Anti-work subreddit goes private after rough Fox News interview

https://mashable.com/article/antiwork-subreddit-fox-news-interview

by caaqil • 4 years ago

106 189 4 years ago

mashable.com

barbacoa• 4 years ago

Link to interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yUMIFYBMnc

anonygler3• 4 years ago

Oh my god stop that person from wobbling in their chair.

alexb_6• 4 years ago

Worth mentioning that they have autism, which is why they aren't making eye contact and are rocking in their chair. Although that is probably a better reason to not be on the show at all if you are trying to present yourself as a large-scale movement to millions of viewers.

xenadu02• 4 years ago

Never talk to the media. That goes double for right-wing media. They aren't your friends, all they care about is pushing their narrative. They will steam-roll you and ruin your life for ratings / views.

xqcgrek2• 4 years ago

The host was quite respectful and only asked reasonable questions.

mgh2• 4 years ago

Tbh, the reporter seemed "professionally respectful" but was actually sarcastic all the way through

joecot3• 4 years ago

When your enemy is making a mistake, don't interrupt them. If the mod had coherent sensible arguments, I'm sure the host would've done the usual Fox News tactics of talking over them, misstating their points, etc. But he didn't need to. All he had to do was reel out enough rope for her to make a noose.

chris11• 4 years ago

Watters is not a reasonable journalist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Watters#Controversies.

robotresearcher• 4 years ago

The host was clearly contemptuous.

ComradePhil• 4 years ago

I disagree. There was nothing wrong with the interview itself. I don't think they looked bad. Fox News did their bit of trying to ridicule the person to please their core audience but the person handled it relatively well and people who were likely to support the AntiWork cause would be able to see the reporter in bad light and be interested in the subreddit. So, the attention they received was good.

If everything had gone well, they would get a swarm of new users to the sub-reddit, people who thought this was a bad idea would dominate the discussion for a few days, but when the dust settled, the subreddit would be much better off for it.

The problem here is that the person being interviewed has a shady past. They have boasted about sleeping on the job, have had multiple allegations of sexual assault and other controversies, which people brought up all the time, which is the reason they had to go private.

supperburg2• 4 years ago

She said she would like to teach critical thinking. How unbelievably rich. The host made the excellent point that in this market, the hardest you will work is determined by how hard people in general are willing to work. The market decides how hard you are expected to work, not your boss or the Illuminati. It’s the same something-for-nothing logic-vacuum that led to communism and the massive corruption that followed.

yabbutz88• 4 years ago

You sure about that?

https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/01/16/37...

It’s not the Illuminati, it’s that no one looks.

Bosses have a way of deflating wages by demanding more hours and effort, too.

The market is like a programming design pattern; kind of a hand wavy concept to fuel discourse. It’s still easily corrupted biology in charge. Repeating the same old semantics is keeping you from seeing the corruption already there.

NotACop182• 4 years ago

Amazon warehouse algorithm disagrees with your assessment.

ActorNightly• 4 years ago

It still falls under the general free market principles. Distribution runs on a very thin profit margin, and if it wasn't Amazon in the lead, it would be Walmart, or others.

tonyedgecombe• 4 years ago

The market decides how hard you are expected to work

That's like saying house prices in San Francisco are set by how much people are willing to pay. It's true but hides the real problem which is housing is unaffordable for many in that area.

wiseowise5• 4 years ago

That's like saying house prices in San Francisco are set by how much people are willing to pay.

They literally are.

It's true but hides the real problem which is housing is unaffordable for many in that area.

