobs, jobs, jobs!
I would argue the punk movement is not about rage but about anarchy and disobedience towards a conformist society. It's more about being an offensive social drop-out, a splinter under the bourgeois' skin - Not out of rage but out of revulsion.
Of course, everyone on HN has their anecdote about their brother's cousin's girlfriend's former roommate successfully negotiation $1M in stock options at Facebook, but those cases are likely 4-5 standard deviation outliers.
A group. You negotiate with a group. coordinated actions by groups of people or the threat of coordinated actions can be a form of negotiation. That's what the antiwork movement is about to me.
You couldn't be more wrong. First some numbers just for laughs:
Greatest weight lifted was 6270 lbs or 2844 kg while the safe limit for average men is 55 lbs or 25 kg.
Greatest speed was 43.99 km/h (27.33 mph) while average men do 10 km/h.
Then there is endurance too of course! Forget about strength and speed, 8 hours is a huuuuuge amount of time for any physical effort. Walking one could theoretically do 25 miles or 40 km in 8 hours but nurses walk only 4-5 and that is considered a lot. I'm not aware of any 8 hour races but Aleksandr Sorokin did 308 km in 24 hours which is 3 x 8 hours.
You probably wonder why I compare it to top sports. That is because in my humble opinion it is. If you don't treat physical labor like top sports, if you don't make an effort to adapt all parts of your lifestyle to it, then it you will destroy your body which will bring down productivity dramatically. The average worker is pretty used up.
In many such jobs not going insane also takes a huge effort. Its not as black and white as it seems. Most of us are partially nuts and make a constant effort to preserve sanity. Long before one jumps down the foxcon stairwell the insanity starts eating you.
If we didn't need them we wouldn't have weekends. You would just hire someone willing to work 7 days? Take it or leave it? 15 hour shifts anyone?
Who is the average worker anyway? Are we grouping 20 year olds with 60 year olds here? Your average 60 year old manual laborer (besides the insanity) has a laundry list of permanent injuries that prevent him from doing cardio. The have (besides experience) a high pain tolerance to work with.
Then there is quality. Focus isn't exactly equally divided among men.
Motivation. Besides from ability one can often chose to do less work or chose to do more. The difference between wanting to dot all the i's and waiting for the big bell to ring is huge.
People are also extremely different in how they think about tools and methods. For some they just are, for others they are a half baked work in progress. Everything can potentially be improved. What better time to think about it than during usage? The more mindless the grind the greater the opportunity. You don't have to be a genius, you get 40 hours per week to think about it.
Communication and social skills! I'm pretty good at this if everyone has his eyes on the ball. If everyone else is just waiting for the bell to ring I'm toxic, useless and I hate life. I want to marvel at my accomplishments regardless what the job is.
Ill do one funny story that can only be told in full: While wiring houses I got to see many companies build walls and ceilings. One day a team of 4 showed up that came in running with the largest size plasterboard that one can buy. They carried it inside slapped the first one onto the ceiling in less than 1 minute then ran off to get the second one. The secret of the formula was that the boss was 6.9 and the 3 employees were all over 7 feet tall.
The same day I worked on a different project where 6 old short carpenters with a thousand years of experience between them spend the better part of a week filling up a floor with scaffolding to do exactly the same job. (It was a pain moving my materials and equipment around.) They [had to] use small more manageable plasterboard which requires a lot more wood framing, a lot of sawing and a lot more screws. It took them 4 more days to put in the plasterboard, after that it was the usual patch work of seams that has to be plastered to be presentable.
I didn't see them put in the framing but it was simple by comparison. In 20 min the fast team covered a giant living room. It was surreal to look at. 4 pushed the plate against the ceiling, the 5th guy measured and cut it while they yell at him to work faster. Afterwards they spend 10 min laughing. I ask the entrepreneur among them how he found those giants. In the pub he said, I look over all the heads and point at the tall guy then yell, you should come work for me! What is the work? Well, we drive a lot!
I didn't see them do the wood frame but I wouldn't be surprised if it took them 1 hour. Lets say 2 hours for the whole job: 6 men 8 days vs 4 men 2 hours = 48 days vs 1 day. Almost 50 times more productive.
They are actually for work, just a better kind. It's basically a corporation and capitalist friendly activism and as such is harmless.
Then they seriously need a better slogan than "anti-work".
To extend a metaphor, I think the sales pitch was: "I am offering you liberation, redemption, freedom, and transformation, and all you need to do to achieve it is to be brave and heroic and tug on your leash! What's that you say? You don't have one? Well I have some right here! Just put one on and tug at it, and with enough suffering and blood, you shall overcome! Step right up! This work is guaranteed to set you free, or your money back!" Nobody wants to accept they've been swindled by a deceptive carnival barker working for the leash maker, but in a metaphysical comic book sort of way, I have come to suspect that's precisely what happened.
The items were originally created as printer tests, but it became too useful to prebuild regular catering orders, add delivery directions, and import internal notes like regular or VIP preferences from CRM. This also meant if you created a new customer profile, you could create a menu item tied to it that you could program to send to any printer, which probably four out of a few hundred ever did anything funny with.
