Anti-work subreddit goes private after rough Fox News interview
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Like all things people have their own interpretation of what "anti-work" is.
For me it's centered around making sure that people aren't working crazy hours at the expense of enjoying the life we live. I'm thinking the Amazon workers who seem to be getting treated terribly. Or its people that work extremely long hours and get paid a very average wage. Or its people burnt out from having worked very hard in their careers. It's the burnout work culture.
Unfortunately in this case, the viewpoint that was taken by the media and certainly communicated by the mod was around simply doing the least amount of work possible. For some people this is okay, but I wouldn't be encouraging it to live a fulfilled life.
If this person had said, I work x number of hours a week dog walking so I can follow my passion of x, then that's completely fine.
The consequence is an inhumanly clocked working schedule for people in that field. But consumers support it too. The ability to not track a package results in a moderate life crisis. A benign benefit that has severe results on the job. No wonder nobody wants to do deliveries anymore.
This phenomenon does extend to other industries like any production. Surveillance of production is sensible, surveillance of people is not and I don't think there is any benefit to it and a lot of negatives.
In that regard I understand why people just don't want to work in such an environment. It doesn't even net increased productivity.
What if one can follow their passion of x without walking the dog? Would that then not be fine with you anymore?
My point was that this person conveyed themselves as a 30 year old dog walker who sleeps on the job and wants to work less hours. But if they could follow their passion they would want to teach. But this person was not making any strides in achieving this at all.
What does "making strides" towards philosophy even mean? Philosophy is largely about taking the time to think about stuff. This person in question seems to have that down. Sure they might fail to figure anything meaningful out, but that's valuable in its own right. A lifetime of sleep walking dogs could lead to enlightenment.
No, this person wanted to teach philosophy, not be philosophical themselves. Please watch the interview.
A lifetime of sleep walking dogs could lead to enlightenment, if that was the case and this person did believe that then they would have said that their passion was walking dogs because it provides them with philosophical thought.
Would I be happier unemployed? No, probably not. I'd feel like shit. Because society is setup so that if you are unemployed you are poor and people think you are a loser. Careers are how we measure ourselves and others. But this is part of what is crap with this system. It's insane that I (and most others) would feel bad for having too much leisure time.
Where do I find this mythical wilderness where no laws apply to me?
Or you can be a hermit.
I think this says something about the very nature of work. In our modern times it is detached from its purpose (survival of self and species), but that is ultimately what drives the need to work.
This idea that a capable, working-age living thing should be able to free load off of others’ work to stay alive is not dignifying for that person, and unfairly burdens the one who is working to keep the other person alive.
Put another way, just because a farmer can make enough to feed a town doesn’t mean the farmer should only be allowed enough grain to feed his family, with everything else divided among those who don’t work. What’s the incentive to work?
And when you introduce government rules to enforce those things, the farmer is compelled by violence and force to give away his labor.
Just like missing the connection between work and survival, people miss the connection between government regulation and the promise of force behind it as a punishment for non-compliance.
The reason people pay taxes (which is the only way we have as a society to redistribute resources from those who work to those who don’t) is because their money will be taken if it is not paid, or they will be put in jail if they lie about how much they owe.
So while the original comment complains about how you’re compelled to work, that’s actually not true. It is a societal norm to work and to have a good quality of life, but no one is forcing you. But at the same time they are asking to increase government benefits and force those who work to pay for their survival.
All this said - if the conversation is framed around how much work it takes to survive, I think as a society it would make sense for that number to drop as we’ve increased scale of production and automation.
The definition of "work" used by every leftist movement in the world is different. They define it as "directly or indirectly selling your time to other humans in exchange for material benefits." Thus, if I hunt alone in the wilderness to get meat for myself I'm not "working". But if there is another person in the wilderness who forces me to hunt to get meat for us then I'm "working".
I hope you understand the difference. Scrubbing toilets is not per se "work". Scrubbing toilets so that someone will give you money to buy food is "work".
