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

• clumpthump 5y ago
  [flagged]
  • CoastalCoder 5y ago
    I suggest we try to avoid a liberal-vs.-conservative discussion here. They typically result in acrimony with little to show for it.
    • Miner49er 5y ago
      You misunderstand OP. They seem to be a leftist, not a conservative. They find it ironic that the word recuperate (which has origins in the left) was recuperated or "sanewashed" by this article. It's actually interesting and kind of amusing. Sanewashing is a recuperation of recuperation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_(politics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_(politics)
    • clumpthump 5y ago
      I was not starting such a discussion. I'm baffled by your comment and can only assume you're reading my comment through an American lens, which is half foreign to me (only half because I'm exposed to so much of it on the Internet).
      • CoastalCoder 5y ago
        I apologize! I can no longer see your original comment, but I may have simply misread it.
• bjt2n3904 5y ago
  ...and creative writing, and astroturfing.
  • notahacker 5y ago
    Yeah. I like the term "sanewashing", but I'm not sure that really applies to the weird dramatic resignation fantasies the sub is famous for!
• A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
  Interesting. Having read the article I noted some of the talking points I regularly hear on Sirius Patriot channel ( and I assume used in other right wing media ) including Che ridicule. It is pretty effective in that regard. I personally saw r/antiwork as another incarnation of OWS. Only difference is that it was online ( so perception only ) and antiwork was very effectively destroyed via character assassination. I am sure it will be studied in terms of PR engagement and social manipulation.
• Besticle 5y ago
  It takes one bad experience to ruin a reputation. Guy went on Fox news (against the communities) wishes and made millions of people's first impression of r/AntiWork to be negative. In the modern world optics are EVERYTHING and that cannot be understated. Imho the first thing they need to change (which they have with their move to the new subreddit) is renaming it from r/AntiWork to r/WorkReform. Most of the sub (I'd wager >80%) are Americans asking for workers rights that are the norm in western Europe. Things like paid maternal/paternal leave, greater work life balance and paid overtime, flexibly working and WFH. The majority of people in America are almost certainly in favour of that, but you get a dog walker going on TV on a notoriously provocative network talking about "anti-work" it's just mind boggling.
  • causi 5y ago
    In the modern world optics are EVERYTHING and that cannot be understated. Imho the first thing they need to change (which they have with their move to the new subreddit) is renaming it from r/AntiWork to r/WorkReform. That was the biggest thing in my opinion. AntiWork was too open to the type of people who don't care about workers' rights and were just there because they think the world owes them a living. NEETs are horrible for the cause of labor reform.
    • djbusby 5y ago
      NEET, an acronym for "Not in Education, Employment, or Training" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEET https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEET
  • belval 5y ago
    It's against the rule to say that you did not read the article, so I won't say it, but: > In the modern world optics are EVERYTHING and that cannot be understated. Imho the first thing they need to change (which they have with their move to the new subreddit) is renaming it from r/AntiWork to r/WorkReform. /r/WorkReform exists already. > Most of the sub (I'd wager >80%) are Americans asking for workers rights that are the norm in western Europe. Things like paid maternal/paternal leave, greater work life balance and paid overtime, flexibly working and WFH. This is the author's point, that before /r/antiwork realigned itself, their moderator was actually representative of the average /r/antiwork user, that through an influx of left-aligned users, it got "sanewashed". These new users were ashamed of being associated with the original mod, but that mod is still very much the one that was dicussing legitimate /r/antiwork ideas before we ever heard of their fringe community.
• wsb_mod2 5y ago
  Great writeup. A subreddit getting co-opted by the masses to change its intentions is a story as old as reddit. See my username for how I know that to be true. Hopefully more subreddits will wake up and realize that being included in high activity feeds (r/all, popular) is not necessarily a good thing. We have. > Speaking of unflattering stereotypes, let’s be blunt for a moment: Most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people. I wholeheartedly agree with this.
  • cinntaile 5y ago
    I think this is where that phrase comes from. https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
  • dilippkumar 5y ago
    I’d love to hear your thoughts on wsb.
    • wsb_mod2 5y ago
      What do you want to know? I think r/wallstreetbets is still a fantastic place and more or less true to its purpose of finding interesting and novel trades. Much of the discussion has expanded, to discord (600K users, the limit) as well as the daily reddit talks (Think clubhouse but for reddit). The daily thread is still fantastic for a very quick list of interesting topics, which you can jump into and have a conversation with anyone. There still remains a decent sense of camraderie, but there are definitely fewer recognizable names amongst the volume of comments. More time being invested into handing out unique flairs will help with this Weekday meme restrictions over the past week has largely undone all the damage to the main feed and brought back a larger array of high quality discussion. Predictions add an interesting dimension to the subreddit where all users can participate regardless of personal wealth. --- So overall, I'd say it's going very well. There seems to be a significant amount of misconceptions both in the general population, as well as even our regular users, but as long as we continue to do the right thing and protect discussion quality, people will slowly but surely see the light.
• belval 5y ago
  > How exactly did it happen in /r/antiwork? Casuals found it. You know — the people who use the internet to laugh at funny memes rather than treating every post as a blow in a grand ideological struggle. That's the very force of the reddit hivemind. I have no interest in /r/antiwork nor their ideologies, but they kept popping up on /r/all, so they get a constant influx of people aligned with the reddit mean opinion, which in turn changes the original community. As long as the popularity of a subreddit is below a certain threshold, it gets to foster specific discussions on whatever fringe ideology you are interested in, but it never stays that way for long.
  • StriverGuy 5y ago
    Off topic, but my tin foil hat theory of r/antiwork is that this a massive psy-op being pushed by some other nation state. Reddits algo easily helps snowball and propagate ideas that are promoted by users within the sub. It is the perfect playbook to destabilize labor markets in a foreign country.
    • the_snooze 5y ago
      It's possible, but I don't consider it plausible at my current level of understanding. My null hypothesis is that there are some really loud people on the internet who like to talk loudly about their unpopular ideas. And they're unaware of how deeply unpopular those ideas are until their little corner of the internet suddenly gets mainstream public attention.
      • StriverGuy 5y ago
        So my thinking is the origin story of the sub is definitely organic. However, it is an easy win for a bad actor to push the narrative that a handful of loud voices are shouting about for their own interests.
        • achenet 5y ago
          Occam's razor. The parent comment is very likely right, it's probably just angry people posting on the internet.