Yeah but:
> But Andrew Morris, the founder of GreyNoise, a cybersecurity firm that monitors the internet, told Motherboard that his firm has seen actual network traffic going to insecure receipt printers, and that it seems someone or multiple people are sending these printing jobs all over the internet indiscriminately, as if spraying or blasting them all over.
Turn off port forwarding on the business’ router. “I have stopped the hackers for good, that will be $10,000.”
If you’re someone who does fishing for a living, self-employed, is the haggler exploiting you are you exploiting them? Is the other boat exploiting you if they undersell you?
If you barter with someone who hunts deer who is exploiting whom?
Or does exploitation only come into focus when it’s private capital (as opposed to state capital)?
Most people on this site would disagree with that view though.
Definition of exploit (Entry 2 of 2)
1 : to make productive use of : UTILIZE exploiting your talents exploit your opponent's weakness
2 : to make use of meanly or unfairly for one's own advantage
Is it unfair if you both mutually agree upon the trade?
If there is a transaction, there is always a risk of exploitation. Someone has the upper hand and someone is the party under more duress --sometimes the little guy and sometimes the big gal. Even when working towards a communal goal as someone in the thread mentioned. Maybe I don't care if the communal canal doesn't get built. Maybe I'm okay with dying of thirst, etc.
Also, I don’t think it follows that because someone does not care about all aspects of a person they are therefore dehumanizing them.
Who of us ever really cares about every single aspect of another person? Even your spouse or close family member will have parts of them that you don’t care to engage with. In fact they may choose to keep those aspects private from you, meaning you cannot care about them.
In an employer employee relationship I expect it is similar. The employer shouldn’t be allowed to delve into the parts of the employees life that are unrelated to the “trade” of service for wage. This type of snooping would be expected and maybe required if the employer was supposed to care about the person themselves.
Fundamentally this is about the right of the individual to alienate their labor. I can sell my labor to others, but nothing else. To sell your whole person is slavery. It seems wage earning is an innovation not an exploitation.
I guess I take the inverse conclusion. I think if you don't engage with people holistically, you're ultimately just using them for your own entertainment.
As for the employer-employee thing, I think it's helpful to come at this from the facts - we know that employee abuse, including very extreme forms, is both pernicious (it persists even when illegal) and ubiquitous, in the present, and in history. This suggests that there should be some structural reason.
So much of this stuff is just semantics.
What do you think the majority of hacking, as in what security professionals / malicious attackers do, entail? A small number of security vulnerabilities are low level or clever tricks, the majority are finding holes in people, processes, and systems that are blatantly obvious.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker#General_definition Originally, hacker simply meant advanced computer technology enthusiast (both hardware and software) and adherent of programming subculture; see hacker culture.[3]
I am referring to the correct definition of the term where you are supposed to hack something.
Oh my, it’s serious then.
Wait, maybe that is the message and maybe that is the sender.
It took me a little while to digest this, as I went through a series of reactions.
First reaction: this confuses me, but looking at the subreddit, "antiwork" seems to be a synonym for "labor." I guess when you want to bring something back into style, you give it a fresh name. "Antiwork" is in the clickbait tradition of "abolish the police," or if "clickbait" feels too harsh, maybe it's more fair to say it's a feel-good way to combine progressive goals with radical feelings, tactics, and rhetoric.
Second reaction: on second thought, this has nothing in common with old-fashioned labor. It seems like it's just a bunch of people discovering that they already have the privilege of leaving jobs, turning down jobs, and demanding more in the market. These aren't the people who need a labor movement. They aren't organizing. They're getting what they want because they already have the individual power to get it.
Third reaction: wait, is "antiwork" just teaching people how to be good middle-class capitalist citizens? It sure seems like it. A decent percentage of the submissions seem to be complaining about some kinds advice for how to be successful at work (work hard, love what you do) while celebrating other kinds of advice about how to be successful at work (negotiate pay, negotiate time off, use your market power, walk away from bad situations.) All stuff that middle-class professionals take for granted, no mention of organized labor, just teaching the younger generation to act like good capitalists while they talk like radicals, no chance at all they'll carry this habit with them when they reach positions of authority and power....
Would it be overly conspiratorial to think this is the brainchild of some edgy gen-Z nerds at a conservative think tank?
A post that is linked in their FAQ:
> Should I burn my savings and take a year off? > I’m thinking of taking a year off to just study some online course, paint, write and play video games
From the top answer:
> I would suggest that you request some extended time off first. Make up a family emergency if you have to. A month or two might be enough to recharge
This is a hilarious. A guide to enjoying a privileged position within capitalism, framed as anti-capitalism.
EDIT: I just remembered this has a name: culture jamming. This is a picture-perfect example of it. You appropriate the style and medium of an established cultural force and use them ironically to undermine the force. In this case, using a lowbrow forum, anti-capitalist rhetoric, and the grievances of workers against management to make the pro-capitalist point that the market gives individuals the power to protect their own interests.