So in your work-free society, hunters have to work?
We generally 'waive' the fee for children, the elderly, and the disabled, but ultimately, right at the very sharp end, some folks HAVE to work so the others have food. So those of us who are not growing food need to produce something of value to trade in order to get food.
The solution we have today (we all contribute our labour in exchange for tokens which can be used to buy food and other things) is significantly better than how it was a couple of hundred years ago (slaves do the work).
The only time global CO2 emissions significantly decreased was when people stopped working due to the Covid pandemic. Thus, I think the evidence is against your claim that we would all be worse off.
Either we all go back to being hunter gatherers, or we exploit the poor to do our fair share of the work that needs to be done for us to live the lifestyles we want to lead. You don’t want to work? Fine. But then you are not entitled to other people’s work product either.
No computer, no electricity, no plants you don’t grow yourself, no meat you haven’t personally slaughtered.
Don’t get me wrong, I still think we could be doing better. But the problem starts with consumerism and same-day shipping and buy-now, pay-later, and LaCroix, not with work.
If we could reduce consumerism, we could for sure reduce our working hours significantly.
I don't think work should be the entrance fee to society. You're saying that if I don't work then bad things should happen to me. I should starve (since I can't hunt nor grow vegetables) and I should not have a computer or even electricity. I.e. I should be punished. I don't see how that improves my life or society.
I think these ideas rub you the wrong way because your identity is tied to your work. If people see work as a problem rather than a solution then your status would evaporate. The guy working part-time as a dog walker and sleeps through most of it would be on an equal footing to you who work XX hours per week and earns $YYYk dollars per year.
In other words: by saying you shouldn't starve for refusing to work, aren't you also saying that someone else should grow your food for you for free?
Society decides which tasks have value and which don’t by whether consumers spend money on the work product produced by those tasks.
Now, society’s way of working this out isn’t perfect, but how else should we determine which jobs are adding value and which are not?
You ask how we should decide what jobs has "value" and which hasn't. Well, if it isn't obvious that a job has "value" then perhaps it has no value?
I’m not being difficult here, these are tough questions.
Allowing the market to decide value is the option we currently have, and seems to be the fairest so far.
I am sure that it is not optimal, and it has flaws, but no one has yet convinced me that there is a better model.
This presents a workless society as a real thing, rather than a hypothetical. I might be wrong, but I’m not aware of any workless society (apart from hunter gatherer tribes and history). If you have examples of a society that functions fully without work, then please share, I’d be interested to see how you solve volunteering for unpleasant or undesirable tasks that no-one wants.
As for optimizing trading algos, the counter is that making markets more efficient is also valuable to society at large, and that is what most quants would say they are doing.
As you pointed out in some other comments, there are certainly issues with the current system. Though, I don’t think the conclusion is for people to stop working entirely. If that were the case all of these “useless” jobs would go away and we would then ask farmers to give us food in exchange for nothing at all?
I think what might be better is offering more incentives for people to work in industries that make a real positive impact on the world. And in lieu of that, people who feel they aren’t contributing in a meaningful way can try to seek out more meaningful work. And we as a society should support *that*.
Try and think of it from a utilitarian perspective. Is some aaa game creating or destroying more happiness? Is it a net positive for society? For some games perhaps the answer is yes, for others it is no. Children getting obese from sedentary lifestyle and not socialising with friends is certainly a large cost.
> If that were the case all of these “useless” jobs would go away and we would then ask farmers to give us food in exchange for nothing at all?
Sure.
> Sure.
Ha, then the farmers would say "no" and you'd starve to death?
You might have invented electricity or the computer through ingenuity, but who is going to build the infrastructure that supports it? Who is going to build the poles in your suburb to get the electricity to you? Who is going to build the telecommunications infrastructure and maintain it such that if it breaks there is someone there to fix it?
https://www.quora.com/I-dont-understand-volunteer-firefighte...