• whatshisface 5y ago
  I think this post may be, in its parlance, "sanewashing" workaholism. For example, let's take this post from the subreddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/lo6wov/my_dads_a_working_class_hero/ https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/lo6wov/my_dads_a_... > "My dads a “working class hero” I wanna punch him in the face, we wanted to visit this weekend, we haven’t seen him in 2 months due to covid, we have three kids and so does he (6, 8 and 9) his wife passed away 2 years ago, and he’s been back to work for a year, he is on salary and gets no overtime, what’s he doing right now on this beautiful winter Saturday morning? Fucking working over time... not for money, but because they “need” him... fuck you, your family needs you and you been working 50 h a week on salary for 20 fucking years. Fucken boomers." When I read this, I see "haven't seen him in two months," "we have three kids and so does he (6, 8 and 9) his wife passed away," and "your family needs you." When the author read this, he saw "criticizing his father for hard work." I think we can all agree that the emotional cost to your family is a major, defining symptom of being a workaholic. This appears to be someone seeking support for that, but the author tries to ignore the emotional reality and paper it over with, well, honestly I don't need to rephrase it, I'm sure it's obvious. Neglecting to spend time with your family can be just as bad as neglecting to provide for them. If it didn't happen so often maybe we wouldn't have so make kids growing up with a deep-set hatred of jobs. You don't need to be Freud to make that association. ;)
  • JasonFruit 5y ago
    I see 50 hours a week as work, nothing more. "Haven't seen him in two months" sounds, in that context, like dramatic hyperbole. Dismissing someone's hard work to support a family with an age-related slur doesn't breed sympathy for a position, either.
    • HWR_14 5y ago
      I'm pretty sure the issue was more "I'm visiting my dad for the first time in months so my kids can play with their similarly aged uncles, and he's skipping our planned trip to do overtime" that he's reacting to, not the 50 hours a week regularly part. Although his siblings are being raised by a single dad, so maybe he needs to not work on saturdays?
• goodpoint 5y ago
  > The start of the answer lies in the simple truth of who Doreen Ford was: the person who almost single-handedly built the space, indisputably the single most accurate representative and the one most qualified to understand it. A community, by definition, cannot be build single-handedly. Especially a large subreddit, where hundreds of thousands visitors posted stuff, commented, upvoted and publicized the subreddit in other communities.
• echopurity 5y ago
  "Sanewashing" is a highly biased slur. It's usually called "reformism" by people who support actual change.
  • s1artibartfast 5y ago
    I think it adds some interesting new context, particularly around denial of origin and proclamation of homogeneity. E. G. It has always meant what I think it means. There is also the connotation of ignorance and post-hoc justification. Maybe this fits under the umbrella of reformism, but is not synonymous.
  • msla 5y ago
    "Sanewashing" is the charitable explanation: Someone convincing themselves that the slogan means something sane out of social pressure to conform and adopt a slogan they don't agree with. The less charitable explanation for what's going on is called "gaslighting": The people you're talking with know damn well the slogan means something insane, but they'll lie to you and act condescending and superior in order to convince you to ignore all of the evidence and accept a sane definition.
• deleted 5y ago
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• maerF0x0 5y ago
  A while ago I heard an adage about hiring, something like when you hire slow you can teach and grow your existing culture, but when you hire fast the equilibrium flips and the incoming culture is what your company will become. This is what happened to antiwork. They couldn't disseminate existing ideas and absorb the influx of new culture fast enough, so their culture became the incoming culture, which was approximately that of reddit.
• BowBun 5y ago
  My only question is, prior to the 'my manager sucks' posts and people getting encouraged to stand up for their rights/humanity, what exactly was r/antiwork _doing_? I feel like a majority of users still want to abolish wage slavery without the extreme anarchist association. Demanding better pay and treatment from our employers is an actionable item on the road to that. Besides just not working and living in poverty, I'm not sure what else the plan is. If a group has to choose between an idealized echo chamber of non-action and a washed-out version of the same thing but with real change in peoples' lives, I would take the latter.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • Miner49er 5y ago
    You can look at it on the internet archive to get an idea. Here's a random day in 2018: https://web.archive.org/web/20180903051111/https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180903051111/https://www.reddi...
    • foogazi 5y ago
      It’s all memes now
  • vorpalhex 5y ago
    It's important to understand that there is a separate movement with some overlap in users called r/WorkReform that is the more "hey, let's fix shitty employment problems" while AntiWork is supposed to be a far anarchist position. Of course, having a position does not make a plan tenable.
• 0F 5y ago
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  • lanfeust6 5y ago
    The mods had made this explicit: they are anti-Capitalist, and that is their mission. The unironic tolerance for Socialism/Communism in popular discussion is disturbing. EDIT: read the faq if you don't want to believe me, it's all there.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • dale_glass 5y ago
    Communism isn't really about "free shit", though. The slogan is "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" -- not that you get to sit on your butt and somehow everything still works out. You're still very much expected to work, in fact if you have any ability it's probably illegal for you not to. Now whether communism actually works or not is another matter, but I don't really see where you get the "free shit" angle.
    • 0F 5y ago
      Yes, communism is about that slogan. And anti work is about labor reform. Neither are true in practice.
    • slothtrop 5y ago
      > The slogan is "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" This is the fantasy. > You're still very much expected to work This is the reality. They contradict each other. The State will coerce you to work regardless of your "need" for it.
• throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  You know, for all this shitting on extremist anti-work anarcho communists, I find that their ideological consistency makes them quite tolerable even if I think their ideas would be laughably useless when taken to the extremes they advocate for. Contrast that with the (to use TFA's terminology) "gentrifiers" who blow like ideological tumbleweeds and hold beliefs simply based on whether those beliefs are advantageous to hold (Stalin would be proud). Principled extremists can be reasoned with. Compromises can be made. Progress can happen. Unprincipled faux-extremists are like herding cats. You give them one thing and they show up the next day bitching that you gave them the wrong thing. I know who I'd rather deal with.
  • whatshisface 5y ago
    >Principled extremists can be reasoned with. Compromises can be made. I think you've defined that they don't make compromises when you called them principled extremists. ;) But I do agree that they have advantages over opportunists who don't believe anything: sometimes an extremist will have discovered a nugget of truth that you can take out from the rest, while an opportunist only believes things that are wholly circumstantial and unlikely to help you.