Millions of people raised on labor/union/socialist/far-left dogma that was relevant in the 1800s and 1900s are realizing that the modern economy is in fact quite different. But because of a mixture of lack of knowledge and adversarial beliefs about capitalism and corporations, they failed to thrive in the system and are now learning the tools to succeed.
The system is flawed. You can work to fix the flaws without thinking you need to burn the whole thing down.
This doesn't exist. Unions are not socialist or far-left. In fact, many union members are conservatives and vote that way.
I don't think this "information asymmetry" thing will work out well for the workers. What if there are some people who are more productive than others, but have the same job title? Do they really want to hear "yeah we pay you less because you are less productive"? Or vice versa "yeah, you work twice as hard as Simon, but you have the same job title, so he still gets the same pay, sorry". Those social actions all sound very good, but I think people can sour on it quickly when they realize they are the ones who effectively pay for their unproductive colleagues that can't be fired.
I don't think that will go down well, and will just make things more difficult to run.
And the impetus is still "socialist", equal pay for everybody, businesses are exploiting people and so on, those are socialist talking points.
The comparison of salaries is used as a method not a goal (I think). And for your 10x-coder-god, the lesson seems to be that they should be given a title better in line with their genius and salary. If it’s somehow difficult because their value isn’t easily measured in terms that would work in a policy document, chances are your impression of their skills may just be imaginary: are they really worth the money, or do they just look and act like only a highly productive person could without being fired?
As for coder gods, yes, there are people who are more productive than others.
"The comparison of salaries is used as a method not a goal"
A method to achieve what?
Its illegal for the company to prevent you, but that doesn't help any employee who doesn't know this fact.
Also, that is kinda the whole point of the anti-work movement, to stop working for companies that abuse you.
>And if no such company exists, you can start one.
I think you have an imperfect view of the situation given you likely work somewhere that pays you enough you have spare money left over to save up a rainy day fund. This movement isn't for you, and you should step out of the way.
Min wage workers don't have a rainy day fund, they don't have any money left over to put into a savings account, they can't even handle missing a single day of work without one of their bills being paid late, all while working a class of jobs that rarely has paid sick time, almost never has vacation, and no union to keep you from being fired for arbitrary or made up reasons.
How da fuck do you expect them to start a company? Its hard enough for them to handle the expense of changing jobs just from the one or two extra days between paychecks because they pay out on a different day.
It can be really cheap to start a company. You could offer to help your antiwork colleagues to find better jobs, for example. Bam, you have a company.
If the min wage is socialism then call me a socialist because thats not an argument you'll win with here
The living wage theory is a completely moronic idea, because why should anybody who needs a job done have to pay for somebody else's whole life expenses? That makes zero sense and just makes it more difficult to offer jobs.
Like suppose you need somebody to paint your living room. Should you have to pay their whole living expenses to do that? How does that make sense? It is just a job.
Minimum wages only hit the poorest people who can't get jobs anymore. And the first victims will not even show up in the joblessness statistics, because they will be people who earned an extra income to their pension or student allowance.
The only proper solution is to increase demand for jobs. If you are desperate to find somebody to paint your living room, you will raise your rates to get the job done.
While I get that you don't see how more income leads to more ability to job hunt for a better job, I would like to ask why you think it is that when people got stimulus checks they started leaving their current wage slave job for better ones in droves?
There is still a labor shortage, where did you think it came from? Unemployment benefits don't apply to people who quit, or were fired for cause, and for most people out of work from the pandemic days, they are fully exhausted, and have been since the first week of sept when the federal """handout""" ended. Nobody who didn't lose their job this calendar year still has employment benefits. Yet there is still a labor shortage for bottom rung jobs?
Its almost like a bunch of people now having the means to eat the cost of job hopping did their job hopping and are working better jobs.
Now lets look at about why that might be...
>Surely at least you can send out some applications from your phone on your daily 2 hour commute to work.
Doesn't matter if you can't afford to take the job.
This is what people who haven't been poor recently don't understand...
If you can not afford to have your first paycheck delayed by a week to 3 weeks without either running out of gas or bus money to get to work(!), or ending up past the final date (!!) on a utility bill or rent bill, why would you waste your time applying to jobs?
I think you are talking about imaginary situations that don't actually reflect reality.
If people were able to find better jobs, that is exactly the solution I propose.
Sometimes I'm reminded of that Ferengi quote "we don't seek to end exploitation, we seek to become the exploiters."
Technology has created multifold opportunities for value creation. There are even fields where the same adversarial urges can be applied. Development and publishing is wide open for creators. Even after all of the big players and platforms, there's still open realestate for solo builders.
If you find work tedious, then become clever. Create something which will earn an income on the terms you define and find acceptable. When you fail, look inward and decide what you can do differently next time. Don't blame others. You can't change them. You'll only make yourself a powerless victim. Retain your individual agency and keep going. Learn and advance past your challenges.
1) Identify the problem correctly. It isn't work. It is tedious, unfulfilling work.
2) Create your solution
3) Profit!