9 ms·

Reddit's antiwork sub and the online movement to end work

27 points by onychomys 5y ago

dmonitor 5y ago
r/antiwork is a terrible forum. The legitimate criticisms of western working culture are mixed in with people who just don't think they need to contribute to society in order to benefit from it. There's too many highschoolers complaining about their first job to take it seriously.
- PickledHotdog 5y ago
  Who's to say that "contributing to society" is entirely encompassed in the idea of "work" though? Perhaps those posters contribute in other ways? Plenty of valuable contributions are made outside of traditional "work"
  - interator7 5y ago
    Like what?
    - skeaker 5y ago
      Every single useful open source program that was made by a community
      - interator7 5y ago
        I mean, isn't that just working for free? If the only means towards contributing to society were through things like open-source, you would essentially be saying that society should be run off of volunteerism.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    You can contribute in any way that people who have worked to create food, shelter, useful energy, clothing, and other items that you want are willing to exchange for those contributions. Call it work, call it art, call it whatever you want, but those people aren’t likely to bust their ass so you can enjoy the fruits of their labor while returning nothing.
    - WastingMyTime89 5y ago
      I’m in favor of people contributing to society and I find meaningful work to be necessary to my own well-being but the idea that people need to make something productive in order to compensate others who do is laughable in a world where capital gains are so superior to wages.
      - jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y ago
        Why? Labor with capital is incredibly more useful and productive than labor alone. We aren't any smarter today than people a couple hundred years ago, the main difference that makes our lives much easier is we've built up various forms of capital over the years.
        WastingMyTime89 5y ago
        > Why? Because people who owns the capital don't have to work and still hugely profit from society that's why. Also we innovated and built machinery not capital. Don't confuse the abstraction we use to track ownership with what is actually owned.
        jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y ago
        We built machinery, processes, IP, etc using saved and invested capital. That machinery wouldn't be built without the capital. And thus labor would be nearly valueless. The machines and processes also stop functioning when the ownership structure is destroyed as we have recently seen in the Venezuelan oil wells. With capital its very much the virtual (ownership) driving the creation, maintainance and operation of the real (machines, processes, etc).
- dusing 5y ago
  Not to mention the incredibly fake content that gets heaps of upvotes and attention. Which encourages the next fake to one up and so on.
  - 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
    That is the state of every single large subreddit that remotely ties into personal experiences/stories though.
    - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
      It is, and I think it’s a general problem that deserves a lot more attention than it gets. A lot of people, and I should be clear that I include myself, are consuming an endless stream of fake stories that validate their preconceptions and biases. It’s not healthy and very possibly dangerous.
  - YATA0 5y ago
    Considering the efforts troll farms put in during the previous election cycles on reddit, I wonder if what we're seeing in places like /r/antiwork is more or less the same. Subversion by nation-state troll farms fomenting intergenerational strife.
    - idontwantthis 5y ago
      I think it’s more that they are jumping on the zeitgeist subreddit for Karma now to legitimize their political posts during the election.
      - YATA0 5y ago
        That's exactly what the Russian troll farms fomented. They were the ones who drove what the zeitgeist was.
- captainoats 5y ago
  I’m amazed at how people see themselves as stuck or forced into their job, especially the younger ones and especially people without kids. For people in that position there are almost endless possibilities for ways to make a living. I’m concerned that many of the people in these communities are depressed and suffering from anhedonia and a self reinforcing cycle of hopelessness.
  - zx321 5y ago
    Possibilities such as?
    - MisterMower 5y ago
      Moving to where work is available, for starters.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - jkic47 5y ago
      Every person they know must have a story on how they make a living - those would be the possibilities to investigate.
    - adamiscool8 5y ago
      Sell antiwork merch?
  - NullInvictus 5y ago
    The anti-work philosophy is not anti-labor. I think anyone of sense can acknowledge that energy needs to be put into the system in order to produce the necessities of life. Rather, the ideology is about allowing people to focus on the kinds of labor which brings value and meaning the community and the ones doing it. It's about eliminating 'bullshit' work, work which does not generate anything other than inane products, stock values and tools to do more of the same. Much of the work around the software industry focuses on this kind of 'bullshit' work. Possibilities: Inexperienced young people are made to commit hard and fast to a career path. Once locked in, this choice (in the US at least) often comes with a large financial burden and time. Support is not there to pivot. Immediately after you leave (trade, academic institutions), the culture sets to weighing you down with more debt. By the time you extract yourself from that, it's still hard to pivot because now you're dealing with Ageism and sunk cost (will you recover this productivity and still put enough away to retire?). Even if you decide to bridge that gap, society provides you with absolutely no safety net. The punishment from making the wrong choice as a young dumb kid are harsh. The "Endless possibilities" is part of the depressing trap. They're _there_, but they're so far out of reach and dangerous that unless you happen to live a charmed life with a deep-pocketed safety net, the risk-reward just doesn't