• newaccount2021 5y ago
  [dead]
• tgb 5y ago
  I think this article is trying to have its cake and eat it too. If the sub has been sanewashed and overrun by average left-of-center opinions and become wildly popular, then how can it be true that Doreen still represents the movement? The movement changed, as the article points out, and therefore Doreen was a terrible choice of representative. The fact that she predates the change is exactly the reason she is not representative. Instead the article tries to argue opposite. I have to admit that the author appears to be doing everything possible to make me assume this is due to their partisan bias as hardly a sentence goes by without a verbal jab.
  • Edman274 5y ago
    > then how can it be true that Doreen still represents the movement Represents the "movement", or represents the sub? They obviously still represented the sub - they were there when it got created, were a moderator, were picked by other moderators to be a representative of the subreddit in media events (which is conflated with the nebulous concept of "the movement") The issue here is that the "movement" may not be represented by Doreen, but there may not even be a movement outside of the sub, and they do represent the sub. A lot of people treat "the movement" and "the sub" as basically being equivalent. They may actually be equivalent. If the sub shut down, there isn't really any guarantee that the same kind of antiwork internet discourse would be as loud, focused and frequent as it is right at this moment.
    • TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
      You could ask the same about Fox - which is hardly ground zero for sanity itself. Does it represent a movement, or a TV channel? If it's a movement, by what process was it elected? Point being I doubt anyone at Fox was unhappy with how the Doreen interview turned out. Did they ask to interview anyone else from the sub? All this really does is highlight the difference between online opinionation - always easy - and effective activism. The latter is much harder and absolutely needs informed - ideally effective and professional - handling of public presentation and messaging.
      • 5y ago
• smlavine 5y ago
  Incredibly well written, interesting, and witty piece.
• bearjaws 5y ago
  The whole subreddit went off the rails the moment they allowed misinformation and fake stories to be kept on the front page. The stories I was reading must have been written by teenagers, nobody in leadership does or says half the things on that sub. One post today was saying how their manager was planning to fire them 6 months from now... NO manager does that, *ever*. If someone is not meeting expectations termination is at most 2 months away, in America anyway. Anyone who is surprised by their termination due to performance really is not paying attention. Only a person with no professional experience would make these stories up.
  • ghaff 5y ago
    >Anyone who is surprised by their termination due to performance really is not paying attention I have definitely seen cases where someone was obviously really struggling with the quality of their work; i.e. others having to massively go through rounds of reworking their output to the point that they had negative productivity. Yet when they were eventually let go, they were shocked and surprised. Some people have pretty low awareness.
• scotty79 5y ago
  I think this setup illustrated ridiculousness of both sides. You confront authentic (troubled) person doing what she wants with another human so meticulously styled, plucked, tanned and dressed at corporate expense, walking at extremely shot leash with every one of his words tightly controlled, with all the scripted emotions. He looks as if he was a voice box made of plastic. With this contrast you see how bad the work is, even if antiwork is not perfect either at the moment. You usually watch news as if it was normal. You look at news anchors as if they were people, not corporate half-robots. Only such contrast gives you a chance to see them for what they are.
  • CrazyPyroLinux 5y ago
    "news actors" or "spokesholes"
  • dec0dedab0de 5y ago
    You usually watch news as if it was normal. You look at news anchors as if they were people, not corporate half-robots. Only such contrast gives you a chance to see them for what they are. I haven't been able to watch the news in about 20 years. Pro wrestlers are more sincere than most news anchors
    • adamrezich 5y ago
      imagine a world where we could tune in to neutrally-moderated longform debate on policy instead of points-scoring five-minute sandwiched-by-advertising talking heads talking through a scripted (at least by the host, if not both parties) sequence of talking points and slogans. instead this is the world we get, the world we're told to accept, the world where people like my dad can watch a night's worth of "news" from each of the major cable networks and think that that's an actually balanced, nuanced information diet. the whole thing cannot implode soon enough.
      • piaste 5y ago
        > imagine a world where we could tune in to neutrally-moderated longform debate on policy We had something of that world. Firing Line was on air for thirty years, and many other countries had or have comparable programmes. It's been a long de-evolution, not a radical destruction. Every innovation in media communication was that little bit faster, that little bit more palatable, but it's a one-way street, and hard to reverse. My mother (born 1951) can't enjoy any film made after 2000, they're too frantic and they stress her. My ex-girlfriend (born 1996) couldn't enjoy any film made before 1990, they were too slow and they bored her to sleep. I have to put effort into reading books rather than relatively short essays nowadays. I don't think there can be an implosion, at this point. We need a future generation, sometime after Z, that will grow up thinking that ten-second TikTok videos are the peak of uncool and something only old stodgy zoomers can enjoy.
• BitwiseFool 5y ago
  This reminds me of "Defund the Police", wherein supporters would try to convince others that the slogan did not literally mean what it says. Like AntiWork, It seems to have been started by those who genuinely wanted to abolish the police. But as time went on people joined who instead wanted to reform the police by dramatically cutting back what they were meant to respond to. But the slogan stayed, and was very misleading and puzzling to most people.
  • Miner49er 5y ago
    Defund the police and the similarity was brought up multiple times in the article.
  • gruez 5y ago
    > This reminds me of "Defund the Police", wherein supporters would try to convince others that the slogan did not literally mean what it says. I have a hard time figuring out whether: 1) all the people who are saying "no we don't really mean defund the police" are just the moderate elements battling it out with the extreme elements (eg. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...) 2) most of them actually want the police to be abolished, but they're doing a motte and bailey[1] whenever they're confronted. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
    • mlyle 5y ago
      "Defund" can be a relative term that doesn't necessarily mean to fully remove funding. E.g. we've had decades of hyperbole where relatively small cuts to defense funding are referred to by opponents as "defunding" US troops. We spend a whole lot on policing compared to most other developed nations, and we're not getting terrific outcomes either on civil liberties or crime rates. It might be time to take a different approach where we spend a lot less on direct policing, and redeploy a lot of those resources to fight crime in other ways. The developed countries that spend more or similar amounts tend to do it by spending on more highly trained officers than we do. On the other hand, maybe we're just so socioculturally fucked that it requires massive authoritarian investment to keep a crummy level of peace. I'm undecided.