Honestly it’s an odd example to pick because there are paid firefighters too - why would you need to pay firefighters if enough people are willing to do it for free?
The reason you need to pay firefighters is because society is work-centric.
The reason you need to pay firefighters is because a few people might give some of their time, but a fire department needs to operate 24x7.
When you can’t find enough volunteers in your society, how do you solve the problem of buildings burning down at a time no-one chooses to volunteer?
I’d rather do something more fun if I can pick and choose. Maybe race car driver? Or chocolate taster?
Not all pay for work is monetary, but firefighting is still work.
And I just realized - maybe you hate your job. If that’s the case, go find something else you enjoy that happens to pay the bills. Life is too short to be spending your working hours hating life, and if you’re on this site you can probably find some sort of job (or start a business) that you enjoy and others find valuable.
No, you’re saying ‘I should be allowed to opt out of work while others labour in fields and cobalt mines and cocoa plantations’. If you can’t hunt or grow vegetables, you should perform some other task that society thinks is valuable, and share your part of collective responsibility that way.
Exploitation is already a big enough issue without us making it worse. Brave New World describes very well exactly what would happen - we would end up with worker castes and ruler castes. I see the work already moving in this direction and it is sad.
I have absolutely no problems with people choosing to work fewer hours or in less lucrative professions, provided they are not expecting society to pick up their slack.
Don’t forget that for every farmer in the fields, you also need some sort of supply chain and distribution network, you need people to build the trucks and drive them, you need people to gather the resources needed to build trucks, you need the folks drilling for oil and those working at the oil refineries, as well as the ships that bring the oil to where it’s needed (as well as folks gathering the resources and turning them into ship parts etc.)
We can afford this now because everyone who buys a vegetable in a shop pays a tiny fraction of all these costs. If nobody had to pay for vegetables any more, it’s not just the farmer who is working ‘for free’.
This is just one small product, and the simplest example I could think of. I would imagine that computers and the internet would have significantly more people who would need to work for free in order for you to have a computer.
I didn't write anything even resembling that. If that is your interpretation then continuing the discussion with you is meaningless.
What’s your opinion about the rest of my argument?
And the work you think I should do should be valuable. Who decides what work is valuable? What makes money? If so, can I be a drug dealer? That makes a lot of money. If I can't, then you must admit that what makes money is not a good indicator of what actually are useful services to soceity.
You claim that my existence causes "slack" that has to be picked up. I disagree both with the notion that human existence causes slack and that work somehow causes "slack" to be picked up. As said, I could be selling drugs and thus having enough money to buy food and pay rent. But that's not picking up "slack".
You seem to be unable to see the big picture. The costs of work and the work-centric lifestyle are massive. People spend significant portions of their lives doing things they'd rather not do and to boot, the associated consumption patterns are changing the world's climate forever. You say that benefits outweigh all that because otherwise society wouldn't function. But you have no proof at all.
So I did not say any of those things (except that work is optional).
I don’t have a Ferrari, but the fact I don’t have something is not a punishment unless it’s freely given to everyone else (eg: liberty, oxygen, etc.).
You don’t have to starve if you don’t work. You are welcome to grow your own food, fish and hunt, and sustain yourself without working. However, if you want other people to do those things for you, you need to give them something in return.
Your drug dealer example is a good one because it highlights a problem with using the market to determine value. Ultimately, consumers determine the value of product or service, and as a drug dealer you may make a lot of money because consumers are willing to pay for the drugs you sell. I completely agree that value and societal net benefits are not always linked, and this is a flaw in the current system. But I have not seen a better model yet.
Your existence in and of itself does not cause slack. Your inability or unwillingness to sustain yourself does.
I think accusing me of being unable to see the big picture is a bit rude and unnecessary. I see a very different big picture to the one you seem to see though.
> People spend significant portions of their lives doing things they'd rather not do and to boot, the associated consumption patterns are changing the world's climate forever.
