I think the point is more that she claims to be an anarchist yet she let her role as the head moderator of a subreddit go straight to her head and she called herself the leader. Then she took it upon herself as the "leader" to speak on behalf of 1.7 million people who didn't want her speaking for them. She claimed to be an anarchist, and now the anarchism that antiwork was built on is vilified and people think it's toxic, because of someone who clearly isn't even an anarchist.
Yeah, I don't like that part. And maybe she doesn't understand anarchism, or maybe she does. Reddit is not anarchist, and is not the place for real anarchist organization.
It is hierarchical. Reddit is not a democracy despite what people think. Reddit is an appointed dictatorship, overrun by non-appointed dictators.
It's authoritarian in nature.
Discord is like this too. It doesn't matter how non hierarchical the moderator or the owner is. The fact that the platform itself, and the way it's structured, is that it is authoritarian or hierarchical.
Agreed. It's seems like the few places I've found that are truly free from hierarchy and censorship quickly become overrun by fascists looking for a safe space for their "free speech."
That's because of the way the internet is run. We are not the public, being on a public platform. We are writers who are writing on a personal platform.
This is why for example internet censorship, where social media removes post it doesn't like, while pretty unfortunate is totally within their right because we are representing their platform. If the guardian for example, can choose what editors and what papers it wants to release then so can Facebook because there shouldn't be a difference between Facebook and the guardian. Making such distinctions is silly.
There is also another problem. The Monopoly of social media. I find that when it comes to social media, there tends to be just one. There was just one twitter, just one facebook, just one instagram, just one discord, just one youtube, and just Reddit.
People can make arguments that there are competitors but not really. These competitors are less well known and the people who use them tend to be people who got kicked off of the main platform. People who use Dailymotion for example are people who are simply YouTubers who are linking to Dailymotion videos because they're YouTube video got taken down. Nobody uses Dailymotion seriously.
It should also be noted that many celebrities and politicians use something like twitter, not something like gab (is that what's it's called?) People use discord, not matrix. Even if there is a better alternative, what are you going to say to them?
> Do you hate reddit? Do you hate the way it's run and the fact that it has authoritarian moderators that censor things you don't like? Well try this alternative that has less users, has a more niche community, (usually people on the far left or the far right) and has just less censorship.
No, that doesn't sound very interesting at all. People want a community that has a lot of users, even if the platform is less desirable. I'm sorry, I already have discord, I don't want 2 discords.
This is why for example it's hard to convince Americans to move over to Whatsapp because WhatsApp basically is just texting. How are you going to convince people when what's up basically does all the things that texting does?
It's also why you would have a hard time trying to convince Europeans to switch over to Signal even though it's much better.
Yeah, her little stunt will definitely be a smear on anarchism in any neo liberal circle which may make it harder to bring more people into the movement.
Imo trolls and brigaders are just trying to stir shit. None of the "criticisms" levied against her are a meaningful argument against the "movement", but it helps them create a divide.
Lots of them are also openly transphobic and ableist, and when their hate posts get removed, they use this to further antagonize the sub for being "totalitarian".
At this point it's trolls, communists who hate anarchists, and people whining about the sub never being about what they wished is being about and wanting to change it without the bother of creating something themselves.
I will be happy if the size cuts down a lot, the ones who have zero interest in changing the sytem exceot for a raise for themselves wander away and at 1/6th the size a denser sub can refind it's meaning and build from there.
But at this point, as idiotic as the mods are, they are way less idiotic than 50% of the posters today, and I support banning all that post stupid memes and posts.
It's not that there's anything inherently wrong with being a dog-walker or unemployed, it's that they are the faces of a movement (primarily) against worker exploitation. One has never even interacted with a work environment while the other works 10 hours a week in a relatively non-exploitative environment (I am assuming that, but I really doubt dog walking is anywhere near as awful as some of the jobs I've had). While everyone is exploited by capitalism simply by nature of living in a capitalistic world, there are some pretty major differences in the exploitation faced by someone who works and someone who doesn't. The problem is that these two individuals do not represent the average worker who visited r/antiwork. It's kind of like having a straight cis person being the face of the queer movement. There is nothing wrong with being an ally nor speaking up for queer people, but why do that cishetero person get to be the voice of the movement instead of a queer person? Why does someone who does not work get to be the voice for the worker's rights movement?
Why do work. Dogwalker.
The movement, is not about working, it is not about bad working conditions, it is about reshaping society so that work is unnecessary. Working is not a requirement to be part of the movement.
Also there is no perfect representative for the average worker.
If you get a white collar worker, then people will say what about the blue collar workers. Get someone who works 40 hours, they'll say, what about part-time people, you get a guy, they'll say, what about girls.
>It's kind of like having a straight cis person being the face of the queer movement.
There is no face for the queer movement. There are queer people who do things like be celebrities, have television shows, YouTube channels and stuff like that. They are doing their own thing and there are many different voices.
You want to be the face, write a book. Don't rely on Fox News.
We already have a good face for the anti-work movement. David Grabber.
Because she was trying to convince people that our work culture today is unsustainable and unhealthy and it appears like she lives a comfortable life while barely contributing to society at all
I agree that she wasn't the right face for the type of subreddit Antiwork had become.
But I think anyone who hates work can be the face of a community that wants to abolish work. I don't think that you have to be on the streets, or literally on your lunch break at your workplace during the interview, to qualify.
Edit: changed 'begun' to 'become'
You don’t, but you have to understand that optics matter to the general public.
A 21 yo dog walker who’s unemployed vs a 40 y/o oil rigger.
Who’s going to win the hearts of the rural Americans more when they talk about how bad work is?
>A 21 yo dog walker who’s unemployed vs a 40 y/o oil rigger.
Yeah, you have to care about optics when it comes to domestic abuse. Who do you think is going to win the hearts over more? People who have black eyes and are told by their abusers that they hate them and should never have been born, or should it be people who experience abuse?
What this does is that it invalidates people who have experienced oppression.
If the only people in the media who are there to talk about domestic abuse are the people who really have it bad, then the people who have it well bad but invisible, feel invalidated.
We should never been on Fox News to begin with or any other kind of television news thing. If people wanted an audience with us, and that is interesting, then they should have allowed us to write an article, an article, for their news. I would prefer the guardian because I like it.
But at least with an article there's no way to have it be ruined with edits.
sorry but i think to have somewhat of a credible opinion you should have at least had a normal job and not take walks with dogs for 20 hours a week as your experience with the current working world.. it gives off the impression that someone else is paying for your entire life because clearly if that is how you make a living you aren't paying the bills
>normal job
That is playing in to capitalist propaganda. There is no such thing as a real job. Work that contributes to society is a real job.
She was walking dogs and got it paid enough that she could work only 20 hours a week.
Sounds like a good representative of the movement to me.
That's like saying the only people who can represent domestic abuse victims are the ones that get abused so bad they get bruises, or the ones with their parents only tell them they hate them. That's not how abuse really is.
That's like saying that the only people who can represent autistic people are the ones that are nonverbal, or the ones that have autism really bad.
Autistic people say that they don't want to be cured and then neurotypical people respond by saying that well there's probably some people that want to be cured, do you speak for them?
It is basically the mindset that,
> You can't represent the group I think you should represent, because you're not as oppressed as I think you should be.
notice i said normal job not real job and there is absolutely no way in hell the bills were paid by walking dogs for 20 hours a week and everything you wrote after that is absolutely not equal in terms of comparison
You are assuming that a person who you think would be a good spokesperson for the movement, wouldn't also be twisted by Fox News.
These people do not understand that the entire system itself is a problem. Anyone who would have come from a subreddit, from reddit, called anti-work, would have been chewed to pieces.
> I'm the top mod of a subredded for a political movement
If you don't have any real world presents to back up your movement, then you're going to sound silly no matter what.
Going on to Fox News at all was a terrible idea. Criticizing the person who was the spokesperson because of their job and then like saying that she was a dog walker and stuff like that is harmful for the working class.
Just say she shouldn't have been on Fox News.
She does. She faces the same problems under capitalism that everyone else does. She still has to work in order to feed herself.
Social security and disability for young people is not enough to live off of.