• PicassoCTs 5y ago
  https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/93696/is-it-unethical-for-me-to-not-tell-my-employer-i-ve-automated-my-job https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/93696/is-it-un... https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/qstsdp/my_5year_getting_paid_for_doing_nothing_is_over/ https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/qstsdp/my_5year_g... Better representation of anti-work- and its crime- having the hacker mentality and the audacity to execute a similar move to investors/big players without the funds. Very few in our society are still needed to work, many who work do more harm then good (to the environment & themselves) and most of the work done today, exists to massage the egos of power-animals who can not avoid a existential crisis without a pyramid of suffering beneath them. Remote work has revealed how obsolete that caste and its longings are. Its also has shown that work is partially used to keep the "uneducated" masses from going haywire with conspiracy theories. (6 Jan comes to mind) Which is a psychological problem worth of solving, but not one that is actually a decent enough argument to protect this institution of self-flagellation without any reward, except continued existence in protestant-work-ethic-purgatory.
• TOMDM 5y ago
  This is a great article, if I were to summarise the broader trend being analysed here it would be something like - Radicals set new bar for discourse. - Aligned moderates adopt and modify message - Radicals are ousted from their own movement by the new moderate messaging - Moderates are left to try and defend their position that is garbed in extreme optics
• foverzar 5y ago
  What is "sanewashing"? English is not my native language and I am having genuine trouble locating the definitions. The top 1 result in google is this very linked article.
  • whatshisface 5y ago
    It's a word the author made up. It means, "taking a movement that was originally crazy and attempting to rehabilitate its image by downplaying its origins." I am not sure how useful this idea is as a concept. The Libertarian party had a similar history (its original platform had something to do with keeping leaded gasoline legal...) but it doesn't matter now.
  • rhaps0dy 5y ago
    Read the article, it's explained. The term was coined in r/neoliberal, https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/js84tu/how_did_defund_the_police_stop_meaning_defund_the/ https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/js84tu/how_did_.... The poster there asks the question, what to do when you want to hold a position but you encounter good arguments against it? And then answers it: > I’m arguing you’re going to “sanewash” it. And by that I mean, what you do is go “Well, obviously the arguments that people are obviously making are insane, and not what people actually believe or mean. What you can think of it as is [more reasonable argument or position than people are actually making]”.
  • derbOac 5y ago
    For what it's worth, English is my native language and I was unfamiliar with the term. I couldn't figure out the definition without more context either.
  • beerandt 5y ago
    When outsiders understand what a movement is really about, but it sounds bad, so movement claims that outsiders' (accurate) perspective is wrong. "No sane person would belive %movement_belief%, what we really believe is %moderate-not_insane-image_saving-fake_belief%.
  • Karawebnetwork 5y ago
• throwthere 5y ago
  In this article the point about mainstream views infiltrating this place where oddballs formerly found sanctuary and a sense of belonging really stuck with me. I wonder how many of these 4chan like places exist under the radar just waiting for a Google algorithm tweak or a viral meme to go big and destroy their formerly tolerant communities.
• lukev 5y ago
  I liked the factual analysis and the story of /r/antiwork. But regarding the actual topic of work I think it sets up a false dichotomy; that one is either a sane normal person who thinks productivity is good, or an out-of-touch anarcho-communist. There is actually a very large middle ground which represents the most balanced view towards work; that most work is a necessary evil. It's not that work is good or desirable, it's that it (both individually and as a society) is necessary for survival or to maintain a certain standard of living. If technology and automation could allow those who wanted to have only a 10-hour work week, with the same lifestyle, that would be unequivocally a good thing. I'm not an anarchist, but in this sense I am very much anti-work.
  • slothtrop 5y ago
    > that would be unequivocally a good thing. Why? Work is a net positive in people's lives.
    • derbOac 5y ago
      There's a saying something like "people don't leave bad jobs, they leave bad bosses" that can be extrapolated a bit. Work can be very positive and rewarding, or it can be negative and abusive. Everyone's experience is different; sometimes I feel that the fact r/antiwork has attained such saliency is maybe a sign that there's too much of the latter experience and not enough of the former.
    • Pryde 5y ago
      I disagree with this, at least as a blanket statement. Plenty of workplaces are a deeply negative factor in people's lives. If what you're saying is really more along the lines of "having a project and way to spend the time is a net positive", then I completely agree, but I don't think that has to be tightly coupled to work (as in employment) per se.
      • slothtrop 5y ago
        Those problems have nothing to do with the nature of work. Bad management, low pay and too many hours have no bearing on the importance of work. It allows you to contribute to society and get social validation. "Personal projects" typically do neither (if they did, they would be lucrative). Even the boring stuff can be meditative. Provided the conditions are adequate, work is good for people and society at large.
• brodouevencode 5y ago
  I might be alone with this notion, but does anyone else just _not care_? Don't get me wrong I've had my share of shitty bosses, employers, coworkers, pay, working conditions, and customer abuse but over time I've managed to fix every one of those. When a new problem crops up I talk to management. If they don't want to fix it, I leave for another place and hope for the best. This includes stints in being self-employed which was nice because I only answered to me, but also tough in that I'm the only one that's answerable. I don't get the (what I perceive to be) hatred for work.
  • ghaff 5y ago
    To be fair, there are a whole lot of low skill jobs that are pretty crappy. And if I didn't see a path to a job that wasn't low skill, I'd probably prefer to not be working too.
    • brodouevencode 5y ago
      But that's just it - as far as I can tell (in the US specifically) there's always a path out.
      • s1artibartfast 5y ago
        Not if your your fundamental desire to avoid work that you dont enjoy. There is a pretty stark lack of well paying jobs that require low skill and are enjoyable.
  • derbOac 5y ago
    I have mixed feelings because on the one hand I generally have felt the same but on the other in the last several years have seen people in situations pretty much outside their control get stuck, or really really hurt because of one bad employer that basically ruins their career. I'm not sure if it's a trend but over the last few years it seems like there's more stories coming up about people who lose a job and then seem to never be hired again, and even with investigative reporting it's not clear why, except for ageism or other prejudice, or lack of connections. I guess what I'm saying is that employment seems increasingly precarious to me. Not everyone has the luxury of moving between jobs easily, and even those who are stuck in stable but abused positions aren't necessarily clearly better off in some ways. Add this to the writings about bullshit jobs, and the great resignation, and it feels like something is off about modern human resources, or management, or hiring, or employment, or something. I've never really identified with antiwork — it seems misguided to me — but I do think, like a lot of things, there's probably some kernel of accuracy behind its motivations. I think this is maybe what the article is tapping into, albeit maybe inaccurately itself.