I completely agree, and have mentioned several times that I think consumerism is a major problem, and by reducing consumerism on an individual level, many people could reduce their own working hours. On a societal level, we would see major environmental benefits.
> You say that benefits outweigh all that because otherwise society wouldn't function. But you have no proof at all.
I shouldn’t need to prove a position that I’m not arguing. I am arguing that society currently works this way, and you are saying we should change it for this model where you don’t have to work, without any evidence that it would be successful. Where’s your proof? The fact that some people like to spend their free time saving lives or writing code?
> You don’t have to starve if you don’t work. You are welcome to grow your own food, fish and hunt, and sustain yourself without working.
You are repeating arguments I have already addressed.
A better model than equating money with value is workfree societies driven by voluntarism. I have given you many examples of those, so you cannot claim that you haven't seen better models. Indeed, there is ample evidence to suggest that the current model is not the best we can do but you seem unable to consider that evidence.
> Where’s your proof? The fact that some people like to spend their free time saving lives or writing code?
Yes? That those communities exist within a work-centric society strongly suggests that work is not required for humans to do useful tasks.
Again, you may choose to farm, hunt etc. for yourself, and choosing not to work would not therefore result in starvation.
> It's notable that the punishment you think is suitable for non-workers
You keep trying to frame my words in this way. I don’t think that anyone deserves a punishment.
> You are repeating arguments I have already addressed.
I haven’t seen anywhere you have addressed this point short of bluntly insisting that you should not have to, and others should do this for you.
> I have given you many examples of those, so you cannot claim that you haven't seen better models.
No, you have mentioned a couple of hobbies with no direct impact on the day-to-day life of most of society. No mention of why people would volunteer to become farmers, hunters, sewage workers, coal miners, refuse collectors, etc.
> Indeed, there is ample evidence to suggest that the current model is not the best we can do but you seem unable to consider that evidence.
I have repeatedly acknowledged problems in the current model. However, evidence of problems with the current model is not evidence of the absence of problems in a different one. At this point I’m starting to feel like you are being deliberately obtuse.
You keep bringing up "you can farm and hunt" as a cop-out to imply that work is optional. In most countries there is no wilderness with game to hunt in, nor is there unused agricultural land to establish farms on.
> I haven’t seen anywhere you have addressed this point short of bluntly insisting that you should not have to, and others should do this for you.
I addressed this point in these comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30107745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30101084 And again, if you can't keep from making this personal this discussion ends (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30112316).
> > I have given you many examples of those, so you cannot claim that you haven't seen better models.
> No, you have mentioned a couple of hobbies with no direct impact on the day-to-day life of most of society. No mention of why people would volunteer to become farmers, hunters, sewage workers, coal miners, refuse collectors, etc.
That's untrue. I have given you plenty of examples of tasks critical to society that people have executed voluntarily. Attempting to satisfy your demand for examples for every "unpleasant" task you can come up with would be a waste of my time and would not convince you either way.
Let's put it this way. What would it take to convince you that a workfree society is possible? What evidence do you need? If you can't formulate that, then perhaps it is because you don't want to be convinced?
> You keep bringing up "you can farm and hunt" as a cop-out to imply that work is optional. In most countries there is no wilderness with game to hunt in, nor is there unused agricultural land to establish farms on.
This is a fair point, and I’ll concede on that.
> Let's put it this way. What would it take to convince you that a workfree society is possible? What evidence do you need? If you can't formulate that, then perhaps it is because you don't want to be convinced?
What would it take to convince you you that you can survive on water and light alone? What evidence do you need? If you can't formulate that, then perhaps it is because you don't want to be convinced?
In all seriousness though, I believe that workfree (per your definition of work) societies can (and do) exist, but they cannot work on a macro scale. I believe this because in ‘workfree’ societies, members are assigned roles and complete tasks still, the only difference is that there’s no exchange of money.