Area has finite amount of estate. The only "solution" is to create ghettos of human hives which lead to classes of problems on their own.

supperburg2• 4 years ago

It doesn’t hide anything. If the price is too high then something is wrong. In your case it’s restraint on supply and in labor the problem is people who don’t know the value of what they have and never put any consideration into making themselves difficult to push around. They jump into precarious financial circumstances, but expensive things and pump out babies and when it comes time to negotiate they have zero leverage. The behavior of the average American is retarded and spoiled. That’s why people from Asia come here and shoot straight to the top — because their parents actually make deliberate decisions to advance their socioeconomic position.

estaseuropano2• 4 years ago

While I agree on substance with your comment you seem to have a strange interpretation of communism. I very much recommend to read e.g. the brief, very readable and very illuminating Communist Manifesto if you would really like to understand where it came from and what its ideas were before Stalin and Mao made it just a veneer on top of a dictatorship. I'm in no way a communist but I can fully appreciate its ideals and aims (e.g. the idea that everyone should receive resources according to their needs).

Sidenote: it is also worth to actually read Smith (especially books 2+3 of the wealth of nations) to understand that rather than a believer in an invisible hand he was deeply critical of laissez-faire capitalism and saw a need for the state to intervene and manage its excesses and abuses.

mdni007• 4 years ago

That interview was extremely hard to watch. Didn't expect much from a Reddit mod but that was just brutal.

Datenstrom2• 4 years ago

The personal attacks and especially acting like dog walking is some lowly profession is just disgusting. Anyone doing anything "ambitious" is only being held up by the support of many others making just as meaningful contributions. A dog walker provides a great service to a community that impacts many peoples lives by keeping their companions, which provide emotional support and boost their productivity, healthy and happy. IMHO this is exactly the toxic attitude causing the movement.

joecot3• 4 years ago

It's not so much that the problem is being a dog walker, it's that she's a dog walker who only works 20-25 hours a week and believes people should work even less. And that her response to Fox News's question about whether they were being lazy was "Laziness is a virtue". This mod made previous posts about how she literally sleeps on the job[1], so this isn't about a noble career choice, it's just about laziness. She was unprepared, wouldn't look at the camera, showed up disheveled, and didn't even make her bed before the interview. Multiple times the mods had polled the community about who should give interviews, and the response was overwhelmingly that no one should. The mods thought they knew better, and this was the result.

Essentially the issue here is that the subreddit started years ago not as a discussion of worker rights reforms, but of people wanting to figure out how to work as little as possible, period. The meaning was literally on the tin. As the pandemic wore on redditors joined the sub to complain about their jobs, their burnout, and advocate for worker rights and reforms. But a look at the sub's about section or the sub's mods made it clear those posts weren't what the sub was originally about. And all it took was an interview with the longest standing mod to make that clear.

Now the sub is private, and /r/WorkReform will hopefully actually stand for something.

1. https://i.imgur.com/XsHDFFN.jpg

Datenstrom2• 4 years ago

Thanks for the missing context I haven't been following the news around this in any detail. Also, I agree it was politically a bad move and she should have expected it and prepared better. Just him mocking aspiring to be a dog walker really revolted me. I deeply appreciate everyone who does things for me so I can be doing other things that interest me no matter what they might be.

eurasiantiger2• 4 years ago

”Essentially the issue here is that the subreddit started years ago not as a discussion of worker rights reforms, but of people wanting to figure out how to work as little as possible, period”

What else are worker rights in the 2020s? We only have one life, why not enjoy it like the men in suits?

hypertele-Xii3• 4 years ago

Here's the thing though: Our social and economic systems are founded on RIGHTS. The person saying "I don't wanna work bullshit jobs to afford a decent life and following my passion" relies on the exact same rights as the person saying "I refuse working at all towards any goal simply because I can."

These specific anti-work people may literally be just lazy, but by pushing that agenda, they are naturally advocating for workers' rights. It doesn't actually matter what their motivations (or lacks thereof) are; Only the rights matter.

Similarily, with Universal Basic Income you will surely get some people who simply engage in indefinite hedonism, but it is absolutely worth it for the effects of UBI on everybody else.

scotty792• 4 years ago

I think that's the whole point that any amount of work that is obligatory to survive is too much.