• asojfdowgh 5y ago
  > You’ve come across the gentrifiers before, I’m sure. They browse the front page of reddit and the trending tab of YouTube, buy Ruth Bader Ginsberg figurines and wear Che Guevara T-shirts. So, gentrifiers are generally made out of straw is the take-away? likewise, "no one wants to mine coal" me, I do, I wanna do that, I wanna work out the refining process, I want to lathe 1000 of the same thing. Not every personality is what the author can come up with in his head, other kinds of people exist too - - - Moderators are meant to keep their subreddits on track, the moderators found it benificial to themselves to not do so, for number-go-up reasons, at that point, the moderators' views no longer represent the community's views, this is decided by the moderators' actions or rather intentional inaction
  • HideousKojima 5y ago
    >likewise, "no one wants to mine coal" me, I do, I wanna do that, I wanna work out the refining process, I want to lathe 1000 of the same thing. Not every personality is what the author can come up with in his head, other kinds of people exist too You may want to, but the kind of people who talk in online discussions about "What will your job be after the revolution" overwhelmingly do not.
    • yk 5y ago
      The radical position is, if nobody wants to mine coal, then we will need to either not use coal (great idea, saves a lot of Co2), or make the coal mining job better. Of course nobody wants the dirty, unhealthy and dangerous job that capitalism designed, but that does not imply that it is impossible to design a job that extracts coal and people genuinely enjoy.
      • s1artibartfast 5y ago
        The challenge is who "designs" the job to make coal mining more enjoyable in a specialized economy. In Capitalism, you raise pay until there is incentive to do the work. In a communist command economy, some authority decides if more coal miners are needed and takes from some people to gives to coal workers until there are enough workers. In a cashless anarchists society, I guess you hope that someone invents something to improve conditions?
• known 5y ago
  [dead]
• jdrc 5y ago
  Why does no social medium try to tailor against gentrification? It doesn't have to be always exponetial growth, it's fun in the beginning but then entropy takes over. Communities with mechanisms to ensure they keep hovering around a midpoint are sustainable.
  • renewiltord 5y ago
    lobste.rs does. It's invite-only. At a bigger scale, Metafilter does. It's $5 to join and you can lose your membership after paying the money. That's the thing with these things. They live and occupy their space and everyone else just says "Why aren't there any X?" because X exists but because it's not so big, no one knows it does. For the most part, these communities are better because those who would idly ask "Why doesn't X exist?" don't know that X exists. Essentially, there are two requirements to joining the club: - You should be able to find the door - You should know why the door is hidden If you're just like "I want what's on the other side of the door" but you can't meet these two conditions, then you can't have it.
  • timgilbert 5y ago
    One or two examples exist. The venerable MetaFilter is heavily moderated ans charges $5 for a (lifetime) membership, which tends to keep out drive-by commenting.
    • dogleash 5y ago
      I don't think MetaFilter is a good example. It's insular, but it also turned to the banal opinions of internet gentrification earlier than a lot of places I used to lurk.
• vanusa 5y ago
  I grant that the absolutist antiwork position fails to meet basic reality compliance standards. But does that give the current de-facto state religion -- cradle-to-grave workaholism (wildly out of proportion to the amount of work we actually need to do to sustain ourselves) -- a pass? Why is the promotion one position an instance of 'sanewashing', while the normalization of other (no less insane in my view) position is just -- "the way it is"?
  • dgreensp 5y ago
    Yeah, all the positions people are taking (progressives, anarchists) about work, here, are in the right direction from the status quo. But saying that wouldn’t fit with the author’s “aesthetic.” :)
  • wutbrodo 5y ago
    This is completely orthogonal to the article's thesis. The entire piece is about optics, and doesn't take any position. In fact, the only time the piece departs from its neutral tone is to decry the latecomers accused of sanewashing the space and pushing its original community to its periphery. This is sympathetic to the radicals, albeit incidentally. You've also misunderstood what sanewashing is. Sanewashing is with reference to the mainstream, not some supposed absolute moral truth. It describes the transformation of a radical viewpoint into one that's palatable to the mainstream. It makes no claim about the moral truth of the radical view.
    • vanusa 5y ago
      I understand what the word means. My point, which I thought was very clear, is simply: If what the r/antiwork community attempting to do in promoting their position an instance of an (attempted) "transformation of a radical viewpoint into one that's palatable to the mainstream" ... Then is not the normalization of an unhealthy addiction to overwork (as a kind of "virtue") -- arguably an instance of a successful transformation of a pretty much equally radical viewpoint? In other words: "If theirs is a 'radical' viewpoint -- how did this shit we actually live under (and which is slowly killing us and the planet with it) get to become a 'normal, sane' viewpoint"?
• CountDrewku 5y ago
• ck2 5y ago
  I think they all went to r/workReform after that Look the media is not your friend, for any movement, for any media left or right biased, you are clickbait to whatever they can hype you into for their own profit. But going on Fox believing you will accomplish anything but arm the idiots is just lack of critical thinking skills.
• kerneloftruth 5y ago
  This is a really well-written and insightful piece, and makes a lot of sense of the dynamics and personalities of fringe SRs. Pure gold: You’ve come across the gentrifiers before, I’m sure. They browse the front page of reddit and the trending tab of YouTube, buy Ruth Bader Ginsberg figurines and wear Che Guevara T-shirts. They vote for Bernie in the primaries and Biden in the general, first outraged that anyone could want Biden and then outraged that anyone could not. They share articles about how the 2020 BLM protests were overwhelmingly peaceful and then hop online to cheer “ACAB” and “F — — capitalism” graffiti and pictures of burning police precincts. They shout “Defund the Police” while angrily asserting that nobody wants to abolish the police. They manage to boldly stand at once for every fashionable cause and against every unfashionable cause, embracing the aesthetics of radicalism while denying complicity or knowledge whenever that radicalism gets too real. And /r/antiwork was the perfect community for them to turn into a cause celebre.
• parkingrift 5y ago
  This article acts as if Doreen and other antiwork mods were just sad passengers as these events happened to them. Does the author know and understand that subreddit moderators have absolute authority? If the mods of antiwork wanted to have a sub for anarchism they could have, should have, and still can forcefully define the rules. Ban people, posts, and content that don't fit their anarchist goals. ...but if the mods of antiwork want to have a wildly popular sub, they can't do that. The mods made their choice, and they chose popularity over ideology. To call that a "tragedy", "sanewashing", or "social gentrification" is pretty disingenuous and revisionist. However, it's not too late. If the mods really truly want an anarchist sub they can go ahead and start enforcing content rules. Today. Right now. The sub will slowly die away, but they can have the community they want.