This works because individuals are able to independently verify whether everyone in the community is pulling their weight. Without every individual being able to do that to every other individual, then you either a) simply have to trust people, which has historically tended to result in a few taking advantage of the many, or b) come up with some way of attesting work has been done, which is just another name for money.
By your definition any society which uses money cannot be a workfree society.
What corner? I'm spending my free time teaching you about work philosophies you haven't heard of. The personal attacks you keep repeating is that I'm arguing that others should work for me and that I shouldn't have to work. If you believe that is the point of my argument then I'm wasting my time.
> This is a fair point, and I’ll concede on that.
Even if wilderness and unused farmland existed in abundance taking advantage of it requires you to disconnect from society. It is not feasible to live that way.
> In all seriousness though, I believe that workfree (per your definition of work) societies can (and do) exist, but they cannot work on a macro scale.
Societies in general do not exist on macro scales. Nations are not societies, they are abstractions whose purpose is to organize work. Of course I can't tell how the world would look like if work became voluntary. I doubt global cooperation would be harder than it is today.
> This works because individuals are able to independently verify whether everyone in the community is pulling their weight.
You are still unable to see that the point of work freedom is that executing useful tasks is not "pulling weight" or "picking up slack" (an expression you used before). If you enjoy what you are doing what difference does it make whether someone is pulling weight or not?
> By your definition any society which uses money cannot be a workfree society.
Yes, kind of. If the distribution of money is uneven society is probably not workfree.
This is not a personal attack. It's literally what you have said. The following are direct quotes: "why should I have to work?"[0]. "we would then ask farmers to give us food in exchange for nothing at all? Sure."[1]
If you don't believe that the things you say are the points of your argument, then I agree one or both of us are wasting our time.
> Even if wilderness and unused farmland existed in abundance taking advantage of it requires you to disconnect from society. It is not feasible to live that way. > Societies in general do not exist on macro scales.
I don't understand. If you're saying there's no such thing as society on a macro scale, then what 'society' are you disconnecting from? Why would you not be able to have a society in the wilderness or on the farmland?
> If you enjoy what you are doing what difference does it make whether someone is pulling weight or not?
Absolutely not! Right up until you expect things which are the products of someone else's labour to be provided for you.
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30102349 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30128236
Perhaps that kind of utopia becomes more feasible when we become a society in which everything is completely automated, but we aren't anywhere close to that, so in the meantime, everybody should be expected to contribute.
Many free software developers work for organisations who have chosen to share their work freely because their revenue stream comes from support or hosting.
There are free software projects where hobbyists build things to scratch a personal itch, but most of these people are contributing their free time and have another job.
You keep repeating the point that ‘a massive number of jobs are not necessary’. Can you define what is ‘necessary work’ and how society can determine a priori what that work might be?
I dispute that. Many contributors to free software are doing so in exchange for money, either directly by being paid by their employer or allowing ‘sponsored features’, or indirectly by soliciting donations or through monetising their software through support contracts etc.
I agree there are hobbyists who do give their time without expecting any financial return, but the free software community does include a significant proportion of people who are paid directly or indirectly for the time they spend on any particular project.
Sure, in the same way that an Amnesty volunteer could be an undercover CIA agent paid by the government. That, however, is not the community's main mode of operation.
You mention Linus Torvalds in another comment, but did you know he has been paid to work on Linux since around 1997?
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/for-50-percent-of-devel...
Regardless, the amount of companies involved in free software could be evidence of the superiority of voluntarism over "workism" for complex human systems.
I think the statistic that half as many commits are on weekend days is particularly interesting, because people who are really doing it for free would likely contribute MORE outside their working hours.
Do you have anything more concrete?
If no one will do that work at a wage that the market will bear, then that job goes away.
And from other comments it appears you only believe work happens when there is An exchange of money. Raising a kid is the hardest job and work that I’ve ever done. I don’t get paid money for that…
Volunteers still “work”. The fact that they are volunteering shows they could be paid for their time and effort, but instead are doing it for free. But it’s not like they weren’t adding value as soon as the exchange of money is removed.
