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

It's all in the moderators. They could delete meme posts or even filter posts and have some guidelines they stick to. Also, the “big” groups are almost all owned by the same cabal of 10-20 “super-moderators” that do it only for name recognition. I got pitched out of like 5 subreddits because I posted 1 comment in an anti-vaxxer sub to rebuke an obviously wrong anti-vaxxer rant. They didn't care, and after I cooled off I didn't care either when I realized those subs were all garbage anyway. I also sent them all strongly worded and curse filled responses to the most prominent “super-moderators” to let them know they are all garbage for blanket bans. One of them tried to get me pitched off Reddit and a Reddit employee that I know said the people over at Reddit couldn't care less about what moderator opinions are, and they don't really have any power outside their subs.

Most anarchist philosophy starts from the idea that "general populace" is a bad idea to begin with. People should be living in small, hyper-independent communities. They sidestep the scalability question by asserting that a community of a few hundred (or even a few thousand) is already unnatural.

(Not a philosophy I agree with, but one that I observe as pretty cornerstone).

Let people work on whatever they want.

People can still get jobs if they want. In fact, most people probably still will. Otherwise nobody would be working in countries where welfare isn't capped, which obviously isn't the case.

Also just think back to all the rich trust fund kids and financially independent people you know (eg. multimillionaires). What percentage of them don't work anymore? In my experience, most continue to work even though they could just live off of their savings/investments. That's because they are free to work on what they themselves enjoy, rather than simply having to sell their labor to make ends meet.

I wish everyone had that freedom. If it were not possible, then at the least it should be a goal we strive towards.

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.

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

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

> government prints money and gives it away for free

In some circumstances this is actually a good idea. One core idea of Modern Monetary Theory is that printing money is only inflationary when the economy is at capacity.

So giving money to people that can't or won't work actually drives growth because they can spend.

If you moralize about economics or think MMT is wrong, this sounds like a horrible idea. If you only care about results, then it's a great idea.

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

I'm not a committed supporter of UBI, so my opinion should be taken with a grain of salt (or more) but I assume the whole point is to promote wealth redistribution. Not print money. So you give everyone some amount, say 12K/year, and then support it with taxes.

It sounds infeasible with the current budget, because of course it is. But modeling the final result isn't that simple I'd guess. More money into the circle, so the circle gets bigger, etc. So while it'd be easy to shoot it down using a single iteration of the circle, I'd like to see someone do a longer term simulation. I'm sure they have, I just haven't seen it.

> nobody has to work

That's generally not the expectation. The expectation is that there's more than enough wealth to allow for everyone to have a baseline of income to meet their most basic needs. You want to buy a house, buy a car, travel, eat at fancy restaurants, buy expensive things, you still have to work. But if you want to quit your job and find another one you don't need to fear starvation or eviction because you are without income for a few months.

It's the same logic as preventative medicine. Instead of dishing out money for surgery you can catch problems earlier when they are cheaper to fix.

It is unfeasible. The reason money works is because it is an abstraction for someone's production of value that is way easier than bartering for everything. physical labor, skilled labor, educated thinking, management, knowledge transfer... anything that is valuable to someone else.

If you just pay people to sit on their asses, many of them are just going to sit on their asses, creating nothing, simply consuming resources. The host (civilized society) cannot survive when everyone is a leech.

When more work is automated the same amount of work is completed with less humans doing it. Currently that means that normal people make less money, but it doesn't have to be that way. Wealth distribution could remain the same as more things are automated. A lot of people believe we passed the point where the country makes enough money from a small enough number of people that they could re-distribute it as it used to be.

A lot of people also believe that a huge percentage of society is engaging in "bullshit" jobs because there isn't enough real work that needs to be done.

You cut most of our bureaucratic social safety net (food stamps, disability, social security, etc) and replace it with a system where everyone gets enough for the bare basics. If you were smart, you'd fund it with a carbon tax.

In all honesty I don't see UBI becoming a thing until we start automating ourselves into unemployment. People say this would increase inflation. Maybe. Let's trial it with 1% of the population and find out.

The ideal way would be to pass a national Land Value Tax, and use the proceeds to fund UBI. The country has plenty of money, but it's all accumulating to landlords. An LVT is the most effective way to both moderate the excesses of the wealthy and continuously fund a social safety net. It would also let you eliminate most other forms of social safety and taxation, since Land/Natural Resources are the greatest stores of value.