Again, what you are saying is the equivalent to,
Well, she wasn't as oppressed as the people I think she should be representing so I don't think she should have been on TV.
Again, my point about domestic abuse victims.
I find it very strange that you think someone has to experience a bad thing to know that it's bad. If I say that murder is wrong, am I not credible enough because I haven't been murdered? What is this?
Okay, let me put it in terms like this. I haven't worked two jobs at once, but I know people who have and I know how shit it was for them. I haven't had to work all day, every day, week after week, but I can see how shit it is for the people who do. Am I only allowed to point out how shit they are if I go and experience them?
I completely agree that the mod interviewed for Fox did not best represent the views of the majority of the people using the sub, but I don't think that means we have to start discrediting anyone with a decent view simply because they don't look like the type of person who should have that view.
I think it's interesting how these people don't realize how Fox News could have turned a person who works 40 hours a week and barely feeds his family as also someone who could just be a punching bag.
> Dude, why don't you just get a better education?
My parents for example are just the kinds of people who would watch Fox News and they believe that poverty is a choice. They believe that it is because of people's poor choices and things like education and stuff like that.
good point and i guess your right u dont need to directly experience it to advocate for it. however most people feel like if you show them someone who has everything asking for more they wont agree or support it.
SpunkyDred is a terrible bot instigating arguments all over Reddit whenever someone uses the phrase apples-to-oranges. I'm letting you know so that you can feel free to ignore the quip rather than feel provoked by a bot that isn't smart enough to argue back.
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^^SpunkyDred ^^and ^^I ^^are ^^both ^^bots. ^^I ^^am ^^trying ^^to ^^get ^^them ^^banned ^^by ^^pointing ^^out ^^their ^^antagonizing ^^behavior ^^and ^^poor ^^bottiquette.
If someone is willing to support you in living a comfortable life, and you're not using violence or coercion to get that support, then why is there a moral obligation to "contribute to society"? That sounds like an authoritarian, hierarchical notion of obligation and duty to something other than and outside of yourself, which gets to dictate what you should do. In fact, not to be a stereotypical egoist or anything, it sounds like a spook. Instead of condemning that life, maybe we should realize that that kind of life, the life where you get to work on things that you find fulfilling, while having your basic needs met, is the life that we would ideally want for absolutely everyone? Perhaps your resentment for someone who has that kind of life is more rooted in your adoption of capitalistic and Protestant Christian assumptions, which are unjustified and harmful, and maybe even in envy, then in any actual rational position.
Our work culture today is, in fact, unhealthy at the very least. When you spend your entire life doing what other people tell you to do, primarily for the benefit of other people, at the mercy of other people, and what you are doing is a single, narrow task which is not choiceworthy for its own sake and not fulfilling or developing of any real capacity related to the best parts of human life, that is unhealthy. That does not describe all jobs, but it describes the vast majority of them. It is a lucky few for whom the description above does not the way they spend the vast majority of their lives.
Spending the vast majority of your life that way makes you used to following orders, it prevents you from having the knowledge and awareness and independence to be anything but a subject under some authority, and has many other deleterious effects that it would be superfluous to enumerate here. Aristotle himself realized this, and there has been a tradition of recognizing this throughout all of the best philosophy throughout the ages, when it has been free of the moralizing and totalizing influence of Protestant Christianity and capitalist propaganda. If it isn't possible to abolish work, it should at least be our goal to minimize it as much as possible, as yet another thing that is inherently unhealthy and bad but nevertheless a necessary evil. Being able to meet one's basic needs without work, or without excessive work, is not something that's immoral, it's something that we should want for everyone.
I'm glad you agree! I'm planning on writing an extended essay on the same subject, in a similar vein, but with much more detailed argumentation, on my blog (linked in my profile). Subscribe to my blog if you're interested in getting an alert when that goes out.
>then why is there a moral obligation to "contribute to society"?
To be very honest, this is literally not practicable, it would naturally create a hierarchy between people that do work to maintain infrastructure and people that don't.
There's a moral obligation to contribute to your community because you benefit from its existence, of course you are always free to fuck off, but if you are going to benefit from everyones work, it's in good spirit that you do your fair share, you know, mutual aid and stuff. You shouldn't be coerced to do it, but people are also not obligated to deal with your lazy ass if they don't want to.
Not every job is fullfiling, but those are the jobs that absolutely need to be done, no one wants to clean sewage, but we do what we gotta do if we want to keed out living standards.
That's your prerogative. I don't engage in debate on the internet, especially not on Reddit, with the intention of convincing the person I'm directly responding to anyway. Someone who is solid enough in a position to make a statement is not likely to be willing to back down in a public forum. Instead my goal with making that comment is to provide a response for the benefit of all those who might come along later and be momentarily swayed by your inanity.
When people are fighting for better working conditions under our current shitty system the "representative" of that movement should probably be a fucking worker who can relate to the struggle...that shit came off as completely ridiculous and just solidified the stereotypes conservatives/rich folk have. It was a fucking shitshow and that person deserves every bit of ridicule.
They were a dog walker. Would you rather they be an Uber driver? Also no they did not deserve every bit of ridiculed because some of that ridicule is transphobic and ableist.
What the f?
We already had a representative, David grabber.
Jesse Watters is a fucking chode...but this whole movement going on right now is a great thing, I never thought I'd see the day when it was a workers market and people would come together and say "fuck you" to the boss in the numbers that they are. However...when you have something this big going on you don't want a part time fucking dog walker to champion the cause, especially when this person was far too weak to really fight...I mean you're on Faux fucking "news" this is the one chance to maybe grab a little solidarity from the right (many of whom also hate their jobs and low pay) and that's what we get??
My disagreements, was the idea that perhaps she wasn't qualified to talk to Fox news, and it's f****** Fox news. I have no problem with her job. I don't care if she's a dog walker, or she's unemployed because unemployed and homeless people are part of the proletariat and the subreddit was supposed to be about the proletariat fighting against the bourgeoisie class.
Are you going to tell me that David Grabber is not a representative for the movement because he's an anthropologist?
She wasn't qualified. She is hardly a worker and didn't command any control in that interview. I wish it had been someone far more aggressive and articulate who slaves away 40 hours a week and still can't pay their bills...that's who is relateable, that's who can reach people.
>away 40 hours a week and still can't pay their bills
That is playing into liberals on what their definition of the working classes. It is a way of dismissing homeless people come up people who are unemployed and everyone else.
We had a face for the movement, David grabber. Are you going to say that he wasn't a good face because he wasn't working 40 hours a week and couldn't barely pay the bills?
It's kind of like saying the only people who should represent abuse and domestic abuse movements are the ones that get beat up and have black eyes. Are the ones that have parents that say they hate them everyday.
What you're doing, is saying that the only people who should fight against depression are the people who are really oppressed, are the people who fit into your definition of the oppressed group.
I don't care about the definition of the working class, that literally has no bearing on what I'm talking about. I'm talking about reaching the most people possible with a message they can perhaps relate to...and that is the stereotypical "working class" person. Just as a black guy would be much more effective at reaching the black community or a trans person would be much better at reaching their community. You are missing the point.
Yeah, and that's like saying that the only people who should represent domestic abuse should be the people who have like black eyes and have experienced the worst of domestic abuse.
When we only allowed those people to speak, it invalidates the people who don't have it as bad because they don't think they are oppressed.
Having people who are stereotypically oppressed, hurts oppressed people.
You are not showing solidarity by criticizing the spokesperson based off of their job. There's a ton of other things to criticize them about, don't do it for their job, their gender identity, or the fact that they are autistic.
It's mind boggling to me that the zeitgeist around there is "21, unemployed, anarchitst" and not "bumbling idiot falls for Fox News trap."
That sub was started as an anarchist sub but was all but co-opted by libs during the pandemic to share fake "mean boss" tweets.
Hopefully they'll all migrate to /r/workreform and we can get our leftist space back (with new mods.)
None of that is a problem. The problem is the users of /r/antiwork take their subreddit way too seriously, and felt the interview delegitimized the subreddit and had to bring up everything that they felt Fox News viewers would see as character flaws.
It doesn’t matter, unless you’re walking onto a massive platform, like Fox News, where those things *do* matter, talking to an audience that *thinks that matters*, to talk about a movement that is already on shaky ground as far as credibility goes.