This is a circular argument, isn't it? Why is the work necessary? Because society pays for it. Why does society pay for it? Because the work is necessary.
I reject it. Money != value.
> Raising a kid is the hardest job and work that I’ve ever done. I don’t get paid money for that…
That's a good example of a task that is valuable (in the real sense) but not work (since it is voluntary). Here is how I define "work": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30127704
But the funny part is, they didn't even do that. The questions asked pretty much amounted to "What are your aspirations?" and "What do you do for a living?" And when the answers to that are "I want to teach Philosophy" and "I sleep on the job that I work 20 hours a week while I punish dogs by refusing them water"[1] then maybe you shouldn't be speaking like what you are doing is too much work.
She could have mentioned the growing wealth inequality, the need for unions, the causes behind the "great resignation", the shifting attitudes of not taking bullshit, but instead she had to say how "Laziness is a virtue!" as if anybody ever is going to agree with that. I would say it's a strawman of the typical reddit moderator (who does it for free, by the way), but if a strawman is made of flesh and blood, is it really a strawman anymore?
Who were the mods at /r/antiwork kidding. I guess this is the egotistical delusion that happens when your head mod is a self admitted rapist.[2]
[1]https://i.imgur.com/XsHDFFN.jpg [2]https://i.redd.it/9zbv77ga04e81.png
Call it like it is. It's insanely rapey. I have no remorse for people who do things like this, and then try to play the victim.
So it's both right: Fox News asked for her and she was selected/elected by the mod team.
I haven't seen those past interviews, but if she behaved like that in the past, could it be that requesting her was the brunt of Fox' strategy?
Like, they might have known she would make a fool of herself (and the movement) without them even needing to trip her up with loaded questions.
Today people are fetishizing this “neurodivergent” psychosis and it’s downright weird. This person could absolutely sit still if they every bothered to have priorities in their life.
I refuse to respect this weird trend.
1. Who are you to immediately assume that they are lying, as if that's the best explanation? Not every single person who has autism has the ability to completely repress everything about it. To assume otherwise is nothing short of ableism - and I'm not using that word lightly. I absolutely do get the concern though - words DO need meaning.
2. You say "Today people are fetishizing this neurodivergent psychosis" as if this is a recent trend. It's not. At all. Tuberculosis was a disease that was romanticized in the early 19th century, and the obsession with thin & pale bodies in culture is theorized to have originated from this. I'm not gonna claim to be an expert to this however, so if someone reading this knows more about this subject than I do then please chime in.
The mod of the sub said they have autism, so that is not what the person you’re replying to did.
Failing at an action you chose to engage in and then to excuse it by supposed psychological issues is not really what any half-decent person does.
Going out on a limb: Any mildly autistic person aware of their issues takes action to avoid such painful situations. So I would also doubt there is an actual diagnosis and she is just looking for an excuse to not feel/be made responsible for the harm she caused this entire movement.
Essentially the issue here is that the subreddit started years ago not as a discussion of worker rights reforms, but of people wanting to figure out how to work as little as possible, period. The meaning was literally on the tin. As the pandemic wore on redditors joined the sub to complain about their jobs, their burnout, and advocate for worker rights and reforms. But a look at the sub's about section or the sub's mods made it clear those posts weren't what the sub was originally about. And all it took was an interview with the longest standing mod to make that clear.
Now the sub is private, and /r/WorkReform will hopefully actually stand for something.
That said, this appears to be a mod of a subreddit, not the leader of a movement.
You seem to have watched a different interview than I did. I don't recall seeing the interviewer ask about what else they did with their time off. I saw the interviewer accuse the person of being lazy and ask if they had higher career aspirations.
> And it turned out that this individual has no answer, which likely means that the answer is "wasting"
I have no idea how hard it is to be the starting mod of a 1.4 million person subreddit, but I guess it requires some amount of work.