Universal basic income is not "anti-work", it's pro-work. The GP seems a bit confused. The simplest way of putting it is that everyone gets a "baseline" subsidy that's at best just enough to live a minimally dignified life. But working to earn a supplemental income can never leave you worse off. And even when this can be described as "anti-forced" work, that's because having such a safe baseline gives you the flexibility of trying for a better fit. It's something everyone would want for themselves.

I think that many yearn for an idealized life in a small, relatively isolated community, low tech and free of fiat currency. They try to imagine workarounds for the fact that it's not actually currently possible in reality.

UBI, anarchism, antiwork and other radical ideas are proposed patches to the cold and lonely reality of modern metropolitan life. They would probably not work, but they are not really the point. The point is to imagine some escape from the current crushing system.

One way to think about it: we already have a basic income in the US.

Nobody starves to death in the US. Nobody is denied medical care in the emergency room. In many places (though not everywhere), there are shelters where a person can sleep inside. There are food stamps and a patchwork of welfare programs.

However meager they may seem, things like this amount to a form of universal basic income. Does it prevent people from working?

In some cases, you could say it does--there are populations in every city that survive off this safety net, though they don't live well.

But in most cases, it doesn't prevent people from working. The vast majority of people are willing to work for a better life than what the US "basic income" can provide.

What makes you think this would be any less true if the basic income was, say, $30k per year instead of whatever the equivalent is now to provide the meager safety net we have?

It's certainly possible to survive on a $30k basic income in many places in the US, but for most, it won't be an easy or especially pleasant life. Most people will want better.

With a basic income that's a bit more substantial (and has no strings or stigma attached), people will have more freedom to make choices that can truly improve their circumstances, rather than being stuck on a treadmill of barely making ends meet with no space to come up for air and consider education or career changes.

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

I grew up around a lot of poor people. One issue in the US is healthcare. If you make <13k (or whatever your state limit is) you dont qualify for government healthcare. Also, 13k is too little to actually purchase private healthcare, so there is a "donut hole" where it makes sense not to work below a certain wage since you get less with income than with no income.

The solution here is obvious to me -- if you provide some of the benefits without means-testing (i.e., the "U" in "UBI") then people are incentivized to work even bits without risking losting healthcare/foodstamps.

Another example was in college -- if you earned even a bit of money, your student aid often went down commensurately. At that point, why would you work? You were no better off unless you could make a LOT of money. I realize this has changed over the past 20yrs.

Also, as someone who's gone thru this -- this is a very delicate process. You do one thing wrong, and you're in bureaucratic hell for months without benefits. The "safe" thing to do is to earn nothing -- God forbid you earn a thousand here or there and lose medical care. The whole system of means-testing makes no sense. It seems to be more a way to create jobs for bureaucrats.

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

Nobody HAS to work, correct. If they only want to survive, they don't need to work. Everyone gets money for food, water, shelter and education; no questions asked.

If you want an iPhone or eat something nice, you should probably get some money though.

Universal basic income isn't much usually, it's enough to survive, enough for a livable life.

That's paid by taxes of the majority of people that will still work, because people usually want more than just to survive, so they'll work. They'll just not work at Starbucks for 10 years to pay their student loan, they'll find a job that they like, a job with meaning.

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.

It is definitely outside the box. But think of it like this:

For the last few hundred years, human productivity has vastly increased. Thanks to technological progress, farming has gone from what the bulk of people do to a niche activity that most see only driving by.

Who benefits most from the productivity increases? The rich. We are approaching gilded-age levels of inequality, while the wage for most workers is stagnant. What if instead of concentrating that wealth on a few people who won the "ovarian lottery" [1] we split the dividends of our ancestors' achievements among everybody?

This isn't totally ridiculous. For example, Alaska has spent decade giving each resident about $1000/year from a fund built up with oil revenues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund

So imagine a program like that but bigger. Maybe a poverty-level income for each person, like $1000/month. What would happen? Some people wouldn't work. But that's nothing unusual; only 63% of people in the US work right now. (And really, how many people are doing bullshit jobs that don't add much to the economy?) Others would keep working because they wanted more money, or just because they like working. (Personally, I'm in that last group.)

Could this work? Personally, I'm skeptical but curious. But it's definitely not impossible.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/16/warren-buffett-says-being-a-...

It seems like those who don't want their old jobs back, don't want to work for the wages offered in places like sandwich shops, or think they're above a certain class of work prove this out. The "everyone really wants to work" idea seems pretty squarely in the land of myth, at least here in California.