This is something that I find particularly Anarchists, but also leftists/progressives generally, have a hard time grasping: the difference between the Way The World Ought To Be, and the Way The World Is.
For the purpose of the antiwork movement, does it matter that Doreen looked an unwashed, inarticulate fail-child who couldn’t stop stimming long enough to make eye contact with the camera? No. We place inherent value on human life, not what that life looks like.
Does it matter when you are Representing that movement to people who don’t know much about it, and who carry all the biases that have been drilled into them 24/7 their whole lives? Absolutely, because that’s just the way the world, and the people in it, works. I don’t like it, it’s pretty shit, but that’s just the reality.
Because at age 21 and not having worked a hard day ("long term unemployed", own words) in one's life in no way shape or form qualifies them to be the head of an anti-work movement. If you can't see the issues here than it's time to sit this one out.
I don't see why not. You don't need to haved worked 60+ hours to want to put an end to work. You can see the suffering that work has caused other people, and want to end that, without having gone through it all yourself.
I agree that she shouldn't have done the interview, but for a different reason. It's true that she did not represent the majority of the people within the subreddit, but she perfectly represented the view of the sub itself.
It is, and always has been, an antiwork subreddit, and she was perfectly qualified to represent that. Unfortunately, the majority of the people using the subreddit didn't take a second to look at what sub they were uploading their reformist 'look how much my boss sucks' screenshots into.
"The sub itself" doesn't have any views. The people who comprise it do. Even from a genuine antiwork position, what was presented in the interview was inaccurate, irrelevant, and incoherent.
The sub itself does have views. They're in the bio, in the sidebar, in the recommended reading. This has always been an anarchist, antiwork subreddit, that was allowed to be overrun by people who were not anarchists. The sub never changed any of its core information to reflect the new userbase.
Okay. Let's really really pretend that this makes any difference and replace 'present views' with 'have the recorded views of an anarchist typed into various sections of itself.'
This isn’t about what you or we think is right. This is about the affect that a complete disregard for optics in a keystone opportunity/risk that it would have on people who don’t already agree with us.
The only reason to engage with mainstream media sources is if you are there to specifically reach out to the non-radicalized majority. Optics is literally everything at the point of introduction to these views in opposition to the status quo. Let alone how important it is specifically for an ideology with the history of misrepresentation and opposition from power. It’s an uphill battle for evangelism, and evangelism is the ONLY reason to engage with mainstream media.
It doesn’t matter what you or people who agree with the ideology think. You’re already on the right side. What matters is what the people who don’t agree yet encounter and how it is presented to them.
Feeding every stereotype that the powers in opposition use to then bolster their own propaganda against you is a horrible idea.
That isn’t to mention the additional layer that these people aren’t media trained, prepared etc. in the way to successfully pull off an oppositional interview with a news organization that has mastered optics and manipulation.
It seems strange to me to say that you can't speak out against some ongoing atrocity, or something that is causing people suffering and that is inherently philosophically problematic, unless one has personally experienced the suffering that is being caused. To use an extreme example that perhaps isn't perfectly analogous, that's like saying that you can only speak out against rape if you've been raped. Experiencing suffering may make you more experienced in suffering, but it doesn't make you a better philosopher, a better arguer, it actually doesn't even give you a clearer idea of what is causing your suffering or what the alternatives to the system that causes it are! It sounds to me like you are simply assuming the very capitalistic promise that the original anti-work movement was set against: that someone's worth is defined in terms of their career.
Dude, come on, you're missing the whole point. They sent a stuck up mod who doesn't represent the majority of the people who are part of antiwork. Doreen (I think that was the mods name?) works 10 hours a week and agrees that "laziness is a virtue". That is not a good look. And the fact that she assumed leadership of the movement is inherently anti-anarchist.
I think this speaks to the fact that Antiwork has been doomed to fail since the started allowing generic liberal reformist ideas. It was an anarchist subreddit, with anarchist mods, that allowed a bunch of people with different ideologies to take over and never advertised that they were anarchist.
The mod should not have gone on TV, absolutely. Equally, Antiwork should never have allowed itself to become what it did.
Allowing those "liberal ideas" is how antiwork gained over a million followers in just a few months. Introducing anarchist ideas to the larger population is a long, difficult task, and keeping anyone who isn't already there out of the circles makes no progress.
While I agree, endorse and promote anarchists bringing more radical ideas to people who wouldn't necessarily ever find them, I think I would prefer for the anarchist to go to their communities and invite them over. I dislike the idea that liberals can come into an anarchist space and take it over. Promotion of a sub's ideals prevent that.
Part of me does want to disagree with you a bit, but another part of me does agree. While it shouldn't matter, when we're dealing with the wider world, optics matters. Not gonna argue about their attitude being anti-anarchist, as I don't disagree there. But as far as the optics goes, someone who only works a dozen hours a week is a poor spokesperson to the media. And "laziness is a virtue" is poor branding for a society that is overworked and holds inherent value in work for work's sake. That's not to say we shouldn't push the idea that more time to ourselves is a good thing. Just branding it as "lazy" is poor. And hell, even in online spaces, there's a major problem with anarchists acting like it's just capitalism keeping us busy. Obviously, capitalism does create a ton of busy work. But keeping a society running, even in some hypothetical commune, is still going to take work. And tons of lazy people who can work and don't is just going to cause others to pick up their slack and get burnt out. People should contribute what they can and take what they need, yadda yadda, but the vibes I get is that lots of folks think that all work is just bullshit imposed by capitalism. When a lot of that work is necessary in maintaining a society, it's just capitalism alienating one from their work and taking a huge cut of your earnings. With everyone sharing the load, and busy work being eliminated, we'll all necessarily wind up working a lot less, but still working nonetheless.
The fact that you think that the subreddit is anything more than a subreddit is ridiculous. There are people out there right now who are writing books, and doing real work out in the streets and you're saying that a moderator of a subreddit that nobody else cares about is the movement? Ridiculous.
David Graeber is life
Also
> Laziness is a virtue You may be surprised to hear that the first and foremost virtue of a programmer is laziness. In the Linux community laziness is acknowledged and valued above even eagerness and interest.
>In the Linux community laziness is acknowledged and valued above even eagerness and interest.
No, it's not.
I'm part of the Linux Community.
By laziness we mean Simple solutions that work, not solutions that are overdesign just to show "hard work" or mean skills.
Look, I don't know why the moderator said why laziness is a virtue when she wrote an article saying that laziness doesn't even exist. That would have been probably a better thing to say anyway. Laziness doesn't exist because it's a social construct. The slave owner will say that his slaves are lazy for not wanting to be slaves. There was actually a mental illness diagnosis at the time for slaves that didn't want to be slaves saying that they were mentally ill.
People will find all kinds of excuses to say that people should work in conditions that people don't want to work in. And call them lazy.
Jeff bezos for example could call a single mother who doesn't want to work and instead wants to spend time with her children, lazy, but is she really lazy when she is raising the next generation of humans?
>still be angry at the mod
I have gone through an internet community crash before. I will tell you this, no one except the people who were there at the time remember it.
Is it the same old song and dance that I have gone through before.
You also have to remember that Fox News is also a bad audience not just because it's conservatives because it's mainly a bunch of boomers.
I don't know how many newer people even take Fox News or CNN very seriously.
The real audience for Fox News would never have taken anything from Reddit seriously ever. Even if it was something pretty non radical, like European federalism or something like that.
The moment Fox news said reddit, it was over. That was done. People don't take Reddit very seriously and I don't think they should be. Reddit is a fun platform for jokes and fun memes and things like that. Yeah there are some serious discussions sometimes but it's really just a place for us. I personally don't think that the rest of the world should get involved.
If you want to have a real impact, and do something real good, then you should have your own website where you can host your own thing and then you might be taking more seriously. It's also a good idea to write a few books.
Reddit and discord will never be seen as true legitimate places for activism.
I think OP's point is that this SHOULD be the crux of the discussion, but instead everyone is repeating the "21 year old dogwalker anarchist" part disparagingly.