make sense. This is why many in the US want tax-sponsored education and single-payer healthcare, so they can make these pivots and find happiness without having to retire at 80. On being forced: There is really no sane way to disengage with exchanging labor. Say that I want to drop out and entirely disconnect myself. Say I fully agree to reject the products of society, be alone even unto death, and be self-sufficient. I can't buy a piece of land and sit on it. Eventually the Tax Man will come for me, and if I don't pay, he will take my land, with violence if need be. I cannot go hide in the woods. That land is the property of another or of the government - I will be chased by law enforcement and federal agents. I can't even just ghost through cities who are growing increasingly hostile to homeless populations. The system is powered by violence and coercion, and your only choice is to exchange labor for money. This could be a fair exchange if it lived up to promises. There is a rate where exchanging freedoms for perks makes sense. but a lot of people play entirely by the rules, do everything right, and still end up miserable, trapped and broken. So yeah, it's forced. If you can't sit back and live on generational wealth or rent on your assets, every job you've ever taken has implicit threat of force behind it. You can make bad-faith arguments about the existence of choice, but choice is an illusion unless the choices presented have a reality where taking that choice makes sense. Cake or Death - what kind of sane person chooses death over cake? I don't think anti-work is a pit of hopelessness. It's actually far more idealistic in its view that _the pieces are there_ and there are alternatives. Whether you believe that or not is really up you. That this briefly made it on to Hackernews surprised me - Hackernews continues to largely reflect the California Ideology, something that doesn't tend to breed a lot of solidarity outside of its own professions.
- skim_milk 5y ago
  It's in some ways, depending on how you look at it, it's even more extreme than Marx - at least Marx wanted to give everyone meaningful work. Even if the anti-workers get what they want, computers and robots doing everything, how are we getting there, and how do we find meaning in this post-work state? I would certainly not find meaning in watching entertainment 16 hours a day, but not even non-stop travel, hiking, leisurely conversations with our fellow liberated people (the stuff I like doing after work) could fill my void. I don't think it's stockholm syndrome to desire to fill all of our lives with some meaningful work and contribute to a society that loves you back! At least they point out the flaws of dog-eat-dog structured life, but the means to, the end-goal of, and the easiest society to pivot into that makes human life function certainly ought to be through meaningful, mutually value-adding work.
- melony 5y ago
  Many conservatives believe that highschoolers should be paid less for the same labor. This is a very common idea especially in the south. There is nobody to fight for that particular group except themselves. Unions just see them as competition. It is no wonder that they complain about their first job.
  - ativzzz 5y ago
    Australia has a "junior pay rate" where people under 21 can be paid less than minimum wage despite doing the same work. Sure you could argue they're less productive, but if you're doing minimum wage work I doubt it. https://www.fairwork.gov.au/pay-and-wages/minimum-wages/junior-pay-rates https://www.fairwork.gov.au/pay-and-wages/minimum-wages/juni...
    - melony 5y ago
      Exactly, everyone wants to oppress the juniors and use them as cheap labor. It is no wonder that they do not want the job. Seniority without real increase in productivity or merit is why unions are so unpopular.
  - xupybd 5y ago
    I worked in NZ on a youth rate. It was $4.80 in the late 90s. The adult min wage was around $10. There was a team of 5 of us that would come in and clean a factory on Saturday. It worked well for me. I loved the extra money and had no expenses of my own. I now work in the upper tier of a similar factory. I discussed with our operations manager getting in some school aged workers to clean. It doesn't work out to be cost effective. We can just get the guys on the floor to clean up. As the guys on the floor cost the same and have already been trained and issued all the required safety equipment.
jdmoreira 5y ago
I appreciate this movement even though I personally enjoy the kind of work I do and can't really see myself ever stopping. Let's be honest though, most people have it pretty rough… I like that people are coming together and at least venting about their situation. We really need to think what we are doing as a society if even in the richest of countries people are miserable with their jobs and life. Life should be simpler and more pleasant for everyone.
richardanaya 5y ago
zelon88 5y ago
Makes sense to me. Most jobs are just code that hasn't been written yet or simple machines that haven't been built yet. The only reason why is because there is no regulatory incentive to stop exploiting humans. We conquered the world already. We have enough technology to replace most human labor with automation and enable people to produce entertainment, media, and innovation of their own accord. Instead people run around anxious and impoverished for basically no reason. You would never know humans are at the top of the food chain looking from the outside. Why not get UBI done, replace the humans with robots, and then actually enjoy our lives?
- unrealhoang 5y ago
  I guess communism boogeyman is still very scary.
  - exolymph 5y ago
    Hundreds of millions died under attempts to impose communism. Yes, it is scary.
  - zelon88 5y ago
    I think people associate "communism" with "corrupt authoritarianism" and then associate UBI with "communism". The same people also conflate "capitalism" with "democracy" and forget that it is actually possible to have the latter without the former.
    - fulafel 5y ago
      Currently the scarily succesful (in terms of material gains) model seems to be capitalism without democracy.
- torbTurret 5y ago
  The world of entertainment and media is far more cutthroat and imbalanced than any current work equivalents. I can only imagine how much worse our world would be if we had everyone pursuing clout.