Someone has to wash dishes, dig ditches, empty bedpans, make sandwiches, etc. Further, the sandwich shop which employs family members etc. and doesn't pay an unskilled laborer $30/hour will crush the ones that do. Multiple businesses have demonstrated that virtue alone doesn't make overpriced goods sustainable in the long term. And nobody seems to want to examine the basic math behind adding $10 per hour to everyone's hourly wage.

So the "where the money comes from" part is a separate discussion (maybe another thread?), but I'll try to answer "how it (could) work".

So, let's say there's some amount X that is enough for a person to afford housing, food, reasonable transport etc. It's as simple as saying "everyone gets this amount now, rich or poor".

For a rich person, it'll be a drop in the bucket, but for a poor person it could mean the economic freedom to quit a bad job. A few quick points around this:

* inflation. People keep worrying about this. Wages have stagnated since the 70s, and whenever raising minimum wage is mentioned, people say it will cause inflation. My counter-question is, how have we stagnated wages and still have inflation as high as it is now? It kinda feels like inflation isn't a result of growing wages but tied to economic growth in general. If inflation will just happen as part of economic growth, why not cut poor people in on the pie a little bit? (I know why, I'm asking rhetorically)

* welfare. People think we're doing something like this already with welfare, except welfare comes with all kinds of random classist baggage. Should the person get welfare if they, say, try to buy some 'luxury' item that's not strictly needed to live but might give them a small hint of joy in an otherwise tough situation? This version just takes away the restrictions and qualifying conditions by saying everyone just qualifies.

* no one working. Of course people would still work. It's just they wouldn't be forced to do so under pain of homelessness or starvation. Imagine saying "I quit" and still getting your base needs met. What kind of working conditions would people have to give you to keep you wanting to work? What kind of job satisfaction would need to become the norm?

I realize many of these don't apply to many of the people in this forum, but it can make a huge difference in industries like food service, where working conditions and perks are... a bit different from tech.

The core observations of the universal basic income drive are that:

a) The amount of actual human labor required in the developed world to maintain an acceptable standard of living for everyone in the society is decreasing (with no end in sight),

b) Much of the profit and control of that decreasing cost of providing for the society is concentrating in the hands of a very small number of extraordinarily wealthy people

c) The process you noted:

> The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work?

... is already how things work, we just dress it up in a byzantine (and expensive!) welfare/social insurance/corporate bailout system and the proliferation of "jobs" that provide no meaningful value to society [0].

If a system could be created that replaces the indirect spending with direct spending, the people who need to be could still be motivated to do the societally valuable jobs (because people want more things still!), and the people who want to do things that are prosocial but not well-remunerated by the capitalist system (arts, education/research, activism/humanitarianism/social work [because there will assuredly still be problems]) will be more able to do so.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

Read this article and the related studies: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/19/21112570/univer...

Not absurd at all and it doesn't need to be framed as a handout either.

The US should have a single land tax and every American should be paid a citizen's dividend out of that. A "UBI" easily emerges from this fair and rational tax system.

Economists across the political spectrum have advocated a single land tax. How we would force politicians to enact it is left as an exercise for the reader.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_tax

I would prefer to fund it via a land value tax, which is seen as the most efficient form of taxation due to having no deadweight loss.

Like the other commenter said, the concept of a UBI is already practically the reality in countries with strong welfare states where no one technically needs to work. We just disguise it with all this means-testing because as a society we're still devoted to this pro-work capitalist grind mental model of everyone needing to make a buck to justify their existence.

ubi is ultimately about control: continue to extract wealth upwards and everyone who's left gets locked onto the money-printing teat (so that taxes don't even need to rise for said wealthy). it has its own logic: the already powerful and wealthy get to ossify socioeconomic stratification, creating a permanent gentry class. we should be fighting this dystopian gambit at every turn (note that dynamism is what makes political economies great, not stagnation).

note that what we should instead be doing is pushing for more meaningful work up and down the economy.

UBI is added on top of work so work will always mean you're better off.

Would you give up your job just to spend all day doing nothing, or would you end up doing something productive?

If you had infinite money, would you do nothing?

What do uber rich people do all day? Why do they work?

Pool together all ( or most ) social benefits in one single payment to get some economy of scale.( removing the need to have specific admin XYZ to distribute XYZ benefits )

I live in the US, and from what I understand you guys have little to no benefits.

But in place where it does exists, similar sums are already being spend between unemployment, rent assistance, affordable healthcare and the likes.

To give you a idea the RSA in France is around 400€ / month. That’s pretty much a given if you do some paperwork )

A transition to UBI would mean to consolidate it to reach higher level.