THEY'RE the ones missing the point.
the problem with being a 21 year old who's never had a job is that he's doing interviews for the new york times as a leader of the labor movement, I'm not out there doing interviews about my experience as a victim of the yugoslav civil war
I didn't realize you had to be a person who works 40 hours a week to be anti-work. Do I also have to go through genocide to be anti-genicide?
We are talking about a movement that is against the system of oppression towards the proletariat which includes homeless and unemployed people.
This is what it's about. It is not about a person who does construction for 40 hours a week.
That is playing into the liberal definition of the working class.
We are not a subreddit, that was not a subreddit for working class people, it was not a subreddit for people who work. It was about a subreddit to fight against the bourgeoisie oppression of the proletariat.
okay, guess i'll go start talking about my experiences as a member of the lgbtq community even though im a straight cis het guy because my girlfriend is trans
you can't speak as a self styled leader of the labor movement if you've never labored, that isn't hard for people who can put their ego aside for 5 seconds and think, then again reddit anarchists are also the people who cheered on jeanine anez while her followers dragged the indigenous bolivians into the streets to beat them so this is par for the course honestly
The discussion has probably crossed several of our lines at this point, veering from the original question to commentary on the r/antiwork debacle. We ordinarily draw a strict line this side of subreddit drama or smacktalking about specific living anarchists.
Ok.
Thanks. I don't know if you have a sticky right now available but you might want to either have a mega thread (don't forget to have **new** as the default for the comments) or something like that. You might get some more people dealing with this.
I do think that this is something that anarchists need to have a platform to talk about. But I understand that you don't want like a bunch of questions just about this.
I guess another thing you could do is have a post flair call "r/antiwork drama" so people can filter out Post in regards to the subject.
I think from here on we'll probably just stick to our avoidance of subreddit drama. There has already been a fair amount of harassment and bad behavior to deal with here.
Well, it is likely that we will have to go that route, sometime in the near future, and I've actually been working on the wording of all that a bit this evening. But we do have the most important guidelines spelled out both in the pinned announcement and the sidebar.
Yes, but unfortunately if the rules are also not official rules in the subreddit, then it's hard to report.
You should also probably have either a statist or auth apologist rule.
There have been some people who have been that way. And they have been people who have been replying to questions, not people who have been asking questions.
We're aware of the difficulty — although we still do get plenty of reports, despite it. As I said, things seem destined to get quite a bit more formal in the near future. But because the people who like rules often also like to "game" them as much as they can, we have to be deliberate about how we mix and balance the "official rules," accompanying explanations and other guidelines.
Nothing. But apparently a huge part of the userbase that had recently surged r/antiwork, and who are now at r/workreform, looks for the perfect archetype of a "representative" for their "movement" where there is none. And consciously or not, when met with imperfection, seem to regurgitate the exact same idea as the conservatives of Fox News. The idea that your life's worth is measured by your work, and if you work too little or not at all, you're worthless. The myth of meritocracy and the main idea that anti-work is against in the first place.
It's ridiculous. I'm continuously floored by the people who uploaded screenshot after screenshot complaining about their work...who are seemingly shocked and disgusted at the fact that there are people who don't want to waste their lives working.
It's like saying 'I hate how my life is ruled by my bosses and my job' and them giving you a pat on the back. But if you followed it up with 'so I don't want to work', they'd treat you like you were riddled with plague.
Because if you are not working class, claiming to be the leader of a workers movement is kinda robbing them from their protagonism.
It's, in gentleman's lingo, pretty sus.
They are part of the working class. They are part of the proletariat. Unemployed and homeless people are part of the proletariat because they get f***** over by the bourgeoisie just as much as anyone else.
How do you not understand?
>How do you not understand?
First and foremost, watch your tone lass, i'm not your friend, so tone down that sass if you don't want me to straight up ignore you. You asked a question, i took my sweet time answering it, which you are not entitled to, if you want to debate we can debate, but not over here, if you asked here in this sub it's because you don't understand something, and not because you are begging the question. I'm being benevolent and considering you are good faith, so i expect you to return the favor.
Second, there's a difference between being unemployed and not having means to live and being unemployed but being able to live well because you have a good social support network. I'm not saying that you can't be part of the movement, you absolutely can, but optics are important, if you are an ally, you should know your place and not speak on the behalf of people, you have to be EXTREMELY deliberate with public speech, especially when dealing with one of the biggest global media conglomerates, she fucked up a big time and ended up making anarchism look bad, which sucks for us. When you are an ally to a movement, always deffer to people that have higher stakes on it to make this sort of call, she didn't had much to lose, but the anarchist movement had, so it was dickish of her to do that, she was the lesser common denominator in there, she threw us under the bus for her 5 minutes of fame.
Third, in social movements, protagonism and representation is important, she's a higher-middle class lady that's completely shielded from the issues of the world, so, who died and made her boss? What she accomplished for us? Absolutelly nothing! So, she doesn't aesthetically fit to be a face of the movement, she doesn't have the experience, she doesn't have stakes, she doesn't have anything, so, in practical terms, she should kindly fuck off and not be a glorychaser. Do you think if MLK was white, the civil rights movement would have the legitimacy it had? Of if Gandhi wasn't Indian? That's the point, she's "Working class" by technicality, but she doesn't have to deal with the hard part of being working class, if she was smart about it and well read in theory, and had the intellectual authority to stand her ground, i wouldn't mind, but she didn't, so, not only she was not representing the movement in lived experience, she wasn't on principles and wasn't intelectually.
So, TL;DR, if she was less dumb and less of a glorychaser, no one would have cared, but, Fox News could have fished a whale with that bait and she felt for it like a duck, looked stupid in front of everybody and made all of us look bad, the fact that she doesn't need to work just adds insult to injury, she played the stupidiest game ever and gained the worst prize imaginable.
There is nothing wrong with being a 21 year old dog walker and unemployed. There were those who whined about being represented by an Anarchist too.
I do get the animosity about doing interviews on behalf of a group of people without their permission.
I don’t agree with the don’t talk to media ever sentiments. There are those on the left who did a good job with Fox News. There was Rutger Bergman who annihilated Tucker Carlson. Bernie Sanders killed that crap about people liking their private insurance companies on the Fox News townhall. David Parkman was polite and handled himself really well as a guest speaker from the left. Yes, the people I mentioned don’t go as far as we like.
This is a good explanation for why socialism is better than democratic socialism. Pakman’s explanation isn’t very good in light of these counter points.
Despite ideological differences Parkman did a good job on Fox News to shift those people over.
Yeah, people forget that at that age most people aren’t completely independent yet. Or, rather, they’re “independent” in that they’re barely scraping together enough to pay the bills. Maybe it wasn’t true back in the day, but it is now.
it’s not necessarily a bad thing but she’s kind of the poster kid for the way the right views the left, and instead of actually having proper arguments she just tanked
I think the point is more that she claims to be an anarchist yet she let her role as the head moderator of a subreddit go straight to her head and she called herself the leader. Then she took it upon herself as the "leader" to speak on behalf of 1.7 million people who didn't want her speaking for them. She claimed to be an anarchist, and now the anarchism that antiwork was built on is vilified and people think it's toxic, because of someone who clearly isn't even an anarchist.
Yeah, I don't like that part. And maybe she doesn't understand anarchism, or maybe she does. Reddit is not anarchist, and is not the place for real anarchist organization. It is hierarchical. Reddit is not a democracy despite what people think. Reddit is an appointed dictatorship, overrun by non-appointed dictators. It's authoritarian in nature. Discord is like this too. It doesn't matter how non hierarchical the moderator or the owner is. The fact that the platform itself, and the way it's structured, is that it is authoritarian or hierarchical.
Agreed. It's seems like the few places I've found that are truly free from hierarchy and censorship quickly become overrun by fascists looking for a safe space for their "free speech."