27 points by onychomys 5y ago

r/antiwork is a terrible forum. The legitimate criticisms of western working culture are mixed in with people who just don't think they need to contribute to society in order to benefit from it. There's too many highschoolers complaining about their first job to take it seriously.

PickledHotdog 5y ago
Who's to say that "contributing to society" is entirely encompassed in the idea of "work" though? Perhaps those posters contribute in other ways? Plenty of valuable contributions are made outside of traditional "work"
- interator7 5y ago
  Like what?
  - skeaker 5y ago
    Every single useful open source program that was made by a community
    - interator7 5y ago
      I mean, isn't that just working for free? If the only means towards contributing to society were through things like open-source, you would essentially be saying that society should be run off of volunteerism.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- sokoloff 5y ago
  You can contribute in any way that people who have worked to create food, shelter, useful energy, clothing, and other items that you want are willing to exchange for those contributions. Call it work, call it art, call it whatever you want, but those people aren’t likely to bust their ass so you can enjoy the fruits of their labor while returning nothing.
  - WastingMyTime89 5y ago
    I’m in favor of people contributing to society and I find meaningful work to be necessary to my own well-being but the idea that people need to make something productive in order to compensate others who do is laughable in a world where capital gains are so superior to wages.
    - jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y ago
      Why? Labor with capital is incredibly more useful and productive than labor alone. We aren't any smarter today than people a couple hundred years ago, the main difference that makes our lives much easier is we've built up various forms of capital over the years.
      - WastingMyTime89 5y ago
        > Why? Because people who owns the capital don't have to work and still hugely profit from society that's why. Also we innovated and built machinery not capital. Don't confuse the abstraction we use to track ownership with what is actually owned.
        jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y ago
        We built machinery, processes, IP, etc using saved and invested capital. That machinery wouldn't be built without the capital. And thus labor would be nearly valueless. The machines and processes also stop functioning when the ownership structure is destroyed as we have recently seen in the Venezuelan oil wells. With capital its very much the virtual (ownership) driving the creation, maintainance and operation of the real (machines, processes, etc).
dusing 5y ago
Not to mention the incredibly fake content that gets heaps of upvotes and attention. Which encourages the next fake to one up and so on.
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
  That is the state of every single large subreddit that remotely ties into personal experiences/stories though.
  - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
    It is, and I think it’s a general problem that deserves a lot more attention than it gets. A lot of people, and I should be clear that I include myself, are consuming an endless stream of fake stories that validate their preconceptions and biases. It’s not healthy and very possibly dangerous.
- YATA0 5y ago
  Considering the efforts troll farms put in during the previous election cycles on reddit, I wonder if what we're seeing in places like /r/antiwork is more or less the same. Subversion by nation-state troll farms fomenting intergenerational strife.
  - idontwantthis 5y ago
    I think it’s more that they are jumping on the zeitgeist subreddit for Karma now to legitimize their political posts during the election.
    - YATA0 5y ago
      That's exactly what the Russian troll farms fomented. They were the ones who drove what the zeitgeist was.
captainoats 5y ago
I’m amazed at how people see themselves as stuck or forced into their job, especially the younger ones and especially people without kids. For people in that position there are almost endless possibilities for ways to make a living. I’m concerned that many of the people in these communities are depressed and suffering from anhedonia and a self reinforcing cycle of hopelessness.
- zx321 5y ago
  Possibilities such as?
  - MisterMower 5y ago
    Moving to where work is available, for starters.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - jkic47 5y ago
    Every person they know must have a story on how they make a living - those would be the possibilities to investigate.
  - adamiscool8 5y ago
    Sell antiwork merch?
- NullInvictus 5y ago