And make it non conditional.

That’s a shift for sure.

>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

The comments here at the time of my writing don't provide a good explanation of it. There are practical UBI proposals out there that are revenue neutral for various countries that would largely replace income transfers of the existing social safety net, better go look them up. (There is no fundamental reason it needs to be RN but it's a good starting point to understand why it doesn't intrinsically mean more funding).

It's not a panacea, generally it can make current recipients of means tested transfers well off in exchange for eliminating some problems associated with means tested programs.

> The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work?

Counter question: assuming there's no UBI, and automation eats the world - Amazon Warehouses and delivery are 99% automated, as are Walmart and MacDonalds - nobody can work[1]. Corporations are still paying close to 0% taxes. How exactly is this supposed to work?

Except a few in repairs and automation, and a handful of industries less amenable to robots.

TIL, neat, thank you.

There are already many countries with generous welfare states where one does not have to work and could theoretically live off the government, yet they manage just fine.

Even if universal basic income was a pipe dream (which I vehemently disagree with, and again point to the examples above as evidence that not needing to work does not lead to societal collapse), I don't see why enabling everyone the freedom to work on whatever they want should not be a goal.

If it were up to me, taxes would be funded via land value tax (commonly referred to as the fairest and most efficient tax since there's no deadweight loss), and the proceeds would be distributed uniformly to the population as a citizen's dividend.

> if you give everyone a free $10 everything becomes $10 devalued.

Inflation happens, but the poor benefit much more, as their gains from UBI(as a percentage of their existing income) are more than the loss through inflation.

For rich people, the loss can be more, but this is how inequality is reduced.

I'm 31, have a well-paying job, and enough assets to be able to retire in a third world country if I wanted to (I'm nomadic so that's not as far-fetched as it sounds), yet I still support a universal basic income. I have friends way richer than me who definitely don't need to work who also support a UBI. I guess we're not as selfish as the last generation?

Even if one were to not go as far as to support a universal basic income, I don't see why it's not a goal worth striving towards if we can afford it, or at least finding a happy medium. For example I envy that higher education in Europe is free, and in countries like Denmark the government will even pay college students a "basic income" to cover their living expenses (was listening to a podcast the other day where a famous Danish entrepreneur said he used that to help bootstrap his first businesses). Also in countries like Denmark and Germany it's normal for high school graduates to take a year off and travel the world, something extremely rare in the U.S.

UBI for me is the equivalent of VC funding for all. Maybe most won't give much back, but all it takes for 1% building the next innovations for that to be a worthy investment (not that I think the humans should be reduced to profit calculators, and value goes beyond profit)

I've traveled to 43+ countries including living in third world ones. Honestly I don't think life in the west is that much different from the western ones to the point where they're disgruntled at the west or really missing out. Not everyone cares about the rat race and hedonist treadmill.

I was going to say the same thing. Let's say your toilet breaks, who's going to come over and fix it? You're not going to automate a plumber in the next 50 years...

It's more about class. The 1% are absorbing almost all the new wealth created and the rest of us get breadcrumbs and they -own- most of the government with occasional concessions lest the rabble rise up and overthrow them like in almost all civilizations where the powers that be eventually went to far. No one thinks we have robots that can replace all physical labor, low wage jobs. I think the 99% occupy wallstreet was headed in the right direction and that the powers that be have been using the media to polarize us all with poltical, racial, and political differences and keep us concentrating on our differences rather than our common enemy and the most valuable prize, self determination.

I personally think hacker news hasn’t fallen victim as much mainly because it’s so small in comparison.

I feel like once any community starts growing faster than a certain rate, its core focus inevitably dilutes because there are not enough older members to impress the culture of the community onto newer members.

I'm not sure that real names would help much. Look at LinkedIn. Lots of personal details in each person's profile, yet it is still devolving into Facebook level low quality content.

It wouldn't, but I'm not sure that would happen (everyone deciding not to work). Especially if UBI is only enough to live ~reasonably comfortably. I'd imagine a wide spectrum of people, some of which are fine with that level of income and don't really work much for money at all, some people who work part time, and others that keep working because they enjoy it/really want more money.

It feels TBD how stable something like this would be, but feels fundamentally workable. I think you could at the least tune the amount of the UBI until it does become stable; I don't think the only stable value would be $0.

> How does UBI work if everyone just decided not to work anymore?