Showing a person who opposes work in current mainstream culture will only end up with mixture of laughter, indignation and branding him as lazy.

It's very similar to the reaction you'd get few decades ago if you showed a black man who thinks he's people.

Evereybody in our culture was brainwashed with supposed virtues of being compelled to work. Noble struggle of providing.

All while 99% of our goods are made by machines and chemistry, with rich fully allowed to capture as much of the value produced by those machines and processes as they can.

All of that is just a modern version of feudalism. Better than any earlier system (same way feudalism was for its time) but still crap.

In the future anti-work in the style "I don't care, fu, where's my robot that covers all the work I don't freely choose to do" will be a mainstream view. And working people of today will just be a bunch of grumpy boomers lamenting that youngsters have no ethics.

I'm 42 but I know where the wind blows.

raxxorrax3• 4 years ago

Agreed. I am almost happy that CS has an increasingly bad reputation because I detest the hype and the impact of parts of the industry. To be honest I smiled a bit at the thought that dog walker is an occupation in the US, but why the heck not. You are right that it is toxic to condemn it. Perhaps it is even jealously of office terrorists.

Still, the judgement will come anyway, even if you believe being a dog walker is much better than being a slimy Fox News anchor.

robot_no_4194• 4 years ago

If everyone worked 25 hours a week, dog walking would not even exist as a job. Literally anyone can do it as long as they can walk. Let's not pretend it's a noble contribution to society here, it's objectively speaking something a 15 year old teenager can do.

datavirtue• 4 years ago

Movement? It's a reddit. My favorite reddit, and the only reason I go to Reddit anymore. That is the problem and that's why the fear level of the elites (about unionization) is elevated enough to start running hatchet jobs on a forum.

ddtaylor• 4 years ago

It's a reddit. My favorite reddit, and the only reason I go to Reddit anymore.

I have never been to that subreddit, what's the regular content about?

renewiltord• 4 years ago

Second oldest topic: complaining about work

mtmail• 4 years ago

Similar to https://www.reddit.com/r/TalesFromTheFrontDesk/ or https://www.reddit.com/r/assholetax/ but where workers complain about their employers, managers, human resources department, toxic workplaces, unions, minimum wage or holiday regulations. First person stories where a worker quit on the spot or otherwise "sticked it to the man" were popular.

llampx2• 4 years ago

Viral cat videos

aeternum• 4 years ago

I think you're drastically overestimating the fear the elites have about unionization. It's relatively easy to outsource jobs or replace with automation/robots.

DangitBobby2• 4 years ago

Then why do we keep hearing about how no one can hire anyone?

yunohn• 4 years ago

This is historically provably false? Lots of things are still not automatable - hence humans are needed, and subsequently, mistreated.

ajkdhcb2• 4 years ago

My first thought when I heard about this story was to wonder if the 'elites' were involved in nudging this convenient disaster to happen in some shady way

perryizgr8• 4 years ago

This is one of those times when it gets really hard to separate satire from reality.

eurasiantiger2• 4 years ago

Do not be fooled, we are being controlled.

zozbot234• 4 years ago

New subreddit r/LyingFlat starting in 3, 2, 1...

udbhavs• 4 years ago

r/WorkReform is supposedly the replacement for the faction that wasn't "anti-work" but pro-better work conditions that felt misrepresented in the interview.

cuteboy19• 4 years ago

Factionalism is endemic to left wing movements. There are already 3 different splinter subs for workreform

rdtsc• 4 years ago

In general, I find it is much harder to maintain group focus and cohesion when the movement is defined as anti- something right off the bat. It works for short term causes, but not easy sustain long term.

It starts with negativity, it then attracts more as it goes along. The angriest, most radical ones are promoted to become leaders. Soon the negativity spills into internal fights - “ you are not angry enough, not one of us, we’re banning you!” etc.

alexb_6• 4 years ago

The entire thing was a disaster, start to finish. If you're going on Fox News, at least clean your room, put on something other than a sweatshirt, and come PREPARED. You have to know that Fox is going to ask you horribly loaded questions that aim to make you seem like the biggest fool on earth.