• jokoon 5y ago
  Brilliantly explained. Too few people have the humility to look like a loser, and would rather work a bad job instead. To add on the condescending tone of fox news, the whole hypocrisy of the backlash was quite surprising to me. To me it really felt like it was an attempt to shut down the sub by elaborate astro turfing (the mods did say there was a lot of new accounts brigading). I felt a lot of empathy for Doreen, and how she was mocked on air. The fact that a whole community disliked her because she was a dog walker or did not look presentable was so ridiculous to me. I think she handled it pretty well, she did not get angry, she did not care about the tone of that tv guy. The subreddit is still there. Nothing really happened. There are still people renegotiating their salary and quitting their jobs.
  • jackling 5y ago
    It's shocking to me how people just made fun of her for everything possible. IMO she explained her position well, and didn't say anything outrageous. The "laziness is a virtue" line specifically seems to be something that people point out as a terrible take, but with full context it's easy to see that she's just promoting more rest and healthier conditions. It's ironic to me how a subreddit that advocates for less toxic workplaces, can foster such a toxic environment. I completely agree with your take.
    • qnsi 5y ago
      exactly. I heard about this interview before, hearing it was disastrous. I read this article and just then watched the interview. I thought she explained things pretty well. She was mocked for being dog walker, but why? Why is news presenter inherently better than dog walker? I guess net effect for society is better from dog walking than news. That the community got angry at her is beyond me, and I was very sceptical of antiwork subreddit
• 3pt14159 5y ago
  I once discussed one of these eye rolling things with a real life friend of mine over the internet and I finally discovered what "abolish the police" really meant to him. He was knowingly being intellectually dishonest in order to move the goalposts. I've dated someone like that too and it only came out during an argument when I started writing down what she literally was saying and she finally said that her choices of words were how she felt in the moment, not descriptions of reality even if they seemed like that to me, the listener of what she was saying. This has made my life so much better. When I hear something someone says to me now I have an extra filter to run it through. It's no longer a choice just between the person being dishonest about the facts or being unintentionally wrong about the facts. They could mean it in a different way. I still think their way is wrong, but now I can deal with it in a practical sense, like waiting for someone to calm down or calling out intellectual dishonesty.
  • wutbrodo 5y ago
    > This has made my life so much better. When I hear something someone says to me now I have an extra filter to run it through. It's no longer a choice just between the person being dishonest about the facts or being dishonest about the facts. They could mean it in a different way. I'm with you, but to me, this is just operationalized dishonesty, assuming it's not a significant cognitive deficit relative to those who are capable of engaging with reality. The solution I landed on was to avoid assuming adult levels of cognition until someone proves they have it. It's much less common than you'd think, especially if you have a foot in many different social circles. I will say that your gf example touches on something related but importantly different, in my experience. The women I've dated generally met the bar I'm describing as "adult level cognition" (naturally, as that feeds into our compatibility). But they universally, by their own description, react to even mild conflict by getting emotional and irrational. I see this as a related phenomenon, but not the same. Loss of rationality in specific emotional circumstances is completely understandable, just as I can lose sensitivity to other's feelings in those moments. The solution we've landed on there is the same as yours: she can press a proverbial button that causes us to table the discussion until she calms down enough to think clearly. It takes a lot of trust on both sides to do this, but it's extremely effective. To me, people subject to these moments of impairment are importantly different from the people who don't even seem to have a mental model of what intellectual honesty looks like. I often wonder if the latter are even capable of it, in any meaningful sense.
• shadowgovt 5y ago
  This article's assertions regarding gentrification seem applicable to the internet as a whole as well.
• JSavageOne 5y ago
  I remember stumbling upon /r/antiwork a few years ago and being so happy I'd stumbled upon a thriving movement that so effectively criticized one of the core principles of society that everyone takes for granted - that everyone must effectively sell their labor to someone else (unless they're rich enough to opt out, or clever enough to create some business or invest their way out). To me anti-work is the recognition that forced wage labor is not acceptable, and that technological advancement and automation should enable greater freedom for individuals to spend their time how they choose. We could already have this reality today if we just implemented a universal basic income, but until the boomers retire from office that's just not happening. I haven't browsed the subreddit in forever but just took a look, and it's sad to see it's just a bunch of stupid memes now. Every decent subreddit eventually devolved into a bunch of stupid memes. Travel and digital nomad subreddits are just people posting Instagram style pictures of themselves or asking the same dumb questions over and over again. Crypto subreddits seem to consist primarily of 14 year olds asking "when moon". Reddit in 2008 was amazing - similar to Hacker News in comment quality (which has also lowered significantly). I watched the site devolve - with the advent of memes, pun threads (thankfully that's gone now), hivemind, and quality discourse being replaced by sarcastic low-effort one-liners and downvote sabotaging of any contrarian viewpoints regardless of the substance of one's post. We need better alternatives to Reddit, or Reddit needs to fix the mess because the post/comment quality there is straight trash there. All the default homepage subreddits are trash. I don't know how any co-founder of Reddit could look at Reddit today and be proud of what they've created knowing the forum of intelligent and productive discourse it could've been.
  • ignasheahy 5y ago
    >We need better alternatives to Reddit I am working on one - heahy.com, it's still very small and unfortunately mostly used for memes and porn :) I will try to do something about having more high quality discussions but probably some changes to design are necessary before doing any marketing.
  • wldcordeiro 5y ago
    It's not Reddit specifically but those different subreddits growing to the point where the most "engaging" stuff wins and that always becomes the low-effort memes and stuff. Hacker News has had a slower decline in quality because it's like one specific subreddit in size and has pretty aggressive moderation of content in comparison. Your comment and the phenomenom it describes has been given the name "Eternal September" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
• dgreensp 5y ago
  It’s a fascinating article, but it lacks respect for people taking principled positions about this social issue. Progressives are fad-chasing sheep, supposedly, while anarchists are legit, but crazy. It’s like the Jordan Peterson philosophy on climate change: People need to stop talking about it and caring about it, because anyone who does so is just virtue-signaling and basically being a shallow, useless idiot about it. When actually people are trying to figure out how to deal with the fact that our leaders and institutions are so out of touch with reality and stuck in their ways. But no, the important point is people in general are shallow and amoral, like me, but dumber. Culture changes and drives change. Collective action eventually does something.
  • achenet 5y ago
    disagree with the climate change thing. We need to be working on finding better solutions. My current goal is to make enough money in the software industry to go back to school so I can learn biochemistry in order to devise bio-technologies that can reverse pollution. If you've got some spare time, energy and imagination, your help would be greatly appreciated. ^_^
    • dgreensp 5y ago
      To be clear, I was advocating against the “individual or collective action is pointless” position on climate change. I do think people should be thinking, talking, and acting, if they want!