If too many (which with any reasonable near-future level of productive capacity, and any level of UBI, is a lot short of “everyone”) people don't work with fixed nominal or dedicated-revenue-stream-based UBI, inflation erodes the value of UBI decreasing the lifestyle sustainable on UBI alone until enough fewer people opt out of work to stabilize things.

With inflation-indexed UBI you get a positive feedback UBI -> price feedback loop, so don't do UBI that way.

But mostly “what happens if too many people don’t work” is irrelevant to real-world UBI proposals: these tend to target a poverty-level income, replace existing means-tested poverty-support programs, and remove barriers to outside income that come with existing means-tested programs.

As such, they structurally incentivize more people choosing to work than under the status quo system (and a move from under-the-table to above-board work.)

You inevitably have to pay taxes in a good 95% of the land, and you don't get to choose which plot of land you're born on. That's the kicker that prevents this "truly sustainable" life you propose.

> There are tons of jobs no one wants to do, but everyone needs done.

If these jobs truly are necessary, then wages would rise to the point where people would be attracted to do them. If truck driving paid as much as FAANG software engineering, I assure you there'd be no shortage of truck drivers (even if it required grinding a trucker Leetcode).

Higher wages further incentivize automation, or alternative means of coping. Truck driving for example will most definitely be automated within the next decade or two. If chickens became so expensive, then more people would opt for vegetables and subsistence farming (actually I heard it's feasible to have a pet chicken in one's apartment. There's your morning eggs).

Your comment is 202 non space characters :) But I like your point nevertheless!

Hm? Would you mind expanding on why and how you feel my piece is hyperpartisan? I'm neither a leftist nor particularly sympathetic to them; my own economic preferences usually lie pretty firmly in the neoliberal camp. Your comment seems to be calling my piece a "communist diatribe", and I'm struggling to see where you got that impression.

You could ask the same about Fox - which is hardly ground zero for sanity itself.

Does it represent a movement, or a TV channel?

If it's a movement, by what process was it elected?

Point being I doubt anyone at Fox was unhappy with how the Doreen interview turned out.

Did they ask to interview anyone else from the sub?

All this really does is highlight the difference between online opinionation - always easy - and effective activism. The latter is much harder and absolutely needs informed - ideally effective and professional - handling of public presentation and messaging.

Representation is really at the heart of it. What the article left out was that Doreen was asked by mods and by the community(by poll) not to participate in the interview. She did it anyway.

The broader social epistemic question of "what makes someone a representative?" or "How do people gain the social status: representative?" is the most interesting part of this. Reddit itself plays a role in the construction of representative status by visually framing mods in the sidebar under the subreddit rules section leading people to mentally label both as the rules and rule-makers of the space. There are examples of mods in other subreddits also being representatives, making it natural to apply that syllogistically and generally to all Reddit communities.

If a mod created the sub, and actively participates, but is disavowed as a representative, are they still a representative? Would this have changed if the interview had gone well? How does representation work when communities disagree? Antiwork members don't see Doreen as a representative, but individuals outside of antiwork do. Does that make her a representative or not? It's fascinating that what is obvious to one person is a tremendous number of questions to another.

It’s in paragraph five, stated very very clearly.

Once you eat the cake, you can no longer possess it

EDIT:

Let me make it more clear, as English may not be your first language, if you're asking this question in truth (I sometimes miss sarcasm online, sorry).

Cakes can be beautiful things which people (of a certain time period, especially) wanted to show off as a sign of their wealth, as refined sugar was expensive. Once it was eaten, you could no longer display such wasteful extravagance.

it's an idiom that's confusing because of how "have ... and" can imply both a sequence of events and simultaneous events.

You can either eat your cake or have your cake. You cannot eat your cake, and then also have it too.

More on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_can%27t_have_your_cake_and...

Well then you don't have it anymore ;)

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".

> It's deeply disingenuous to suggest that the work reform principles of the subreddit are moot because a mod started the original subreddit as a protest against work.

This point might stand better using a word other than "principle," from principium (beginning), from princeps (initiator).

TIL, I didn't know that reddit allowed mods to opt-out of /r/all.

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.

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.

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 are dying and turning on each other.

It's possible, but I don't consider it plausible at my current level of understanding.

My null hypothesis is that there are some really loud people on the internet who like to talk loudly about their unpopular ideas. And they're unaware of how deeply unpopular those ideas are until their little corner of the internet suddenly gets mainstream public attention.

Perhaps, if you consider, there is genuine feeling of resentment among a large portion of the population trying to survive, and that resentment stems from actual material conditions in the labor market. And a community focused on that could garner actual popularity?