> you are a parasite on society,
I don't even understand what that means.
What else are worker rights in the 2020s? We only have one life, why not enjoy it like the men in suits?
Anyone expecting even a basic level of anything without being willing to contribute at all is not demonstrating good behaviour within society.
Philosophically, why is that? Second question, what should we do about trust fund babies who never contribute anything other than a demand for yachts?
I believe we have enough useless productivity enhancers that really lack perspective.
Separately, I'm not sure who you are referring to by "the men in suits" but the large majority of men in suits I know (lawyers, accountants, finance professionals) work crazy hours.
These specific anti-work people may literally be just lazy, but by pushing that agenda, they are naturally advocating for workers' rights. It doesn't actually matter what their motivations (or lacks thereof) are; Only the rights matter.
Similarily, with Universal Basic Income you will surely get some people who simply engage in indefinite hedonism, but it is absolutely worth it for the effects of UBI on everybody else.
Showing a person who opposes work in current mainstream culture will only end up with mixture of laughter, indignation and branding him as lazy.
It's very similar to the reaction you'd get few decades ago if you showed a black man who thinks he's people.
Evereybody in our culture was brainwashed with supposed virtues of being compelled to work. Noble struggle of providing.
All while 99% of our goods are made by machines and chemistry, with rich fully allowed to capture as much of the value produced by those machines and processes as they can.
All of that is just a modern version of feudalism. Better than any earlier system (same way feudalism was for its time) but still crap.
In the future anti-work in the style "I don't care, fu, where's my robot that covers all the work I don't freely choose to do" will be a mainstream view. And working people of today will just be a bunch of grumpy boomers lamenting that youngsters have no ethics.
I'm 42 but I know where the wind blows.
Maybe someday. This was one of the common optimistic promises of the space age (along with "power too cheap to meter") that the 70s smothered like a wet blanket.
It won't happen until people demand it.
Still, the judgement will come anyway, even if you believe being a dog walker is much better than being a slimy Fox News anchor.
The anti-work movement is goodin the sense that it is waking people up to spending all their lives working for terrible bosses and companies. Should peoples lives be hard just so we can make other rich people richer? So they can live in giant houses, by the sea? So they can own multiple vehicles and fly first class everywhere? So they can play golf at fancy clubs when they want?
Why should a worker for a massive e-commerce company not be able to use the toilet? Just so the CEO can go to space as a hobby? FFS.
It didn't wake anyone up to anything - everyone except perhaps the entitled rich has been perfectly aware of this ever since the days of the Industrial Revolution. Go watch Metropolis, made in 1927, where the plight of the working class is illustrated as oppressed factory workers literally being thrown into the furnace mouth of Moloch.
People don't put up with work because they're blind to its nature, they put up with work because they have no alternative in a purely capitalist system in which survival can only be rented by the labor class, not owned. But what is the anti-work movement's answer to this? Just don't work? That's not feasible for most people.
It's not just about not working. It's about entrepreneurship, working for better companies, smaller companies/startups. It's about not getting so far in debt that you're a slave to a megacorp because you need to pay it off.
It's about not over working and burning out.
At it's core (the defensible part) anti-work is an American labour/union movement, reacting to the exploitation of workers due to flimsy labour law (think Amazon workers).
But the term anti-work is so emotive against the movement, that is just becomes indefensible. So much that the subreddit itself is no longer a single issue movement.
It starts with negativity, it then attracts more as it goes along. The angriest, most radical ones are promoted to become leaders. Soon the negativity spills into internal fights - “ you are not angry enough, not one of us, we’re banning you!” etc.
Fox contacted to the mods and asked specifically to talk with this person, and the mods accepted this instead of other due to having some experience in other media. All of this without asking the users if they agree with that.
The Fox interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yUMIFYBMnc
After the Fox interview happened, practically the whole subreddit were upset and disappointed. People asked why this happened in this way, why they didn't prepare a lot more this kind of event, and practically they got an "it is what it is", with a bit of authoritarian smell because the mods took this personally.