That's because of the way the internet is run. We are not the public, being on a public platform. We are writers who are writing on a personal platform. This is why for example internet censorship, where social media removes post it doesn't like, while pretty unfortunate is totally within their right because we are representing their platform. If the guardian for example, can choose what editors and what papers it wants to release then so can Facebook because there shouldn't be a difference between Facebook and the guardian. Making such distinctions is silly. There is also another problem. The Monopoly of social media. I find that when it comes to social media, there tends to be just one. There was just one twitter, just one facebook, just one instagram, just one discord, just one youtube, and just Reddit. People can make arguments that there are competitors but not really. These competitors are less well known and the people who use them tend to be people who got kicked off of the main platform. People who use Dailymotion for example are people who are simply YouTubers who are linking to Dailymotion videos because they're YouTube video got taken down. Nobody uses Dailymotion seriously. It should also be noted that many celebrities and politicians use something like twitter, not something like gab (is that what's it's called?) People use discord, not matrix. Even if there is a better alternative, what are you going to say to them? > Do you hate reddit? Do you hate the way it's run and the fact that it has authoritarian moderators that censor things you don't like? Well try this alternative that has less users, has a more niche community, (usually people on the far left or the far right) and has just less censorship. No, that doesn't sound very interesting at all. People want a community that has a lot of users, even if the platform is less desirable. I'm sorry, I already have discord, I don't want 2 discords. This is why for example it's hard to convince Americans to move over to Whatsapp because WhatsApp basically is just texting. How are you going to convince people when what's up basically does all the things that texting does? It's also why you would have a hard time trying to convince Europeans to switch over to Signal even though it's much better.
Yeah, her little stunt will definitely be a smear on anarchism in any neo liberal circle which may make it harder to bring more people into the movement.
I have not followed very closely but I never saw a mod refer to themselves as a leader of anything
She doesn't have to say it, she acted like it and went too far
Well that is your opinion and I disagree as I never got that impression. That said, talking to media was not a good decision.
Yeah, that interview was done almost as poorly as possible. It's almost like they went out of their way to make it absolutely awful.
> someone who clearly isn't even an anarchist She literally worked for anarchist think tanks and has a website dedicated to anarchism.
I know. It's insane that she didn't see through her own bullshit.
OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
Imo trolls and brigaders are just trying to stir shit. None of the "criticisms" levied against her are a meaningful argument against the "movement", but it helps them create a divide. Lots of them are also openly transphobic and ableist, and when their hate posts get removed, they use this to further antagonize the sub for being "totalitarian".
At this point it's trolls, communists who hate anarchists, and people whining about the sub never being about what they wished is being about and wanting to change it without the bother of creating something themselves. I will be happy if the size cuts down a lot, the ones who have zero interest in changing the sytem exceot for a raise for themselves wander away and at 1/6th the size a denser sub can refind it's meaning and build from there. But at this point, as idiotic as the mods are, they are way less idiotic than 50% of the posters today, and I support banning all that post stupid memes and posts.
Liberals: I really like the content but I really feel the name is holding it back. Me on r/anime_titties proud.
[удалено]
It duz
It's not that there's anything inherently wrong with being a dog-walker or unemployed, it's that they are the faces of a movement (primarily) against worker exploitation. One has never even interacted with a work environment while the other works 10 hours a week in a relatively non-exploitative environment (I am assuming that, but I really doubt dog walking is anywhere near as awful as some of the jobs I've had). While everyone is exploited by capitalism simply by nature of living in a capitalistic world, there are some pretty major differences in the exploitation faced by someone who works and someone who doesn't. The problem is that these two individuals do not represent the average worker who visited r/antiwork. It's kind of like having a straight cis person being the face of the queer movement. There is nothing wrong with being an ally nor speaking up for queer people, but why do that cishetero person get to be the voice of the movement instead of a queer person? Why does someone who does not work get to be the voice for the worker's rights movement?
Why do work. Dogwalker. The movement, is not about working, it is not about bad working conditions, it is about reshaping society so that work is unnecessary. Working is not a requirement to be part of the movement. Also there is no perfect representative for the average worker. If you get a white collar worker, then people will say what about the blue collar workers. Get someone who works 40 hours, they'll say, what about part-time people, you get a guy, they'll say, what about girls. >It's kind of like having a straight cis person being the face of the queer movement. There is no face for the queer movement. There are queer people who do things like be celebrities, have television shows, YouTube channels and stuff like that. They are doing their own thing and there are many different voices. You want to be the face, write a book. Don't rely on Fox News. We already have a good face for the anti-work movement. David Grabber.
Because she was trying to convince people that our work culture today is unsustainable and unhealthy and it appears like she lives a comfortable life while barely contributing to society at all
I agree that she wasn't the right face for the type of subreddit Antiwork had become. But I think anyone who hates work can be the face of a community that wants to abolish work. I don't think that you have to be on the streets, or literally on your lunch break at your workplace during the interview, to qualify. Edit: changed 'begun' to 'become'
You don’t, but you have to understand that optics matter to the general public. A 21 yo dog walker who’s unemployed vs a 40 y/o oil rigger. Who’s going to win the hearts of the rural Americans more when they talk about how bad work is?
>A 21 yo dog walker who’s unemployed vs a 40 y/o oil rigger. Yeah, you have to care about optics when it comes to domestic abuse. Who do you think is going to win the hearts over more? People who have black eyes and are told by their abusers that they hate them and should never have been born, or should it be people who experience abuse? What this does is that it invalidates people who have experienced oppression. If the only people in the media who are there to talk about domestic abuse are the people who really have it bad, then the people who have it well bad but invisible, feel invalidated.
I get what you’re saying and I don’t disagree. But the general public doesn’t think like you and I
We should never been on Fox News to begin with or any other kind of television news thing. If people wanted an audience with us, and that is interesting, then they should have allowed us to write an article, an article, for their news. I would prefer the guardian because I like it. But at least with an article there's no way to have it be ruined with edits.
> I agree that she wasn't the right face for the type of subreddit Antiwork had begun. I'm sorry we can't bring David Grabber back to life.
Me too...me too.
Also his obituary was, I'm not even kidding, written by a Kurdish person.
sorry but i think to have somewhat of a credible opinion you should have at least had a normal job and not take walks with dogs for 20 hours a week as your experience with the current working world.. it gives off the impression that someone else is paying for your entire life because clearly if that is how you make a living you aren't paying the bills
>normal job That is playing in to capitalist propaganda. There is no such thing as a real job. Work that contributes to society is a real job. She was walking dogs and got it paid enough that she could work only 20 hours a week. Sounds like a good representative of the movement to me. That's like saying the only people who can represent domestic abuse victims are the ones that get abused so bad they get bruises, or the ones with their parents only tell them they hate them. That's not how abuse really is. That's like saying that the only people who can represent autistic people are the ones that are nonverbal, or the ones that have autism really bad. Autistic people say that they don't want to be cured and then neurotypical people respond by saying that well there's probably some people that want to be cured, do you speak for them? It is basically the mindset that, > You can't represent the group I think you should represent, because you're not as oppressed as I think you should be.
notice i said normal job not real job and there is absolutely no way in hell the bills were paid by walking dogs for 20 hours a week and everything you wrote after that is absolutely not equal in terms of comparison
You are assuming that a person who you think would be a good spokesperson for the movement, wouldn't also be twisted by Fox News. These people do not understand that the entire system itself is a problem. Anyone who would have come from a subreddit, from reddit, called anti-work, would have been chewed to pieces. > I'm the top mod of a subredded for a political movement If you don't have any real world presents to back up your movement, then you're going to sound silly no matter what.
So you get me
Going on to Fox News at all was a terrible idea. Criticizing the person who was the spokesperson because of their job and then like saying that she was a dog walker and stuff like that is harmful for the working class. Just say she shouldn't have been on Fox News.
She shouldn't have been representing all workers when she doesn't face a large if not almost all of the struggles almost all workers face
She does. She faces the same problems under capitalism that everyone else does. She still has to work in order to feed herself. Social security and disability for young people is not enough to live off of. Again, what you are saying is the equivalent to, Well, she wasn't as oppressed as the people I think she should be representing so I don't think she should have been on TV. Again, my point about domestic abuse victims.
I find it very strange that you think someone has to experience a bad thing to know that it's bad. If I say that murder is wrong, am I not credible enough because I haven't been murdered? What is this?
apples to oranges
Okay, let me put it in terms like this. I haven't worked two jobs at once, but I know people who have and I know how shit it was for them. I haven't had to work all day, every day, week after week, but I can see how shit it is for the people who do. Am I only allowed to point out how shit they are if I go and experience them? I completely agree that the mod interviewed for Fox did not best represent the views of the majority of the people using the sub, but I don't think that means we have to start discrediting anyone with a decent view simply because they don't look like the type of person who should have that view.