How did the foreign nation state convince reddit to put /r/antiwork in /r/all?

"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 approach where we spend a lot less on direct policing, and redeploy a lot of those resources to fight crime in other ways.

The developed countries that spend more or similar amounts tend to do it by spending on more highly trained officers than we do.

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 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.

I’m thinking the latter as it seems so crazy to use a specific word and then argue against its understood meaning. Why would I want to bother with that confusion when I could just call it “reform police” or whatever.

Gaslighting is very mainstream and seems so commonplace in even banal, insubstantial things like debating whether “defund police” means to remove funding from the police or something else.

I think the article articulates the counterpoint. Most movements start with radicals. A milder slogan wouldn't have gotten traction with the radicals, who actually do want to abolish the police. If the radicals weren't protesting, the mainstream wouldn't have taken notice and come on board. This leads to a conflict of views within the protesters and ultimately the revision of the slogan definition

You could say literally the same thing about any political slogan. For example, please explain "government accountability" or "serve the people"? That literally could be anything. Another example, "Medicare for All", pretty straight forward, but what does it look like as a policy?

https://www.propublica.org/article/medicare-for-all-is-not-m...

Or "Make American Great Again" or "Build Back Better". Any slogan can be questioned. IMO, "Defund the Police" is almost the most straightforward political slogan I can think of and if you Google it, near the top result is a website explaining exactly what it means.

https://defundthepolice.org/

The problem with a lot of people who were questioning "Defund the Police" in my experience is that they would go to BLM protests but then be much more moderate and not actually interested in what the protests meant or what defunding the police actually means; the slogan wasn't unclear, it was wanting to look like you cared but not actually doing the work to convince yourself or learn more.

These terrible slogans are the product of social media. A good slogan is only going to get juice from one side. A slogan that is supremely dunkable by one side yet scratches the itch on the other is going to surface like curds in spoiled milk.

Only because opponents of it deliberately misinterpreted it.

Defund the police means defunding the police. Over half of all city taxes go to funding the police forces, who do little to no good for the community with the money they're given. Buying more tanks and assault weapons and fancy cars and employing people who live in big macmansions in the suburbs isn't helping us.

Concervatives act like the word "defund" means the same as "abolish" when talking about the police, but then are happy to talk about defunding education, or defunding planned parenthood, or defunding medicare, defunding social security, defunding sanctuary cities, etc fully expecting their base to understand that they don't mean "abolish".

Well, not really. While it isn't necessarily a mainstream view, many people do believe that the police in the United States function an unaccountable armed militia/gang, killing at will, and paid for by the public. Hence, the view that the public should defund the police.

Another facet of the same view is that the police are assumed to be inherently so far gone and corrupt that reform is not possible, and to assume that it is is futile.

It's crazy.

"Defund the police!"

"Do you mean 'defund the police'?"

"Of course not!"

A lot of the mini-tanks, assault weapons and SWAT gear is based on how the police are funded, not necessarily the amount of funding they have.

The amount of funding a police department has is determined at the beginning of the fiscal year and by how much was spent by the previous year, including any shortfalls or excesses in budgetary spending. City councils and Mayors/DA's are always looking to trim the police budget (believe it or not), so a lot of the time, the department will take any excess budget they have at the end of the year and spend it on military auction items (a whole other mess), in order to keep their budget and show that they've been able to stretch their budget as far as they can and get the most value for their dollar (I read a very good article about it like 2 years ago, or so and can't find it). But departments do this so they don't lose their future budgets, "just in case" they need to hire future officers, need more "real" equipment, etc. etc.

This has lead to the increase in militarization of the police and the militarization of the tactics of the police as military personnel are already familiar with the equipment. There has been no same said impetus to increase nonviolent intervention tactics on an ever increasingly divisive nation, who's "news" cycle and social networks actively work to stoke division and tension as it feeds interaction, which provides more eyes on advertisement (sorry, I went down a rabbithole in the end, there).

It would be better, well it would be a start, to have quarterly budget reviews and performance reviews tied to the needs of the community and training. But, we all know that isn't how politics works =(

> Actually defund the police means exactly what it says.

…to you. Not everyone agrees and the simple fact that this discussion is taking place and you are defending this slogan would seem to render this purported clarity moot.

Is it really surprising that all kinds of different people are a part of a political movement? You would find this same kind of diversity of thought in any group of people.

I'm sure you could find some folks in the world who would support that for any protest, but most just want the Ottawan ones to stop honking, stop blocking, stop whining, achieve their political ends via democratic means, vs. by force, and suck it up when they're unable to convince enough people to subscribe to their newsletter.