But the funny part is, they didn't even do that. The questions asked pretty much amounted to "What are your aspirations?" and "What do you do for a living?" And when the answers to that are "I want to teach Philosophy" and "I sleep on the job that I work 20 hours a week while I punish dogs by refusing them water"[1] then maybe you shouldn't be speaking like what you are doing is too much work.

She could have mentioned the growing wealth inequality, the need for unions, the causes behind the "great resignation", the shifting attitudes of not taking bullshit, but instead she had to say how "Laziness is a virtue!" as if anybody ever is going to agree with that. I would say it's a strawman of the typical reddit moderator (who does it for free, by the way), but if a strawman is made of flesh and blood, is it really a strawman anymore?

Who were the mods at /r/antiwork kidding. I guess this is the egotistical delusion that happens when your head mod is a self admitted rapist.[2]

[1]https://i.imgur.com/XsHDFFN.jpg [2]https://i.redd.it/9zbv77ga04e81.png

soared2• 4 years ago

[2] doesn’t seem to support your claim?

alexb_6• 4 years ago

How so? Masturbating next to someone after they specifically told them it made them uncomfortable, inappropriate touching, and purposefully turning off alarms specifically set to stop this from happening again out of "desperation for emotional intamacy". Then going to talk about it as if it wasn't her fault and it's actually okay now because she went to therapy except she didn't because it's too expensive but it's actually okay because she gave money to an organization....

Call it like it is. It's insanely rapey. I have no remorse for people who do things like this, and then try to play the victim.

anothernewdude2• 4 years ago

Doesn't matter. Fox News selected this guy for a reason.

alexb_6• 4 years ago

Fox News actually didn't select her - the mod team elected her as the best representative. Think about that.

xg15• 4 years ago

I didn't really follow the whole affair, but I found it interesting that Fox apparently specifically requested this particular mod for the interview - and that the mod had already given interviews in the past.

I haven't seen those past interviews, but if she behaved like that in the past, could it be that requesting her was the brunt of Fox' strategy?

Like, they might have known she would make a fool of herself (and the movement) without them even needing to trip her up with loaded questions.

uxp100• 4 years ago

She was the head mod, and was the only one to have done other interviews. That doesn’t seem that interesting to me. Who else would you request to interview, but the person who handles media and is “in-charge.” (Not really all that in-charge, though she made the subreddit private, so)

shitlord• 4 years ago

FYI you may want to rehost that second image. Reddit is currently scrubbing that image off their website, and they will delete it if they become aware of it.

c0balt• 4 years ago

https://archive.is/tK2p6 someone already archived it 13 hours ago.

rPlayer6554• 4 years ago

You expect him to do work to prepare for the interview? I thought it was clear he was anti-work! He wanted to clean up his room....then realized laziness is a virtue!

loceng• 4 years ago

He clearly didn't read Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life.

NoPicklez5• 4 years ago

The part that Fox hit the nail on the head was asking them what they really wanted to do in life. They responded saying to teach Philosophy, now all jokes aside, what's stopping this person from going after that? This movement that this person supports isn't going to get them to where they want to be in life, or atleast have a go.

Like all things people have their own interpretation of what "anti-work" is.

For me it's centered around making sure that people aren't working crazy hours at the expense of enjoying the life we live. I'm thinking the Amazon workers who seem to be getting treated terribly. Or its people that work extremely long hours and get paid a very average wage. Or its people burnt out from having worked very hard in their careers. It's the burnout work culture.

Unfortunately in this case, the viewpoint that was taken by the media and certainly communicated by the mod was around simply doing the least amount of work possible. For some people this is okay, but I wouldn't be encouraging it to live a fulfilled life.