People really get even more mad about this, created other subreddits, and created threads in r/antiwork saying things like "mods are mods, not leaders or content creators, and they shouldn't influence the whole sub" and like like "we need new mods".
Mods took that personally, banned a lot of people, removed a lot of comments, more people were mad about this, and even attacked personally the person who spoke in Fox, until they had to close the sub.
- Sources:
https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/sdesxw/mega...
https://old.reddit.com/r/ABoringDystopia/comments/sdjc4b/the...
- What I think we should learn about this:
Fox wanted to interview a specific mod because they knew that using a person who probably would give a bad public image they can show a bad image of the sub. And not only Fox, but every media who have a opposite idea or ideology to yours.
Mods weren't clever enough to ask the people if they wanted or not to be in Fox, who should be the spokesperson, and what thing they wanted defend, report, or ask for. They also needed to make to the spokesperson a guide about what appearance (not only physical) give and what subjects needs to talk.
The spokesperson never should talk about their personal life. That person is representing a group of people, not only one.
You can stop individual people, but not a common idea.
This is gonna be used for ever to teach people what not to do in an interview for a lot of time.
They did ask the subreddit. It voted that no one should go on Fox.
If everything had gone well, they would get a swarm of new users to the sub-reddit, people who thought this was a bad idea would dominate the discussion for a few days, but when the dust settled, the subreddit would be much better off for it.
The problem here is that the person being interviewed has a shady past. They have boasted about sleeping on the job, have had multiple allegations of sexual assault and other controversies, which people brought up all the time, which is the reason they had to go private.
https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/01/16/37...
It’s not the Illuminati, it’s that no one looks.
Bosses have a way of deflating wages by demanding more hours and effort, too.
The market is like a programming design pattern; kind of a hand wavy concept to fuel discourse. It’s still easily corrupted biology in charge. Repeating the same old semantics is keeping you from seeing the corruption already there.
That's like saying house prices in San Francisco are set by how much people are willing to pay. It's true but hides the real problem which is housing is unaffordable for many in that area.
They literally are.
> It's true but hides the real problem which is housing is unaffordable for many in that area.
Area has finite amount of estate. The only "solution" is to create ghettos of human hives which lead to classes of problems on their own.
> The only "solution" is to create ghettos of human hives which lead to classes of problems on their own.
As a general rule, one can assume that anybody who refers to humans as an infestation or their homes as hives is not a good person. Have the day you deserve.
Anything concrete to say, aside from weak ad-hominem?
I grew up in post-USSR, I'm pretty sure I know much more about human hives than you do. And I never said anything about infestation. Every family should have their own home.
There's a list of reasonable things they haven't tried yet.
The best thing for most people to realise is that "life's not fair, deal with it".
Personally, whatever little I have is probably 1/3 luck, 1/3 hard work, 1/3 good decision making. I've never inherited a single $1, don't have a CEO relative to hire me, etc... but what good would it do to blame the world for any of that? Life _isn't_ always fair, whatever.
No matter who you talk to, everyone will have their hardships, but complaining about it rarely makes things change for the better. I'm not saying one shouldn't advocate for change or try to change a broken system, but for your situation to improve, often the only thing you can do is just try harder and hope for a little luck.
I support the "work reform, unionize, know what you're worth" camp of this "antiwork" crowd, I 100% agree that workers should be more open about wages, try to organise and show solidarity... I'm a salaried worker myself and my quality of life is very much correlated to that of the AVG worker. That doesn't mean I believe that I can fix the world and all of its ills, nor do I care to.
edit: typo
Sidenote: it is also worth to actually read Smith (especially books 2+3 of the wealth of nations) to understand that rather than a believer in an invisible hand he was deeply critical of laissez-faire capitalism and saw a need for the state to intervene and manage its excesses and abuses.
I have never been to that subreddit, what's the regular content about?