I think if you asked 100 people what it meant at its heyday maybe 70-80 would say "abolish the police." Connotation of words and all that. Just for humor's sake, google dictionary definition of defund is "prevent from continuing to receive funds" thus kill/abolish.

If it meant lower police funding it would have been "cut police funding." The initial movement in Minneapolis was outright defunding 100%.

No, I don't think it actually did. It was created by prison abolitionists, who believe in abolishing prison as a whole, an end to punitive jailing and moving to restorative justice with a community problem-solving system, like that advocated by Danielle Sered.

The police abolition movement coined the slogan.

What do you want to know?

I think r/wallstreetbets is still a fantastic place and more or less true to its purpose of finding interesting and novel trades.

Much of the discussion has expanded, to discord (600K users, the limit) as well as the daily reddit talks (Think clubhouse but for reddit).

The daily thread is still fantastic for a very quick list of interesting topics, which you can jump into and have a conversation with anyone.

There still remains a decent sense of camraderie, but there are definitely fewer recognizable names amongst the volume of comments. More time being invested into handing out unique flairs will help with this

Weekday meme restrictions over the past week has largely undone all the damage to the main feed and brought back a larger array of high quality discussion.

Predictions add an interesting dimension to the subreddit where all users can participate regardless of personal wealth.

---

So overall, I'd say it's going very well. There seems to be a significant amount of misconceptions both in the general population, as well as even our regular users, but as long as we continue to do the right thing and protect discussion quality, people will slowly but surely see the light.

imagine a world where we could tune in to neutrally-moderated longform debate on policy instead of points-scoring five-minute sandwiched-by-advertising talking heads talking through a scripted (at least by the host, if not both parties) sequence of talking points and slogans. instead this is the world we get, the world we're told to accept, the world where people like my dad can watch a night's worth of "news" from each of the major cable networks and think that that's an actually balanced, nuanced information diet. the whole thing cannot implode soon enough.

This is a great comment. And of course you're aware that I largely agree with it.

So with that proviso, all I will say in response is that I think it would be helpful to consider the opposing view point:

If the goal is to elicit an emotional or political response that one desires through one's actions, why should perfect, literal truth be in the way of achieving those goals?

My answer to that is that it destroys good faith and good faith is never worth sacrificing. Never. I literally can't think of one instance where mutual understanding exists and I would consider sacrificing good faith. So for me that's what the kettle of fish boils down to, and quite frankly it's one of the main reasons I'm happy I no longer date the person I mentioned above, even if she was otherwise wonderful and my ticket into many fancy parties.

I'd rather have someone honest.

I understand what the word means. My point, which I thought was very clear, is simply:

If what the r/antiwork community attempting to do in promoting their position an instance of an (attempted) "transformation of a radical viewpoint into one that's palatable to the mainstream" ...

Then is not the normalization of an unhealthy addiction to overwork (as a kind of "virtue") -- arguably an instance of a successful transformation of a pretty much equally radical viewpoint?

In other words: "If theirs is a 'radical' viewpoint -- how did this shit we actually live under (and which is slowly killing us and the planet with it) get to become a 'normal, sane' viewpoint"?

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.

It’s all memes now

But that's just it - as far as I can tell (in the US specifically) there's always a path out.

NEET, an acronym for "Not in Education, Employment, or Training"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEET

> It's against the rule to say that you did not read the article, so I won't say it

Maybe it should be against the rules to say you know it's against the rules, and so on recursively. This loophole is often exploited to make these remarks equally useless and extra snarky.

>> which they have with their move to the new subreddit

> /r/WorkReform exists already.

Yes, they noted that

don't care didn't read

That is the "sanewashed" viewpoint. The original message of r/antiwork was that nobody should have to work to live a comfortable life in modern society, and their needs should be provided by others who do.

There are a lot of low skilled jobs in a service economy. I imagine that a significant fraction of all jobs are low skilled ones. Not everyone is chasing the hustle or whatever either, so there's a significant amount of people will be working those low skilled jobs their whole lives. What quality of life do they deserve? Does society want a permanent underclass that are treated miserably?

For me antiwork is just anti forced wage labour. If we had a universal basic income, then that would be accomplished and people would be free to work on whatever they want. If technology is advanced enough to be able to afford this which I'd argue is already the case, I don't see why this shouldn't be the case.

A lot of the most popular threads had less to do with lifelong careers and more about being treated with basic human decency by your employer (and telling them off when the labor market turned in worker's favor).

