The sad thing is that FOX didnt have to do anything to make this mod, and the community they represented, look bad. They did that all on their own because fundamentally something was very wrong with that sub. It wasnt just people legitimately pissed off at employers, there were people in that community that were very much like that mod and the former didn’t want to be associated with the latter.

Knowing reddit, I assume the thinking was something along the lines of “I can regularly win a reddit argument, therefore my towering intellect will surely win the day on TV and I will become a hero.” Which of course doesn’t hold up at all against someone with professional-grade social/communication skills no matter how right-on your point is.

I was really active in that sub at the time. Fox or CNN or something contacted the moderators about an interview. The mods discussed it and decided to decline. IIRC, they later made a post about not accepting interviews until they felt they were more ready to present clear goals, and maybe pull someone from the community to be a “official” spokesperson.

Then a mod went rogue and did the now infamous Fox interview. That was bad, but recoverable. It was further shenanigans by the moderators in the immediate aftermath that caused the schism into work_reform. Before my exodus from reddit, I followed that community closely, but never got as involved. At the time, I remember thinking that the mods felt more reasonable than in antiwork, but that quickly changed too. Eventually they effectively became mirror subs.

Then RIF got shut down and someone told me about this lemmy federation where I could post about all the gay space communism and fringe technology I wanted. I think that I am happier now overall.

Unless you’re* a professional communicator, talking to media is always dangerous. They can totally change what you say using “editing”, and loaded question can quickly trap you.

This is probably the real reason why politicians never actually say “yes” or “no”! Haha

To expand on the point about editing for anyone who assumes that is only means taking things out of context, editing can also be rearranging the order of communication to change the meaning as well as introducing context prior to the interaction that changes the meaning.

Fox News is known for doing all of that.

Wtf is a “professional communicator”? How do you think you get there?

They just needed someone who wasn’t really weird, and had a proper job. Look at Mick Lynch’s interviews in the UK for example - he did great work for the union.

So… what’s the second rule of talking to Fox News?

I was amazed at how few people thought she was a plant.

It’s not that hard to get someone in a mod position. Then they just have to be a whackjob on air. Mission accomplished.

Vaguely similar to the Occupy Wall Street protests. Interview several people across the country then cherry pick the ways they disagree with each other to call it a disunified movement. All you really need is one discordant voice.

Talking to the media can be incredibly helpful for a movement. It can turn a movement into a near revolution—if the person is competent, well-spoken, and tactfully spreads a great message.

The problem with that interview was the person was not media ready. They needed to be coached. For a long time. They needed to be more charismatic. They needed to know what to say and what not to say.

They didn’t do any of that. In fact, they failed every single part. It’s a high risk/high reward gamble. But you have to be ready for a hostile interviewer, trick questions, traps in your own wording, tone, image, everything. It could completely destroy an idea, much like it did with antiwork. But it could also turn something small into something huge.

Reddit isn’t a “psy-op” but it does intentionally select for the status quo. Once the decision was made to start trying to IPO, radical elements that were anti-capitalist, were purged from all the major sub-reddits. The other radical’s drew traffic and were allowed to stay. Once you get rid of anyone advocating for change, of course stagnation is the end result. That’s the goal.

It’s “accomplished” giving a clear place of congregation to many, many niche communities. It’s (anti-)social media; it’s not intended to accomplish anything big.

The drama and infighting here is completely different.

I’m thankful to antiwork for turning me on to David Graeber. He has a huge body of really amazing work and I’ve enjoyed all of it I’ve read so far. He was taken from us far too early.

There aren’t any non-idiots at traitor rallies.

The thing about trump rallies is you’d have to look really hard to find someone with a full set of functioning brain cells.

I remember when anti-work meant anti-work. As in, fewer jobs, more free time, against the notion of labor as an entire thing. Our entire species retiring.

Unfortunately most people only remember back to the explosion in subscribers that preceded the Fox “interview” by 6-9 months. During which time there was a marked uptick in bad faith arguments pushing what eventually backboned the work reform sub. The (likely paid) Fox appearance was just the diarrhea drizzle on the shit sundae. And then it was obvious to all that the entire thing was comprised of lazy drooling idiots. Narrative captured, mission complete.

Unfortunately much of the world feels entitled to the labor of others and refuses to acknowledge the mental gymnastics we accept as a society.

One has to look no further than the way we treat food service employees. People demand to be served. They feel they are entitled to their basic human needs being serviced while blaming those servicing them for being under valued.

It’s sick and twisted; our society is mentally ill.

Eliminating work wouldn’t actually be enjoyable.

We just need to reform society so that people aren’t required to be employed to survive.

Humans inherently like to work and be productive. The problem isn’t working, it’s employment under shitty companies.

Even if it never accomplished nothing before the Fox News interview, isn’t it interesting Fox felt the need to confront it?

I disagree but it didn’t accomplish anything. It made people aware that they are not alone in their situation and thinking. It created community. This also helped fuel the great resignation and encouraged people to do better for themselves. To not keep running on the wheel for a broken and abusive system. That’s far from nothing.

Every movement is going to contain a whole spectrum of voices. Never having to work is pie in the sky but I’ll tell you who I’m siding with in the “there should be slaves” and the “people should not have to work at all” argument.

The idea of antiwork isn’t bad though. We should use anything and everything we can to utilize automation to allow people to live with as little work as possible. Is that a reality today, no. Can it be a reality in the future, maybe. Things will need maintenance and upkeep, people will want to innovate and try to build new things, etc. But that doesn’t mean we can’t work on things like UBI, free housing, free medicine, free education, etc.

The idea of heading that direction is (what I understood) the main goal. We’re just going to need to take steps to get there and changing the terrible labor practices we currently have became step 1 and thus a majority of the focus in the subreddit.

The Reddit antiwork community had quite a few ridiculous folks hanging out within it.

Not that getting to a post-scarcity society where people aren’t forced to work wasn’t a nice horizon-goal to have, but there are a million steps from where we are in the modern world to there, and a lot of those people wanted it done by next Tuesday. And then when you’d point out that was literally impossible, they’d stick their fingers in their ears and make noises. Needless to say, I didn’t try to stick around for long.