  The anti-work philosophy is not anti-labor. I think anyone of sense can acknowledge that energy needs to be put into the system in order to produce the necessities of life. Rather, the ideology is about allowing people to focus on the kinds of labor which brings value and meaning the community and the ones doing it. It's about eliminating 'bullshit' work, work which does not generate anything other than inane products, stock values and tools to do more of the same. Much of the work around the software industry focuses on this kind of 'bullshit' work. Possibilities: Inexperienced young people are made to commit hard and fast to a career path. Once locked in, this choice (in the US at least) often comes with a large financial burden and time. Support is not there to pivot. Immediately after you leave (trade, academic institutions), the culture sets to weighing you down with more debt. By the time you extract yourself from that, it's still hard to pivot because now you're dealing with Ageism and sunk cost (will you recover this productivity and still put enough away to retire?). Even if you decide to bridge that gap, society provides you with absolutely no safety net. The punishment from making the wrong choice as a young dumb kid are harsh. The "Endless possibilities" is part of the depressing trap. They're _there_, but they're so far out of reach and dangerous that unless you happen to live a charmed life with a deep-pocketed safety net, the risk-reward just doesn't make sense. This is why many in the US want tax-sponsored education and single-payer healthcare, so they can make these pivots and find happiness without having to retire at 80. On being forced: There is really no sane way to disengage with exchanging labor. Say that I want to drop out and entirely disconnect myself. Say I fully agree to reject the products of society, be alone even unto death, and be self-sufficient. I can't buy a piece of land and sit on it. Eventually the Tax Man will come for me, and if I don't pay, he will take my land, with violence if need be. I cannot go hide in the woods. That land is the property of another or of the government - I will be chased by law enforcement and federal agents. I can't even just ghost through cities who are growing increasingly hostile to homeless populations. The system is powered by violence and coercion, and your only choice is to exchange labor for money. This could be a fair exchange if it lived up to promises. There is a rate where exchanging freedoms for perks makes sense. but a lot of people play entirely by the rules, do everything right, and still end up miserable, trapped and broken. So yeah, it's forced. If you can't sit back and live on generational wealth or rent on your assets, every job you've ever taken has implicit threat of force behind it. You can make bad-faith arguments about the existence of choice, but choice is an illusion unless the choices presented have a reality where taking that choice makes sense. Cake or Death - what kind of sane person chooses death over cake? I don't think anti-work is a pit of hopelessness. It's actually far more idealistic in its view that _the pieces are there_ and there are alternatives. Whether you believe that or not is really up you. That this briefly made it on to Hackernews surprised me - Hackernews continues to largely reflect the California Ideology, something that doesn't tend to breed a lot of solidarity outside of its own professions.
skim_milk 5y ago
It's in some ways, depending on how you look at it, it's even more extreme than Marx - at least Marx wanted to give everyone meaningful work. Even if the anti-workers get what they want, computers and robots doing everything, how are we getting there, and how do we find meaning in this post-work state? I would certainly not find meaning in watching entertainment 16 hours a day, but not even non-stop travel, hiking, leisurely conversations with our fellow liberated people (the stuff I like doing after work) could fill my void. I don't think it's stockholm syndrome to desire to fill all of our lives with some meaningful work and contribute to a society that loves you back! At least they point out the flaws of dog-eat-dog structured life, but the means to, the end-goal of, and the easiest society to pivot into that makes human life function certainly ought to be through meaningful, mutually value-adding work.
melony 5y ago
Many conservatives believe that highschoolers should be paid less for the same labor. This is a very common idea especially in the south. There is nobody to fight for that particular group except themselves. Unions just see them as competition. It is no wonder that they complain about their first job.
- ativzzz 5y ago
  Australia has a "junior pay rate" where people under 21 can be paid less than minimum wage despite doing the same work. Sure you could argue they're less productive, but if you're doing minimum wage work I doubt it. https://www.fairwork.gov.au/pay-and-wages/minimum-wages/junior-pay-rates https://www.fairwork.gov.au/pay-and-wages/minimum-wages/juni...
  - melony 5y ago
    Exactly, everyone wants to oppress the juniors and use them as cheap labor. It is no wonder that they do not want the job. Seniority without real increase in productivity or merit is why unions are so unpopular.
- xupybd 5y ago
  I worked in NZ on a youth rate. It was $4.80 in the late 90s. The adult min wage was around $10. There was a team of 5 of us that would come in and clean a factory on Saturday. It worked well for me. I loved the extra money and had no expenses of my own. I now work in the upper tier of a similar factory. I discussed with our operations manager getting in some school aged workers to clean. It doesn't work out to be cost effective. We can just get the guys on the floor to clean up. As the guys on the floor cost the same and have already been trained and issued all the required safety equipment.