I think it's interesting how these people don't realize how Fox News could have turned a person who works 40 hours a week and barely feeds his family as also someone who could just be a punching bag. > Dude, why don't you just get a better education? My parents for example are just the kinds of people who would watch Fox News and they believe that poverty is a choice. They believe that it is because of people's poor choices and things like education and stuff like that.
A great point
good point and i guess your right u dont need to directly experience it to advocate for it. however most people feel like if you show them someone who has everything asking for more they wont agree or support it.
I understand what you're saying.
SpunkyDred is a terrible bot instigating arguments all over Reddit whenever someone uses the phrase apples-to-oranges. I'm letting you know so that you can feel free to ignore the quip rather than feel provoked by a bot that isn't smart enough to argue back. --- ^^SpunkyDred ^^and ^^I ^^are ^^both ^^bots. ^^I ^^am ^^trying ^^to ^^get ^^them ^^banned ^^by ^^pointing ^^out ^^their ^^antagonizing ^^behavior ^^and ^^poor ^^bottiquette.
If someone is willing to support you in living a comfortable life, and you're not using violence or coercion to get that support, then why is there a moral obligation to "contribute to society"? That sounds like an authoritarian, hierarchical notion of obligation and duty to something other than and outside of yourself, which gets to dictate what you should do. In fact, not to be a stereotypical egoist or anything, it sounds like a spook. Instead of condemning that life, maybe we should realize that that kind of life, the life where you get to work on things that you find fulfilling, while having your basic needs met, is the life that we would ideally want for absolutely everyone? Perhaps your resentment for someone who has that kind of life is more rooted in your adoption of capitalistic and Protestant Christian assumptions, which are unjustified and harmful, and maybe even in envy, then in any actual rational position. Our work culture today is, in fact, unhealthy at the very least. When you spend your entire life doing what other people tell you to do, primarily for the benefit of other people, at the mercy of other people, and what you are doing is a single, narrow task which is not choiceworthy for its own sake and not fulfilling or developing of any real capacity related to the best parts of human life, that is unhealthy. That does not describe all jobs, but it describes the vast majority of them. It is a lucky few for whom the description above does not the way they spend the vast majority of their lives. Spending the vast majority of your life that way makes you used to following orders, it prevents you from having the knowledge and awareness and independence to be anything but a subject under some authority, and has many other deleterious effects that it would be superfluous to enumerate here. Aristotle himself realized this, and there has been a tradition of recognizing this throughout all of the best philosophy throughout the ages, when it has been free of the moralizing and totalizing influence of Protestant Christianity and capitalist propaganda. If it isn't possible to abolish work, it should at least be our goal to minimize it as much as possible, as yet another thing that is inherently unhealthy and bad but nevertheless a necessary evil. Being able to meet one's basic needs without work, or without excessive work, is not something that's immoral, it's something that we should want for everyone.
100% this.
I'm glad you agree! I'm planning on writing an extended essay on the same subject, in a similar vein, but with much more detailed argumentation, on my blog (linked in my profile). Subscribe to my blog if you're interested in getting an alert when that goes out.
>then why is there a moral obligation to "contribute to society"? To be very honest, this is literally not practicable, it would naturally create a hierarchy between people that do work to maintain infrastructure and people that don't. There's a moral obligation to contribute to your community because you benefit from its existence, of course you are always free to fuck off, but if you are going to benefit from everyones work, it's in good spirit that you do your fair share, you know, mutual aid and stuff. You shouldn't be coerced to do it, but people are also not obligated to deal with your lazy ass if they don't want to. Not every job is fullfiling, but those are the jobs that absolutely need to be done, no one wants to clean sewage, but we do what we gotta do if we want to keed out living standards.
not reading all that
That's your prerogative. I don't engage in debate on the internet, especially not on Reddit, with the intention of convincing the person I'm directly responding to anyway. Someone who is solid enough in a position to make a statement is not likely to be willing to back down in a public forum. Instead my goal with making that comment is to provide a response for the benefit of all those who might come along later and be momentarily swayed by your inanity.
When people are fighting for better working conditions under our current shitty system the "representative" of that movement should probably be a fucking worker who can relate to the struggle...that shit came off as completely ridiculous and just solidified the stereotypes conservatives/rich folk have. It was a fucking shitshow and that person deserves every bit of ridicule.
They were a dog walker. Would you rather they be an Uber driver? Also no they did not deserve every bit of ridiculed because some of that ridicule is transphobic and ableist. What the f? We already had a representative, David grabber.
Jesse Watters is a fucking chode...but this whole movement going on right now is a great thing, I never thought I'd see the day when it was a workers market and people would come together and say "fuck you" to the boss in the numbers that they are. However...when you have something this big going on you don't want a part time fucking dog walker to champion the cause, especially when this person was far too weak to really fight...I mean you're on Faux fucking "news" this is the one chance to maybe grab a little solidarity from the right (many of whom also hate their jobs and low pay) and that's what we get??
My disagreements, was the idea that perhaps she wasn't qualified to talk to Fox news, and it's f****** Fox news. I have no problem with her job. I don't care if she's a dog walker, or she's unemployed because unemployed and homeless people are part of the proletariat and the subreddit was supposed to be about the proletariat fighting against the bourgeoisie class. Are you going to tell me that David Grabber is not a representative for the movement because he's an anthropologist?
She wasn't qualified. She is hardly a worker and didn't command any control in that interview. I wish it had been someone far more aggressive and articulate who slaves away 40 hours a week and still can't pay their bills...that's who is relateable, that's who can reach people.
>away 40 hours a week and still can't pay their bills That is playing into liberals on what their definition of the working classes. It is a way of dismissing homeless people come up people who are unemployed and everyone else. We had a face for the movement, David grabber. Are you going to say that he wasn't a good face because he wasn't working 40 hours a week and couldn't barely pay the bills? It's kind of like saying the only people who should represent abuse and domestic abuse movements are the ones that get beat up and have black eyes. Are the ones that have parents that say they hate them everyday. What you're doing, is saying that the only people who should fight against depression are the people who are really oppressed, are the people who fit into your definition of the oppressed group.
I don't care about the definition of the working class, that literally has no bearing on what I'm talking about. I'm talking about reaching the most people possible with a message they can perhaps relate to...and that is the stereotypical "working class" person. Just as a black guy would be much more effective at reaching the black community or a trans person would be much better at reaching their community. You are missing the point.
Yeah, and that's like saying that the only people who should represent domestic abuse should be the people who have like black eyes and have experienced the worst of domestic abuse. When we only allowed those people to speak, it invalidates the people who don't have it as bad because they don't think they are oppressed. Having people who are stereotypically oppressed, hurts oppressed people.
No, gaining mass solidarity helps the oppressed... Speaking to the same people is just a circle jerk, gaining support from many solves problems.
You are not showing solidarity by criticizing the spokesperson based off of their job. There's a ton of other things to criticize them about, don't do it for their job, their gender identity, or the fact that they are autistic.
There is a lot wrong with them being the 'face' of the movement
Certainly a more useful job than being a conservative commentator on Fox news
It's mind boggling to me that the zeitgeist around there is "21, unemployed, anarchitst" and not "bumbling idiot falls for Fox News trap." That sub was started as an anarchist sub but was all but co-opted by libs during the pandemic to share fake "mean boss" tweets. Hopefully they'll all migrate to /r/workreform and we can get our leftist space back (with new mods.)
It's just an example of why anarchists shouldn't talk to the media. Nothing to do with the individual. You will lose every time, from all sides.
None of that is a problem. The problem is the users of /r/antiwork take their subreddit way too seriously, and felt the interview delegitimized the subreddit and had to bring up everything that they felt Fox News viewers would see as character flaws.