• at_a_remove 5y ago
  This reminds me of something that happened previously, wherein kind of an easy-going, free-wheeling site also got "gentrified" by the neoliberal left. It started with a "hey, maybe you should think a bit before you use that word" and the slippery slope tilted, now the place is all privilege/intersectionality and so on chat. Everyone walks on eggshells now. They ran off the fun people first, the ones who did a lot of heavy lifting when it came to the attraction of the site. After a while, they started running off the people who were fun and even mostly agreed with them. It's really hard to keep the spirit of a place the same, and as far as I can tell, it requires that moderators MERCILESSLY CRUSH that first person who says "hey maybe we should kind of cool it with the-" and bootstomp them right off.
  • nebula8804 5y ago
    Those people will just come back and find a way to destroy/cancel you. They don't go away so they work outside the system to undermine you. That is probably what we are seeing with this whole Joe Rogan 10 part saga.
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  > …people start calling those who say they don’t want to work at all are infiltrators meant to discredit the sub. This is one of the most frustrating things I see on HN and reddit. People dismiss large parts of the community as infiltrators and bots and paid shills and astroturfers. I’d bet that for every bot/infiltrator/whatever there’s a thousand times more actual humans dismissed as bot/infiltrator/whatever. There’s literally no way to further dehumanize someone else’s thoughts than to say that they aren’t real people presenting real thoughts.
• BoppreH 5y ago
  Deliberately misleading article. The community was mad at Doreen because they held a vote on whether to send someone to the Fox interview, and the consensus was NO. She violated an explicit choice of the community, and this complaint has been clearly articulated from day 1 of the aftermath. No mention of it in the article, though. And even the small things are misleading: > the classic thread “whats your job on the leftist commune??”[1], in which everyone plans to lead discussion on theory and make lattes and there’s nary a Coal Mining Enjoyer to be found That's blatantly false. Second column, next to last tweet: > Hard labor. Something rewarding I can do with my hands. Maybe something intellectual later in life. I'm just tired and don't want to think too hard right now in my life. You can argue about how many hard laborer will be necessary, and how quickly this user would change their mind, but this is not what the article is arguing. I didn't find the post an honest description of the event. Flagged. [1] https://i.redd.it/xi839vo8uml71.png https://i.redd.it/xi839vo8uml71.png
  • stemlord 5y ago
    >The community was mad at Doreen because they held a vote on whether to send someone to the Fox interview, and the consensus was NO. Anyway, it doesn't really matter whether Doreen stood for the original ethos or the newer sterilized version that apparently would have consisted of the majority of votes, fact is that she didn't do a good job representing either in the interview. They really should have considered using a professional spokesperson who knows how to handle a live roast on national tv, if they actually had voted that someone participate.
• shakes_mcjunkie 5y ago
  > Every time, liberal progressives hop on these movements and attempt to sanewash them; every time, the radicals proudly push towards extremes. The trouble for these radical movements comes, often, when their vision meets reality. Mass protests fail to materialize. Workers of the world fail to unite. Autonomous zones collapse into violence and murder. The problem here is liberals want to reshape movements without actually understanding them. Modern liberalism isn't really about understanding core issues and looking for solutions, it's about "sanewashing" as the article mentions which fundamentally runs counter to movement ideals. I think a lot of more radical people would be willing to work with liberals and vice versa if liberals (who IMO generally have more power) would listen more first.
• hogrider 5y ago
  Well this is a good thing, you literally can't abolish work u less youd be willing to bring back slavery or we get start trek warp engines feedi g replicators.
• giantg2 5y ago
  "Why was Doreen Ford, of all people, able to appoint herself as representative of a self-proclaimed movement 1.7 million strong?" This shouldn't be a surprise. The news interviews many people about a variety of subjects. Either the network frames that person as wholly representing the group, or the viewers imply it. It's convenient, and perhaps even useful in some contexts, to assume that all the people in a group/movement have the exact same ideas and goals. But once a certain size is achieved that is rarely the case. I work and don't support the antiwork movement, but have some sympathy for the anti-workers. I think a lot of this is about the perverse incentives. There are many jobs where the pay is low while the profits are high. I don't see anything wrong with the thread about easy jobs that was mentioned. In my own job I have basically given up on trying to get ahead/promoted/whatever. I've been repeatedly screwed by the company, a company that has a reputation for being a best place to work and doing what's right. Why would I continue to work hard or try hard when my experience tells me that it won't pay off? I am looking for better jobs, but if this place is supposed to be so great, I doubt there are better places out there. For those curious, what I mean by screwed over is that they violate their own policies and contradict themselves. Stuff like giving me a bad rating because the department requires that a manager pick a bad rating to balance out a great rating for someone else. And stuff like saying you can't go from a bad rating last year to a great rating this year, event though policy says the rating should only consider the current year. Or working as a tech lead and then a senior dev for a year each when just a midlevel dev but not being promoted. Being told that you would have been given a great rating, but you "slacked off" the last month, which was the month when you were on PTO for 2.5 weeks for your wedding and honeymoon and you put in extra hours before leaving. The list goes on.
• MrStonedOne 5y ago
• jancsika 5y ago
  According to my understanding of how Reddit works, it was the OG anarchist asshats who had mod powers, not the "liberal" noobs. Occam's Razor says the OG's got seduced by their newfound popularity. In trying to square the anarchist/liberal circle, they flew too close to the sun. That's too bad. But that's the end of story in terms of a power dynamic. Calling that "sanewashing and social gentrification" is incoherent. None of the noobs had mod powers. And there are plenty of examples of subreddits modded by irreverent types who would probably eschew a popularity bump in order to keep the sub pedantic. Try complaining about your job in lowercase on r/THE_PACK and you'll see what I mean. :)
• a4isms 5y ago
  Two words: Eternal. And September. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September Every social space either withers, or grows until there is a preponderance of new people whose values no longer reflect the founders and old hands. Then there is a power struggle, and if the old hands don't regain or enforce the original cultural values, they typically depart and start all over again somewhere else. This is the dynamic behind "tech" social media sites. HN was begat of Reddit, which was begat of Digg, which was begat of Slashdot, which was begat of Compuserve... Or is it some other order? This story fits the same pattern. The sub grew, the new people don't share the same values as the ostensible founder, and now they are purging her because she doesn't speak for them.