jdmoreira 5y ago

I appreciate this movement even though I personally enjoy the kind of work I do and can't really see myself ever stopping. Let's be honest though, most people have it pretty rough… I like that people are coming together and at least venting about their situation. We really need to think what we are doing as a society if even in the richest of countries people are miserable with their jobs and life. Life should be simpler and more pleasant for everyone.

richardanaya 5y ago

zelon88 5y ago

Makes sense to me. Most jobs are just code that hasn't been written yet or simple machines that haven't been built yet. The only reason why is because there is no regulatory incentive to stop exploiting humans. We conquered the world already. We have enough technology to replace most human labor with automation and enable people to produce entertainment, media, and innovation of their own accord. Instead people run around anxious and impoverished for basically no reason. You would never know humans are at the top of the food chain looking from the outside. Why not get UBI done, replace the humans with robots, and then actually enjoy our lives?

unrealhoang 5y ago
I guess communism boogeyman is still very scary.
- exolymph 5y ago
  Hundreds of millions died under attempts to impose communism. Yes, it is scary.
- zelon88 5y ago
  I think people associate "communism" with "corrupt authoritarianism" and then associate UBI with "communism". The same people also conflate "capitalism" with "democracy" and forget that it is actually possible to have the latter without the former.
  - fulafel 5y ago
    Currently the scarily succesful (in terms of material gains) model seems to be capitalism without democracy.
torbTurret 5y ago
The world of entertainment and media is far more cutthroat and imbalanced than any current work equivalents. I can only imagine how much worse our world would be if we had everyone pursuing clout.