Does anyone else remember when "they" broke up the anti-work movement on reddit by putting a mod on fox news then dividing the community by creating the work reform sub?
I some times think about it and how shitty people are
Talking to the media can be incredibly helpful for a movement. It can turn a movement into a near revolution—if the person is competent, well-spoken, and tactfully spreads a great message.
The problem with that interview was the person was not media ready. They needed to be coached. For a long time. They needed to be more charismatic. They needed to know what to say and what not to say.
They didn’t do any of that. In fact, they failed every single part. It’s a high risk/high reward gamble. But you have to be ready for a hostile interviewer, trick questions, traps in your own wording, tone, image, everything. It could completely destroy an idea, much like it did with antiwork. But it could also turn something small into something huge.
Its not like they weren’t warned or anything. The mods told the community that they got approached for an interview in a pinned post. Declaring they won’t be doing it unless they had someone really really good at speaking.
In comes one of the oldest mods, who genuinely is completely anti all forms of work, from when the sub was actually against the very concept of working, claiming to have media training (they had been interviewed before, through email). And they launch themselves to the occasion and the rest is history.
What has reddit accomplished in over a decade? That place has been nothing more than an escalating demoralization psy-op. It’s given the right another central platform to push their ideologies. It’s had the left preoccupied with petty squabbles.
Maybe reddit closer to 15-20 years ago would have been able to use reddit to stage actual coordinated worker demonstrations in cities around America. Over the past decade or so they’ve been keyboard mashing.
It’s “accomplished” giving a clear place of congregation to many, many niche communities. It’s (anti-)social media; it’s not intended to accomplish anything big.
Reddit isn’t a “psy-op” but it does intentionally select for the status quo. Once the decision was made to start trying to IPO, radical elements that were anti-capitalist, were purged from all the major sub-reddits. The other radical’s drew traffic and were allowed to stay. Once you get rid of anyone advocating for change, of course stagnation is the end result. That’s the goal.
The sub was divided well before the interview but it had good conversation early on iirc, it was about Graeber’s idea of bullshit jobs, how labor never receives the perks of productivity increases, and how this is destroying our planet. I don’t know if these ideas were not conveyed well to the newcomers, or whether the newcomers had no interest in understanding and discussing them.
As for WorkReform, I rank it up there with other classic reactionary subs like VoteDEM and CapitolConsequences. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a concerted push to funnel people to it, but “they” is more likely to be the terminally online bootlickers than TPTB imo.
I'm thankful to antiwork for turning me on to David Graeber. He has a huge body of really amazing work and I've enjoyed all of it I've read so far. He was taken from us far too early.
I remember what she said was embarrassing. The discussion afterwards made me realize how many in that sub really were ‘antiwork’ in a literal sense, not just about labor protections and maintaining work-life balances.
The idea of antiwork isn’t bad though. We should use anything and everything we can to utilize automation to allow people to live with as little work as possible. Is that a reality today, no. Can it be a reality in the future, maybe. Things will need maintenance and upkeep, people will want to innovate and try to build new things, etc. But that doesn’t mean we can’t work on things like UBI, free housing, free medicine, free education, etc.
The idea of heading that direction is (what I understood) the main goal. We’re just going to need to take steps to get there and changing the terrible labor practices we currently have became step 1 and thus a majority of the focus in the subreddit.
Every movement is going to contain a whole spectrum of voices. Never having to work is pie in the sky but I’ll tell you who I’m siding with in the “there should be slaves” and the “people should not have to work at all” argument.
Never having to work is pie in the sky but I’ll tell you who I’m siding with in the “there should be slaves” and the “people should have to work at all” argument.
I’m only ‘siding’ with people that can recognize that’s a very silly false dichotomy.
Yes, there’s a rational spectrum of labor protections and social safety nets between the silly extremes you used for your false dichotomy. You’ve almost got it.
Antiwork accomplished nothing of consequence aside from embarassing itself.
That mod didn’t represent a huge chunk of the community that was in that sub which is why people broke off to form another sub that did.
The sad thing is that all FOX really had to do is let this mod speak on what their beliefs were. No dishonest editing to make them look bad was needed. They did that all on their own.
The Reddit antiwork community had quite a few ridiculous folks hanging out within it.
Not that getting to a post-scarcity society where people aren’t forced to work wasn’t a nice horizon-goal to have, but there are a million steps from where we are in the modern world to there, and a lot of those people wanted it done by next Tuesday. And then when you’d point out that was literally impossible, they’d stick their fingers in their ears and make noises. Needless to say, I didn’t try to stick around for long.