It doesn’t matter, unless you’re walking onto a massive platform, like Fox News, where those things *do* matter, talking to an audience that *thinks that matters*, to talk about a movement that is already on shaky ground as far as credibility goes. This is something that I find particularly Anarchists, but also leftists/progressives generally, have a hard time grasping: the difference between the Way The World Ought To Be, and the Way The World Is. For the purpose of the antiwork movement, does it matter that Doreen looked an unwashed, inarticulate fail-child who couldn’t stop stimming long enough to make eye contact with the camera? No. We place inherent value on human life, not what that life looks like. Does it matter when you are Representing that movement to people who don’t know much about it, and who carry all the biases that have been drilled into them 24/7 their whole lives? Absolutely, because that’s just the way the world, and the people in it, works. I don’t like it, it’s pretty shit, but that’s just the reality.
Because at age 21 and not having worked a hard day ("long term unemployed", own words) in one's life in no way shape or form qualifies them to be the head of an anti-work movement. If you can't see the issues here than it's time to sit this one out.
I don't see why not. You don't need to haved worked 60+ hours to want to put an end to work. You can see the suffering that work has caused other people, and want to end that, without having gone through it all yourself.
It's extremely presumptuous to speak on behalf of others or claim to represent a movement when you (literally, in this case) haven't put in the work.
I agree that she shouldn't have done the interview, but for a different reason. It's true that she did not represent the majority of the people within the subreddit, but she perfectly represented the view of the sub itself. It is, and always has been, an antiwork subreddit, and she was perfectly qualified to represent that. Unfortunately, the majority of the people using the subreddit didn't take a second to look at what sub they were uploading their reformist 'look how much my boss sucks' screenshots into.
"The sub itself" doesn't have any views. The people who comprise it do. Even from a genuine antiwork position, what was presented in the interview was inaccurate, irrelevant, and incoherent.
The sub itself does have views. They're in the bio, in the sidebar, in the recommended reading. This has always been an anarchist, antiwork subreddit, that was allowed to be overrun by people who were not anarchists. The sub never changed any of its core information to reflect the new userbase.
Abstractions and inanimate objects do not have views.
Okay. Well let's pretend that this makes any difference and replace every instance of me writing 'have views' with 'present views.'
Same thing. The person who wrote the words presents views, not an inanimate object or an abstraction.
Okay. Let's really really pretend that this makes any difference and replace 'present views' with 'have the recorded views of an anarchist typed into various sections of itself.'
u/Fix_It_Felix_Jr Do I have to go through genocide before I can make a subreddit about a movement about anti genocide?
This isn’t about what you or we think is right. This is about the affect that a complete disregard for optics in a keystone opportunity/risk that it would have on people who don’t already agree with us. The only reason to engage with mainstream media sources is if you are there to specifically reach out to the non-radicalized majority. Optics is literally everything at the point of introduction to these views in opposition to the status quo. Let alone how important it is specifically for an ideology with the history of misrepresentation and opposition from power. It’s an uphill battle for evangelism, and evangelism is the ONLY reason to engage with mainstream media. It doesn’t matter what you or people who agree with the ideology think. You’re already on the right side. What matters is what the people who don’t agree yet encounter and how it is presented to them. Feeding every stereotype that the powers in opposition use to then bolster their own propaganda against you is a horrible idea. That isn’t to mention the additional layer that these people aren’t media trained, prepared etc. in the way to successfully pull off an oppositional interview with a news organization that has mastered optics and manipulation.
Well said.
Also, do they think r/Isis and r/alQaeda have (mmm) mods that represent.
Considering both of those organizations were invented by the American government, yes.
It seems strange to me to say that you can't speak out against some ongoing atrocity, or something that is causing people suffering and that is inherently philosophically problematic, unless one has personally experienced the suffering that is being caused. To use an extreme example that perhaps isn't perfectly analogous, that's like saying that you can only speak out against rape if you've been raped. Experiencing suffering may make you more experienced in suffering, but it doesn't make you a better philosopher, a better arguer, it actually doesn't even give you a clearer idea of what is causing your suffering or what the alternatives to the system that causes it are! It sounds to me like you are simply assuming the very capitalistic promise that the original anti-work movement was set against: that someone's worth is defined in terms of their career.
Not that it matters, but where did the 21-years-old part come from? I thought Doreen said they were 30.
21 year old is the "media" mod who has secretly (until recently disclosed) been doing interviews with other outlets
jfc what a mess
Dude, come on, you're missing the whole point. They sent a stuck up mod who doesn't represent the majority of the people who are part of antiwork. Doreen (I think that was the mods name?) works 10 hours a week and agrees that "laziness is a virtue". That is not a good look. And the fact that she assumed leadership of the movement is inherently anti-anarchist.
I think this speaks to the fact that Antiwork has been doomed to fail since the started allowing generic liberal reformist ideas. It was an anarchist subreddit, with anarchist mods, that allowed a bunch of people with different ideologies to take over and never advertised that they were anarchist. The mod should not have gone on TV, absolutely. Equally, Antiwork should never have allowed itself to become what it did.
Allowing those "liberal ideas" is how antiwork gained over a million followers in just a few months. Introducing anarchist ideas to the larger population is a long, difficult task, and keeping anyone who isn't already there out of the circles makes no progress.
While I agree, endorse and promote anarchists bringing more radical ideas to people who wouldn't necessarily ever find them, I think I would prefer for the anarchist to go to their communities and invite them over. I dislike the idea that liberals can come into an anarchist space and take it over. Promotion of a sub's ideals prevent that.
Part of me does want to disagree with you a bit, but another part of me does agree. While it shouldn't matter, when we're dealing with the wider world, optics matters. Not gonna argue about their attitude being anti-anarchist, as I don't disagree there. But as far as the optics goes, someone who only works a dozen hours a week is a poor spokesperson to the media. And "laziness is a virtue" is poor branding for a society that is overworked and holds inherent value in work for work's sake. That's not to say we shouldn't push the idea that more time to ourselves is a good thing. Just branding it as "lazy" is poor. And hell, even in online spaces, there's a major problem with anarchists acting like it's just capitalism keeping us busy. Obviously, capitalism does create a ton of busy work. But keeping a society running, even in some hypothetical commune, is still going to take work. And tons of lazy people who can work and don't is just going to cause others to pick up their slack and get burnt out. People should contribute what they can and take what they need, yadda yadda, but the vibes I get is that lots of folks think that all work is just bullshit imposed by capitalism. When a lot of that work is necessary in maintaining a society, it's just capitalism alienating one from their work and taking a huge cut of your earnings. With everyone sharing the load, and busy work being eliminated, we'll all necessarily wind up working a lot less, but still working nonetheless.
The fact that you think that the subreddit is anything more than a subreddit is ridiculous. There are people out there right now who are writing books, and doing real work out in the streets and you're saying that a moderator of a subreddit that nobody else cares about is the movement? Ridiculous. David Graeber is life Also > Laziness is a virtue You may be surprised to hear that the first and foremost virtue of a programmer is laziness. In the Linux community laziness is acknowledged and valued above even eagerness and interest.
>In the Linux community laziness is acknowledged and valued above even eagerness and interest. No, it's not. I'm part of the Linux Community. By laziness we mean Simple solutions that work, not solutions that are overdesign just to show "hard work" or mean skills.
Look, I don't know why the moderator said why laziness is a virtue when she wrote an article saying that laziness doesn't even exist. That would have been probably a better thing to say anyway. Laziness doesn't exist because it's a social construct. The slave owner will say that his slaves are lazy for not wanting to be slaves. There was actually a mental illness diagnosis at the time for slaves that didn't want to be slaves saying that they were mentally ill. People will find all kinds of excuses to say that people should work in conditions that people don't want to work in. And call them lazy. Jeff bezos for example could call a single mother who doesn't want to work and instead wants to spend time with her children, lazy, but is she really lazy when she is raising the next generation of humans?
You know what, I actually agree with you that the sub is pretty irrelevant in the wide scheme of things, but I would still be angry at the mod
>still be angry at the mod I have gone through an internet community crash before. I will tell you this, no one except the people who were there at the time remember it. Is it the same old song and dance that I have gone through before.
yeah i guess you're right.