That said, to address your point head on, is it possible in the US for everyone to move on to "bigger and better" things? I don't think so which is why we have so many adults with families in min. wage or lowing paying jobs. There is no pool of well paying jobs for them all to move into, there is no magic solution where everyone can have their needs met just by pulling harder on their bootstraps.

So the question then becomes: should a person (or two people) working a full time job be able to provide for themselves and their family? I think the answer to that question is yes. You might disagree, but I don't think its fair to write them off as having a "fantasy".

You cannot structurally expect everyone to have a good career in the us. It is not currently mathematically possible. Please don't delude yourself into thinking the economy could function the same as it currently does without lifelong service industry workers

> One way I'm trying to make sense of is the following: The left is used to being the underdog, the ones fighting for reform against powerful, conservative institutions.

This isn't necessarily true. The Democrats in the US had a near stranglehold on Federal politics from the 1950s through the mid-1990s. The Republican ascendence in the 1990s came about in part because Democrat-oriented institutions; e.g., large blue-chip companies, labor unions, and the Federal government itself were viewed as inefficient and corrupt by a portion of the voting population.

> But we're in a situation where there are pockets of real power occupied by left-leaning leadership. University campuses. Some parts of the media. Large cities.

This also isn't necessarily true. Democratic sympathies != left-leaning. And the actual truth is that, going on voting records alone, people in the US mainly vote based on whether they live in more or less densely populated regions. The institutions you've mentioned are all Democrat-leaning because they are predominantly located in more urban areas. Which makes sense, since the policies that Democrats generally support are all more effective at higher population densities.

Are the right really in defense mode? They managed to instill a majority in the supreme court, they have veto power in the senate and after 2022 will likely hold the majority in the house. They are successfully chipping away at the gains of the FDR era.

At the same time the left is fractured into two major camps. One camp is the leadership that seems to end up controlling major movements like Black Lives Matter and subduing it into nothing. This group chooses to not fight. They are benefiting from the status quo.

The other is the "progressive" left that is aiming for European style systems and policies. All they have as a weapon is Twitter and they are not really achieving their goals. What power do "Twitter People" really have if their efforts only translate into gestures from the higher ups(eg. BLM painted on the street in front of the capitol)?

I wonder what it's like to have such a naive black and white view of the world. You speak of left and right like it's a fantasy movie with some long narrative about good and evil. And you speak as though the concept of right and left has been an unchanging thing ("the right has been doing this for centuries"). Do you believe you are some stoic warrior engaged in a centuries long battle for some ideal?

I'm pretty sure the issue was more "I'm visiting my dad for the first time in months so my kids can play with their similarly aged uncles, and he's skipping our planned trip to do overtime" that he's reacting to, not the 50 hours a week regularly part.

Although his siblings are being raised by a single dad, so maybe he needs to not work on saturdays?

Offshore workers get weeks or months off at a time, alternating with their weeks of solid working.

Military deployments are hard on families. Not sure what to add to that but it's a fact.

If your plan is to live your career, why not just stay single?

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

I don't think MetaFilter is a good example. It's insular, but it also turned to the banal opinions of internet gentrification earlier than a lot of places I used to lurk.

There's a saying something like "people don't leave bad jobs, they leave bad bosses" that can be extrapolated a bit. Work can be very positive and rewarding, or it can be negative and abusive. Everyone's experience is different; sometimes I feel that the fact r/antiwork has attained such saliency is maybe a sign that there's too much of the latter experience and not enough of the former.

I disagree with this, at least as a blanket statement. Plenty of workplaces are a deeply negative factor in people's lives.

If what you're saying is really more along the lines of "having a project and way to spend the time is a net positive", then I completely agree, but I don't think that has to be tightly coupled to work (as in employment) per se.

Not good -- having to read some additional link to a top post of a reddit thread that mentions the term over 10 times but never explicitly defines it is really tough for a reader c'mon. I saw that the link went to some reddit post without a specific comment or anything and wasn't going to click it.

So on that post after reading paragraph after paragraph I kind of get it but man it's really not explicit and just talked about even there like it's a thing. It isn't. Using the term is as wacky as the actual topic being discussed about 'normal people think Defund means Defund'.

Let's create a definition then of something like:

sanewashing • deliberately glossing over or attempting to conceal unpleasant or insane facts or actions about something or someone.

To be clear, I was advocating against the “individual or collective action is pointless” position on climate change. I do think people should be thinking, talking, and acting, if they want!