I remember that! I also remember it passing pretty quickly, don’t think it was effective. And I disagree with all of the nay sayers on the usefulness of those subs. Since that time I’ve noticed a lot more people willing to speak about work as a simple contractual arrangement. Not too long ago you would be called lazy and lacking in team spirit etc. for holding boundaries at work. I’ve had more co-workers express the ‘work to live not live to work’ mentality.
Maybe you guys didn’t grow up around as many people who put their entire human energy into their jobs as I did, but in some places there has been a clear shift in how people are thinking about work. Boomers used to let ther vacation expire guys. I am not seeing that in the workplace anymore. Don’t forget the ‘lying flat’ movement that was/is concurrent and frequently discussed in those subs as well. I truly think the antiwork sub helped spark a conversation in the public zeitgeist and helped spur a shift in thought.
It’s a pretty common tactic by people pushing an agenda to interview an idiot with certain views and then present it as if everyone with those views are just as dumb. It’s common on conservative outlets but I also don’t like it when people do interviews at Trump rallies and find the biggest idiot to put in front of the camera. It’s disingenuous to do that.
I feel like I was watching a very different situation than the rest of you were.
First off, the antiwork subreddit didn’t actually accomplish anything. It was mostly people complaining about bad/illegal practices at their jobs, and literally nothing changing.
Second, things didn’t die after that mod appearance. It drew attention to many users that the mods had a different goal than they did, but that didn’t change the atmosphere of the posts for very long. The work_reform sub did become more popular, and antiwork still kept getting just as many people complaining about bad practices.
And neither sub got people organized, neither sub changed attitudes, and neither sub made a difference.
I’ve watched Fox once in the past year and that’s exactly how they arranged their segments, connecting two loosely related things to push a singular agenda…
… Never saw the AntiWork thing, I just know how it went down.
I disagree but it didn’t accomplish anything. It made people aware that they are not alone in their situation and thinking. It created community. This also helped fuel the great resignation and encouraged people to do better for themselves. To not keep running on the wheel for a broken and abusive system. That’s far from nothing.
I remember when anti-work meant anti-work. As in, fewer jobs, more free time, against the notion of labor as an entire thing. Our entire species retiring.
Honestly, I'm glad work reform is a separate thing now, because I don't want to reform work. I want to eliminate it.
I remember when anti-work meant anti-work. As in, fewer jobs, more free time, against the notion of labor as an entire thing. Our entire species retiring.
Unfortunately most people only remember back to the explosion in subscribers that preceded the Fox “interview” by 6-9 months. During which time there was a marked uptick in bad faith arguments pushing what eventually backboned the work reform sub. The (likely paid) Fox appearance was just the diarrhea drizzle on the shit sundae. And then it was obvious to all that the entire thing was comprised of lazy drooling idiots. Narrative captured, mission complete.
Unfortunately much of the world feels entitled to the labor of others and refuses to acknowledge the mental gymnastics we accept as a society.
One has to look no further than the way we treat food service employees. People demand to be served. They feel they are entitled to their basic human needs being serviced while blaming those servicing them for being under valued.
It’s sick and twisted; our society is mentally ill.
I've had this argument too many times with newcomers to antiwork that I'm not going to do it again with you. But ask yourself this: If people so desperately want to work, why do they dream about winning the lottery so they don't have to? Why do they save up their entire lives to enjoy their golden years not working?
Stop looking at this from the bottom of a 6,000 year old hole that tells you that you need to justify your existence to your superiors.
I said people want to work. I explicitly said that the problem is employment, which is not the same thing as work, so I don’t know what “my superiors” has to do with this.
Work can look like a lot of different things. Cooking, gardening, producing art, building things, leading people, building or supporting communities. Even training in and playing sports is “work”. (There’s ridiculous amounts of money there in the world of sports, and athletes are compensated for their time, including that spent training, so it’s really not that strange when you think about it)
Humans are built to enjoy feeling productive.
How would you spend your retirement? Many people re-enter the workforce. Many people volunteer their time to various organizations.
Even if your idea of a perfect retirement involves endless consumption of entertainment, I’d argue that a lot of entertainment effectively simulates various kinds of work. Video games are a prime example.
Sounds like justifications for the Protestant work ethic that had to be socialized into us at torture-point. Stop trying to keep your cogs. “The chattel, they yearn for the menial factory line! They yearn for the cotton gin! They ache for feeling like they produced something!” They could make art, they could spin your culture; but we both know that’s not what you’re talking about.
So how do you propose that would (pun coincidental) work? Who’d build and maintain roads and railways, who’d build houses and install plumbing, who’d build cars, robots and other goods, who’d grow produce and who’d transport it to the cities where people live? Who would do all the work?