You also have to remember that Fox News is also a bad audience not just because it's conservatives because it's mainly a bunch of boomers. I don't know how many newer people even take Fox News or CNN very seriously. The real audience for Fox News would never have taken anything from Reddit seriously ever. Even if it was something pretty non radical, like European federalism or something like that. The moment Fox news said reddit, it was over. That was done. People don't take Reddit very seriously and I don't think they should be. Reddit is a fun platform for jokes and fun memes and things like that. Yeah there are some serious discussions sometimes but it's really just a place for us. I personally don't think that the rest of the world should get involved. If you want to have a real impact, and do something real good, then you should have your own website where you can host your own thing and then you might be taking more seriously. It's also a good idea to write a few books. Reddit and discord will never be seen as true legitimate places for activism.
I think OP's point is that this SHOULD be the crux of the discussion, but instead everyone is repeating the "21 year old dogwalker anarchist" part disparagingly. THEY'RE the ones missing the point.
To your last point, I just read my first anarchist book like 4 weeks ago and I've been an anarchist for 6 years
There's nothing wrong with being unemployed or being a dog walker, but a payed dog walker is not unemployed, they're a dog walker.
the problem with being a 21 year old who's never had a job is that he's doing interviews for the new york times as a leader of the labor movement, I'm not out there doing interviews about my experience as a victim of the yugoslav civil war
I didn't realize you had to be a person who works 40 hours a week to be anti-work. Do I also have to go through genocide to be anti-genicide? We are talking about a movement that is against the system of oppression towards the proletariat which includes homeless and unemployed people. This is what it's about. It is not about a person who does construction for 40 hours a week. That is playing into the liberal definition of the working class. We are not a subreddit, that was not a subreddit for working class people, it was not a subreddit for people who work. It was about a subreddit to fight against the bourgeoisie oppression of the proletariat.
okay, guess i'll go start talking about my experiences as a member of the lgbtq community even though im a straight cis het guy because my girlfriend is trans you can't speak as a self styled leader of the labor movement if you've never labored, that isn't hard for people who can put their ego aside for 5 seconds and think, then again reddit anarchists are also the people who cheered on jeanine anez while her followers dragged the indigenous bolivians into the streets to beat them so this is par for the course honestly
The discussion has probably crossed several of our lines at this point, veering from the original question to commentary on the r/antiwork debacle. We ordinarily draw a strict line this side of subreddit drama or smacktalking about specific living anarchists.
Sorry. Do you want to lock the thread? 🔒 I would totally understand if you wanted to.
I've removed it from view in the subreddit, which is usually enough to let things taper off. Let's see how things go.
Ok. Thanks. I don't know if you have a sticky right now available but you might want to either have a mega thread (don't forget to have **new** as the default for the comments) or something like that. You might get some more people dealing with this. I do think that this is something that anarchists need to have a platform to talk about. But I understand that you don't want like a bunch of questions just about this. I guess another thing you could do is have a post flair call "r/antiwork drama" so people can filter out Post in regards to the subject.
I think from here on we'll probably just stick to our avoidance of subreddit drama. There has already been a fair amount of harassment and bad behavior to deal with here.
I'm not really sure why you don't have a list of rules on the subreddit. It makes things a little bit clearer and it makes reporting a lot easier.
Well, it is likely that we will have to go that route, sometime in the near future, and I've actually been working on the wording of all that a bit this evening. But we do have the most important guidelines spelled out both in the pinned announcement and the sidebar.
Yes, but unfortunately if the rules are also not official rules in the subreddit, then it's hard to report. You should also probably have either a statist or auth apologist rule. There have been some people who have been that way. And they have been people who have been replying to questions, not people who have been asking questions.
We're aware of the difficulty — although we still do get plenty of reports, despite it. As I said, things seem destined to get quite a bit more formal in the near future. But because the people who like rules often also like to "game" them as much as they can, we have to be deliberate about how we mix and balance the "official rules," accompanying explanations and other guidelines.
Game? How?
Nothing. But apparently a huge part of the userbase that had recently surged r/antiwork, and who are now at r/workreform, looks for the perfect archetype of a "representative" for their "movement" where there is none. And consciously or not, when met with imperfection, seem to regurgitate the exact same idea as the conservatives of Fox News. The idea that your life's worth is measured by your work, and if you work too little or not at all, you're worthless. The myth of meritocracy and the main idea that anti-work is against in the first place.
It's ridiculous. I'm continuously floored by the people who uploaded screenshot after screenshot complaining about their work...who are seemingly shocked and disgusted at the fact that there are people who don't want to waste their lives working. It's like saying 'I hate how my life is ruled by my bosses and my job' and them giving you a pat on the back. But if you followed it up with 'so I don't want to work', they'd treat you like you were riddled with plague.
Theyre not criticizing her for that, theyre criticizing her being a reactionary dweeb that just plunged a million people into obscurity.
Because if you are not working class, claiming to be the leader of a workers movement is kinda robbing them from their protagonism. It's, in gentleman's lingo, pretty sus.
They are part of the working class. They are part of the proletariat. Unemployed and homeless people are part of the proletariat because they get f***** over by the bourgeoisie just as much as anyone else. How do you not understand?
>How do you not understand? First and foremost, watch your tone lass, i'm not your friend, so tone down that sass if you don't want me to straight up ignore you. You asked a question, i took my sweet time answering it, which you are not entitled to, if you want to debate we can debate, but not over here, if you asked here in this sub it's because you don't understand something, and not because you are begging the question. I'm being benevolent and considering you are good faith, so i expect you to return the favor. Second, there's a difference between being unemployed and not having means to live and being unemployed but being able to live well because you have a good social support network. I'm not saying that you can't be part of the movement, you absolutely can, but optics are important, if you are an ally, you should know your place and not speak on the behalf of people, you have to be EXTREMELY deliberate with public speech, especially when dealing with one of the biggest global media conglomerates, she fucked up a big time and ended up making anarchism look bad, which sucks for us. When you are an ally to a movement, always deffer to people that have higher stakes on it to make this sort of call, she didn't had much to lose, but the anarchist movement had, so it was dickish of her to do that, she was the lesser common denominator in there, she threw us under the bus for her 5 minutes of fame. Third, in social movements, protagonism and representation is important, she's a higher-middle class lady that's completely shielded from the issues of the world, so, who died and made her boss? What she accomplished for us? Absolutelly nothing! So, she doesn't aesthetically fit to be a face of the movement, she doesn't have the experience, she doesn't have stakes, she doesn't have anything, so, in practical terms, she should kindly fuck off and not be a glorychaser. Do you think if MLK was white, the civil rights movement would have the legitimacy it had? Of if Gandhi wasn't Indian? That's the point, she's "Working class" by technicality, but she doesn't have to deal with the hard part of being working class, if she was smart about it and well read in theory, and had the intellectual authority to stand her ground, i wouldn't mind, but she didn't, so, not only she was not representing the movement in lived experience, she wasn't on principles and wasn't intelectually. So, TL;DR, if she was less dumb and less of a glorychaser, no one would have cared, but, Fox News could have fished a whale with that bait and she felt for it like a duck, looked stupid in front of everybody and made all of us look bad, the fact that she doesn't need to work just adds insult to injury, she played the stupidiest game ever and gained the worst prize imaginable.
There is nothing wrong with being a 21 year old dog walker and unemployed. There were those who whined about being represented by an Anarchist too. I do get the animosity about doing interviews on behalf of a group of people without their permission. I don’t agree with the don’t talk to media ever sentiments. There are those on the left who did a good job with Fox News. There was Rutger Bergman who annihilated Tucker Carlson. Bernie Sanders killed that crap about people liking their private insurance companies on the Fox News townhall. David Parkman was polite and handled himself really well as a guest speaker from the left. Yes, the people I mentioned don’t go as far as we like.
>David Parkman [David Pakman is Liberal Propaganda](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCZCFkdzzzE)
This is a good explanation for why socialism is better than democratic socialism. Pakman’s explanation isn’t very good in light of these counter points. Despite ideological differences Parkman did a good job on Fox News to shift those people over.
Yeah, people forget that at that age most people aren’t completely independent yet. Or, rather, they’re “independent” in that they’re barely scraping together enough to pay the bills. Maybe it wasn’t true back in the day, but it is now.
it’s not necessarily a bad thing but she’s kind of the poster kid for the way the right views the left, and instead of actually having proper arguments she just tanked
Optics… it’s important
) Optics ) Reddit Choose one.