If this person had said, I work x number of hours a week dog walking so I can follow my passion of x, then that's completely fine.

raxxorrax3• 4 years ago

Off-topic: Amazon or in general delivery workers are a case where the IT industry heavily failed to improve work or be a positive influence. Instead of providing people with information, they are put under heavy surveillance. This is the only application a lot of the older generation can think of when the topic of digitisation comes up, but it is not restricted to that.

The consequence is an inhumanly clocked working schedule for people in that field. But consumers support it too. The ability to not track a package results in a moderate life crisis. A benign benefit that has severe results on the job. No wonder nobody wants to do deliveries anymore.

This phenomenon does extend to other industries like any production. Surveillance of production is sensible, surveillance of people is not and I don't think there is any benefit to it and a lot of negatives.

In that regard I understand why people just don't want to work in such an environment. It doesn't even net increased productivity.

hypertele-Xii3• 4 years ago

If this person had said, I work x number of hours a week dog walking so I can follow my passion of x, then that's completely fine.

What if one can follow their passion of x without walking the dog? Would that then not be fine with you anymore?

NoPicklez5• 4 years ago

Well if they don’t have a job at all and/or their passion does not bring in an income from said passion then I don’t know how they will put food on the table.

My point was that this person conveyed themselves as a 30 year old dog walker who sleeps on the job and wants to work less hours. But if they could follow their passion they would want to teach. But this person was not making any strides in achieving this at all.

bjourne30• 4 years ago

No, antiwork is the idea that work is unnatural, forced upon us and not part of what it is to be human. For example, I work in academia so I have lot of personal freedom and I enjoy my work. However, work itself is still forced upon me. I have no practical choice on over whether I should work or not. Antiwork means that you think this is bad and that you should have that choice. Antiwork is not Socialism, it is not workers' rights. It can't be because antiwork means that workers shouldn't even exist!

Would I be happier unemployed? No, probably not. I'd feel like shit. Because society is setup so that if you are unemployed you are poor and people think you are a loser. Careers are how we measure ourselves and others. But this is part of what is crap with this system. It's insane that I (and most others) would feel bad for having too much leisure time.

ethagknight• 4 years ago

Curious, forced upon you by whom? if you move somewhere where no one else can force you to work (maybe the wilderness?), then what forces you to work?

lloydatkinson2• 4 years ago

The working theory is the mods, including this one, were paid off to be a total disaster to try prevent the movement gaining further traction. Everyone in the subreddit voted no to a media appearance. That mod decided otherwise with a second interview with another mod not yet aired.

computershit• 4 years ago

There was no vote in the sub, that was on r/wallstreetbets earlier this year. That's actually how this should have been handled, but instead it was all mod-driven.

hogrider3• 4 years ago

I have no problem believing this but then again it could also totally happen organically bc reddit mods are the biggest assholes on earth, over reaching constantly, totally arbitrary.

lloydatkinson2• 4 years ago

Yeah there is that too - some of the most dysfunctional human beings I’ve ever encountered.

Graffur2• 4 years ago

As usual with stories like this, everyone taking part comes across badly. Fox, the interviewer and the Reddit mod.

The anti-work movement is goodin the sense that it is waking people up to spending all their lives working for terrible bosses and companies. Should peoples lives be hard just so we can make other rich people richer? So they can live in giant houses, by the sea? So they can own multiple vehicles and fly first class everywhere? So they can play golf at fancy clubs when they want?

Why should a worker for a massive e-commerce company not be able to use the toilet? Just so the CEO can go to space as a hobby? FFS.

krapp• 4 years ago

The anti-work movement is goodin the sense that it is waking people up to spending all their lives working for terrible bosses and companies.

It didn't wake anyone up to anything - everyone except perhaps the entitled rich has been perfectly aware of this ever since the days of the Industrial Revolution. Go watch Metropolis, made in 1927, where the plight of the working class is illustrated as oppressed factory workers literally being thrown into the furnace mouth of Moloch.