• alangibson 5y ago
  The worst thing that can happen to a community is for it to become popular. Once the spotlight hits you, the normals rush in and cooptation is inevitable. Eternal September and all that. Does Reddit have a feature to ask to not be down in the main feed?
• bjourne 5y ago
  That's the best article I've read the whole year! I encourage you all to read it. Regarding the topic of abolishing work, I wrote about it last time /r/antiwork came up here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30099687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30099687 What I've written is just the tip of the iceberg - hundreds of books, articles and papers have been written on the topic of humanity's relationship with work the last hundred years. After all, the phrase wage slavery from the mid 19th century and the associated idea that abolishing work is an imperative has been discussed for far longer than that. The majority has always had a hard time accepting that work freedom is possible. Probably because it is foreign similar to how someone 100 years ago would have found it completely natural that men dominated society. Don't ask me how a workfree society would work (cause you probably believe it couldn't), instead consult the literature and learn about the arguments yourself. Regarding Doreen Ford, isn't her fate a little like Richard Stallman's? Odd and weird and now old dirt is forcing them both out of their respective communities. Does people have to be normal and non-creepy to be leaders? I think a 30-year-old dog walker working part-time is a pretty good role model for the antiwork "movement". We all work and then we all die, only some of us makes people think differently. Stallman and Ford has done just that. Also it's probably true that most online content is written by the insane ones. Like this comment! I really like the term "sanewashing" that the author coined. But I would define it as the act of being in favor of progressive ideas but not their logical conclusion. E.g. "commitment" to < 1.5C global temperature rise but not commitment to stop using fossil fuels by 2030.
• gtsop 5y ago
  Regardless of who is right here, these stories demonstrate the value of voting people as representatives.
• dash2 5y ago
  There's nothing tragic about this! It's hilarious! * Loons create internet forum to abolish work * Meme-obsessed teens crowd it out * Chief loon goes on Fox News, is transsexual dog walker, is Fox News producers' wet dream * Masses LOL * Earnest articles are written * Yet more earnest comments are written * /me skips work for 10 minutes to read and chortle What's not to like? THIS IS WHAT THE INTERNET IS FOR PEOPLE
• Havoc 5y ago
  Great write up. The point about internet content being written by a 1% in particular is very easy to lose sight of. Somehow public debate on the internet naturally leads to some assumed sense of its representative and “democratic” for lack of better words
• thinkingemote 5y ago
  The mistake is thinking politics on Reddit changes things. "Optics is everything" is how NFTs and cryptocoins work, it's hype and attention, and it's the media and the net. Optics is literally the media. Even mainstream movements do protests to get on the media primarily, to get attention. Politics as marketing. But it's not really how life works. Any real political movement should realise that playing the optics game is doomed, and explicitly avoid such things. "The revolution will not be televised" was a good slogan for example... This Reddit story gives me some sympathy to the moderator. I think they were being honest, but they were glamoured with fame and media. And it revealed how the vast majority of redditors are just live action role playing with no actual change in themselves or their world. The drama around it and the new subreddits are all just another scenario in their online roleplay. The idea that 4chan used cartoon frogs to meme a president into office is something that is seriously believed because it enforces belief in the media, in spectacle, in attention, in optics itself. 4chan doesn't take it seriously however, and I find it both funny and a good example that those who believe in optics should believe that optics works. Optics is everything to optics.
• shakes_mcjunkie 5y ago
  The sanewashing post linked in the article is hilariously ironic: https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/js84tu/how_did_defund_the_police_stop_meaning_defund_the/ https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/js84tu/how_did_... > So with all that explained - I think it's pretty simple. Mainstream progressives 'sanewashed' the "Defund The Police" position because they'd acquired the position through social spaces that imply anyone who doesn't hold those positions are guilty. If you exist in social spaces like that primarily, you almost don't have the option to dissent. The incentives against it are too strong. And that's how and why people will continually push for completely dumb slogans and ideas like that, even when it makes no sense - and sometimes, especially when it makes no sense. Because they assume it has to, and will rationalize their own reasons why it does. This is a post in r/neoliberal which itself is a subculture with its own rationalizations. It assumes that their positions are "right" and default because they've thought "rationally" about them. But ironically, all social spaces and especially social media spaces are subject to this same pressure. Look at this thread where the poster has negative votes and the reddit OP is responding to: https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/js84tu/how_did_defund_the_police_stop_meaning_defund_the/gbxuogt/ https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/js84tu/how_did_... This is the exact same pressures the reddit OP is decrying in left spaces. This is such a perfect encapsulation of liberals acting in left spaces, co-opting the space and making it moderate rather than listening and helping amplify left ideas and solutions. > It's not devoid of argument, but the key call to action is "Listen to trans people" - in other words, really, an appeal to "you should be a good person", a condemnation of people who don't "Listen to trans people", and the implication that if you're a Good Cis Perosn, you will Listen To Trans People like the one in the thread. "SJW" spaces spread their desired information and views to sympathetic people by appealing to the morality, empathy, and fairness of the situation, but with a strong serving of 'those who do not adapt to these views and positions are inherently guilty'. Left spaces have to appeal to emotion because "logic" and rational thinking itself are co-opted by everyone to the right who have made it this grey space where "logic" == moral correctness == my opinion. Maybe when people say "listen" they actually mean listen and stop trying to apply logic and rationalization to everything. Maybe you need to actually need to do emotional work and sympathize to understand where leftists are coming from. And really maybe you do have to internalize at least a shred of guilt to understand your position in the world and how you might be impacting someone's ability to be heard.
• ChrisArchitect 5y ago
  only opened this to find out what the hell sanewashing is. Still not sure/can't find a clear definition. Use real words in titles. (like, even urbandictionary entries acceptable of course)
  • TraceWoodgrains 5y ago
    I did link the original piece coining the term and quote the specific definition given. I think that's a sufficient standard to meet when introducing an unfamiliar term.
    • ChrisArchitect 5y ago
      Not good -- having to read some additional link to a top post of a reddit thread that mentions the term over 10 times but never explicitly defines it is really tough for a reader c'mon. I saw that the link went to some reddit post without a specific comment or anything and wasn't going to click it. So on that post after reading paragraph after paragraph I kind of get it but man it's really not explicit and just talked about even there like it's a thing. It isn't. Using the term is as wacky as the actual topic being discussed about 'normal people think Defund means Defund'. Let's create a definition then of something like: sanewashing • deliberately glossing over or attempting to conceal unpleasant or insane facts or actions about something or someone.