I don't have an entire solution for it, and for a while some work would obviously be necessary. But it's important to have a goal so we work toward it instead of just working forever.
I share David Graeber of the opinion that we could eliminate a third of jobs - the Bullshit Jobs - immediately, and with a small increase in our standard of living. And I think that if someone can automate their job they should be given their salary in perpetuity, because now people don't have to do this one thing.
For me, antiwork is less a clear political goal than it is an ethos. Find ways to eliminate drudgery so all of us everywhere can retire and live comfortably.
I was amazed at how few people thought she was a plant.
It’s not that hard to get someone in a mod position. Then they just have to be a whackjob on air. Mission accomplished.
Vaguely similar to the Occupy Wall Street protests. Interview several people across the country then cherry pick the ways they disagree with each other to call it a disunified movement. All you really need is one discordant voice.
In regards to OWS, they just had to find the most wacked out, stoned nut jobs that saw the sit-in as a party and ask them a couple pointed questions. Then they blast it all over the evening news as a bunch of lazy hippies, no crazy editing needed. I remember seeing the newscast live and compared it to what was going on online, and yeah that was a masterful way to shut it down unfortunately, because the next day all anyone could talk about was the lazy, entitled kids demanding free this or that from wall street. From there the movement was dead in the water.
Unless your a professional communicator, talking to media is always dangerous. They can totally change what you say using “editing”, and loaded question can quickly trap you. There is a reason why there is so many job in communication and media assistant, you don’t want to let people talk unsupervised
Honestly, if only a sub reddit keeps a political movement alive, it isn’t a political movement
Wtf is a “professional communicator”? How do you think you get there?
They just needed someone who wasn’t really weird, and had a proper job. Look at Mick Lynch’s interviews in the UK for example - he did great work for the union.
Not everyone is born a speech-giving savant. There are TEAMS of people that train you for it. Or at least there are if they want you to succeed. Ever notice how many times someone that’s new to the limelight is kinda awkward but over time they get better at it? They have trainers.
To expand on the point about editing for anyone who assumes that is only means taking things out of context, editing can also be rearranging the order of communication to change the meaning as well as introducing context prior to the interaction that changes the meaning.
Unless you’re* a professional communicator, talking to media is always dangerous. They can totally change what you say using “editing”, and loaded question can quickly trap you.
This is probably the real reason why politicians never actually say “yes” or “no”! Haha
"After that, I made it a rule, I only do e-mail responses to print interviews; because these people love to put a twist in your words, to infer that you said somethin fuckin absurd–" – Mike Shinoda, “Get Me Gone”
Knowing reddit, I assume the thinking was something along the lines of “I can regularly win a reddit argument, therefore my towering intellect will surely win the day on TV and I will become a hero.” Which of course doesn’t hold up at all against someone with professional-grade social/communication skills no matter how right-on your point is.
The sad thing is that FOX didnt have to do anything to make this mod, and the community they represented, look bad. They did that all on their own because fundamentally something was very wrong with that sub. It wasnt just people legitimately pissed off at employers, there were people in that community that were very much like that mod and the former didn’t want to be associated with the latter.
It’s fairly easy to infer that Fox would not give a sympathetic or neutral interview to someone with views that the hosts fundamentally disagree with. The mod was unprepared, had poor lighting - which surely Fox could have asked them to fix before the show - started rocking back and forth, but they also have a lot of subtle ways of manipulating the audience. If you watch their other shows, the hosts use facial expressions and negative tones of voice to express what they want viewers to feel about the topic - look like they’re having an orgasm when they mention Trump, scowl and use a derisive tone for Democratic politicians. Some of that was going on with Waters’ smug smirk, but I think he detected quickly that the mod was an easy target and he didn’t have to do much for the intended effect. For some reason the interview drifted to the interviewee’s personal life vs. antiwork, too, and that’s intentional imo.
I was really active in that sub at the time. Fox or CNN or something contacted the moderators about an interview. The mods discussed it and decided to decline. IIRC, they later made a post about not accepting interviews until they felt they were more ready to present clear goals, and maybe pull someone from the community to be a “official” spokesperson.
Then a mod went rogue and did the now infamous Fox interview. That was bad, but recoverable. It was further shenanigans by the moderators in the immediate aftermath that caused the schism into work_reform. Before my exodus from reddit, I followed that community closely, but never got as involved. At the time, I remember thinking that the mods felt more reasonable than in antiwork, but that quickly changed too. Eventually they effectively became mirror subs.
Then RIF got shut down and someone told me about this lemmy federation where I could post about all the gay space communism and fringe technology I wanted. I think that I am happier now overall.
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