People don't put up with work because they're blind to its nature, they put up with work because they have no alternative in a purely capitalist system in which survival can only be rented by the labor class, not owned. But what is the anti-work movement's answer to this? Just don't work? That's not feasible for most people.

Graffur2• 4 years ago

People are generally told.. go to school, pass exams, go to college, pass exams, get a job, buy a house, etc. I surmise that the anti-work movement has pulled people out of that way of life.

It's not just about not working. It's about entrepreneurship, working for better companies, smaller companies/startups. It's about not getting so far in debt that you're a slave to a megacorp because you need to pay it off.

It's about not over working and burning out.

jmrm2• 4 years ago

- For those outside of the loop, a couple time-ordered points not mentioned here:

Fox contacted to the mods and asked specifically to talk with this person, and the mods accepted this instead of other due to having some experience in other media. All of this without asking the users if they agree with that.

The Fox interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yUMIFYBMnc

After the Fox interview happened, practically the whole subreddit were upset and disappointed. People asked why this happened in this way, why they didn't prepare a lot more this kind of event, and practically they got an "it is what it is", with a bit of authoritarian smell because the mods took this personally.

People really get even more mad about this, created other subreddits, and created threads in r/antiwork saying things like "mods are mods, not leaders or content creators, and they shouldn't influence the whole sub" and like like "we need new mods".

Mods took that personally, banned a lot of people, removed a lot of comments, more people were mad about this, and even attacked personally the person who spoke in Fox, until they had to close the sub.

- Sources:

https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/sdesxw/mega...

https://old.reddit.com/r/ABoringDystopia/comments/sdjc4b/the...

- What I think we should learn about this:

Fox wanted to interview a specific mod because they knew that using a person who probably would give a bad public image they can show a bad image of the sub. And not only Fox, but every media who have a opposite idea or ideology to yours.

Mods weren't clever enough to ask the people if they wanted or not to be in Fox, who should be the spokesperson, and what thing they wanted defend, report, or ask for. They also needed to make to the spokesperson a guide about what appearance (not only physical) give and what subjects needs to talk.

The spokesperson never should talk about their personal life. That person is representing a group of people, not only one.

You can stop individual people, but not a common idea.

This is gonna be used for ever to teach people what not to do in an interview for a lot of time.

HWR_144• 4 years ago

Mods weren't clever enough to ask the people if they wanted or not to be in Fox, who should be the spokesperson,

They did ask the subreddit. It voted that no one should go on Fox.

jmrm2• 4 years ago

I didn't read that. In that case, they did worse than I thought.

was_a_dev• 4 years ago

The biggest issue anti-work has, is it's name.

At it's core (the defensible part) anti-work is an American labour/union movement, reacting to the exploitation of workers due to flimsy labour law (think Amazon workers).

But the term anti-work is so emotive against the movement, that is just becomes indefensible. So much that the subreddit itself is no longer a single issue movement.

hogrider3• 4 years ago

It was by all the people that hated work at its core and reject the traditional values regarding work, the protestant / puritanical work ethic above all. I agree it changed to that later but really they should have gone with anlther name by then.

mrkentutbabi• 4 years ago

I can’t believe society has a lot of losers like this. It checks every losers boxes out there. Meme comes to life.

tsol• 4 years ago

It's cringe and all but I'm more than anything surprised at how much people care about a throwaway 2 minute segment they filmed so viewers have something to laugh about during the commercials. Fox News really has mastered creating news segments that get people riled up

hogrider3• 4 years ago

Why are reddit mods always like this? They power tripped so hard they'd rather destroy this forum than be embarrassed by it. What causes someone to get delusions of grandeur just because they are doing this unpaid job for reddit which should be limited to just delwting all the nastiness in the forum?

Anti-work subreddit goes private after rough Fox News interview

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