I mean... probably originally, but that's not all that it is, nowadays. Some people really do unironically mean the former, in that sub on the social network that shall not be named (though I haven't checked it for... hrm, almost a year now!:-P).
You mean that sub that saw a huge surge in subscribers, increased bad faith actors, and general chaos ahead of the infamous mod schism that shredded any credibility that might have been hanging on?
As someone who watched it happen in real time, no one will ever be able to convince me that all of that was a coincidence.
I didn't go into the details, but yeah you got exactly what I meant:-). 💯
Some of them were probably even real.
That was as intentional and obvious as the agent provocateurs that were used to break up and arrest the occupy wall street protests.
They've stopped shooting us because MLK Jr became a martyr. Now they just arrest us and make us disappear.
I do feel like the former or something close to it should be our goal as a society.
Um... you probably meant the latter, as in the second one, right? Eating Doritos while slaves do all the hard work - presuming we aren't talking about non-sentient robots but actual people - sounds kinda selfish to me:-P.
Edit: to clarify, I'm down with the live like a King 👑 and eat Doritos 🔺 parts, it's only the pesky slavery 🤕 part that I'm against!
Lol, I did mean the former, but yes, I was imagining automation/etc taking over the role of most jobs.
Best I can do is bad AI art and music to take away the hobbies of a lot of people and to stop paying people who do that for a living.
Oh man, so very many movies would disagree with you there. "I, Robot" and "Terminator" come to mind, and "The Matrix". But perhaps most important: "Wall-E", as in those fat fuckers sat down and simply... never stood up again. (yeah, you can tell I am old from my selection:-D)
Don't get me wrong, Doritos are effing delicious! But also, we need some amount of balance in our lives to help make them worth living. What we gain in comfort there, we lose in autonomy, and that's not a trade-off I would willingly make, even if I could. I mean, I'm not insane - or Amish - I use technology and I enjoy comfort, but I also value the ability to give something back to society through my work.
What e.g. "made America great" (in the 50-60s) was that people's work would get them something in return for it - a house, a family, college education for their kids, etc. - as opposed to today where other than rent work only buys the ability to purchase barely some food & weed, and many people have lost all hope of ever owning their own home, or getting healthcare.:-( I get it - that's beyond fucked up. But what that means is that something was stolen from us (autonomy & freedom), not given (comfort & ease, e.g. look at Google search).
TLDR: When we become reliant upon the machines, that's when they own us rather than the other way around.
we need some amount of balance in our lives to help make them worth living. What we gain in comfort there, we lose in autonomy,
Is it really inherently a reduction in autonomy to remove compulsory labor from society using automation? Why? IMO the whole, spend your life in a job and get the American Dream in exchange thing, is not really freedom and is not much of a choice, even when the work to reward ratio is favorable. Being able to actually choose how your time is spent beyond picking between various jobs which all require you to live the same general sort of on-rails lifestyle could ideally mean a lot more autonomy than we've ever had, and there's no reason I can see to think the result would have to be a bland culture of Wall-E style consumerist vacationers. Our imagination of leisure is defined by its nature as a brief reprieve from working life. Why should we be limited to that, if we had space to grow past it?
I also value the ability to give something back to society through my work
To clarify: work need not be "compulsory" in order to give back to society. I have contributed towards multiple Open Source software projects, been a moderator of a small & then another medium-sized Reddit sub, written the sole content for many a wiki page and aided the creation & extension of far many more others, etc. - not one bit of any of that gave me any direct monetary compensation (though may have helped me get other jobs, from polishing those skillsets), but was all fulfilling and helped my common human to enjoy their leisurely pursuits, and that was enough for me.
And doing that kind of non-compulsory work I feel like adds to my freedom, rather than detracts from it. For the same reason that walking or cycling to some places enhances my enjoyment of life, rather than always having to take a car - and yet I have also been without a car entirely for certain periods of my life, and yes that too was constraining. It is best to have choices imho, from my own direct & personal experiences.
The scenario that Wall-E describes is that they leaned so heavily into their "comfort" that they literally lost the ability to have choices anymore - instead of being able to choose to sit, or stand, or walk, or run, or bike, or swim, etc., their only "choice" was to sit in their chairs. Period. This is not "best" - this is not maximum "freedom": when you have zero viable alternatives, that is in fact no choice or freedom at all. Leading up to that: sometimes you have to stand up, even if you don't feel like it in the moment, in order to preserve your ability to stand up in the future. And if not, well that's your "choice" - but is it though, if it is not one based on informed consent?
Why I say the latter is that, remember that the OP graphic specifically precluded automation: it talked about living like a king, eating Doritos, "while other people do all the hard work". Essentially it advocates that we all be like Elon Musk, playing games all day long and then taking credit and all the monetary rewards resulting from that hard work of others. The implication even goes further: that we would be forcing others to do our bidding as our slaves (colonialism = do that to "others" abroad, vs. inflation where we do it to our own citizens at home). To that I say fuck that noise! But then we got off on this other tangent, which is: what if other humans didn't have to be slaves, and robots just did all the work for us? Okay... that's not nearly so ethically unsound as the OP. But my point was that it is still far from the ideal, unless we made (non-compulsory) work a part of the balancing of our lives - exercise and rest, not one or the other but both.
TLDR: When we become reliant upon the machines, that’s when they own us rather than the other way around.
I am not advocating for slavery here, e.g. as opposed to having robots do our work. On that point I think we are in agreement - it sure would be nice if robots would take over the compulsory stuff (NOT HUMAN BEINGS USED AS SLAVES!!1!!), to allow us the freedom to live however we choose. So moving on, next: if we sit down into those couch-chairs, then we make slaves of ourselves, i.e. our comfort takes precedence but at the cost of our autonomy, whereupon we have lost something - our freedom to choose what to do next. So my note was a cautionary tale, to be mindful of the balance, as opposed to the overly simplistic "work=bad (always)" mindset that was so prevalent in that sub, even before bots took it over. In the OP graphic, the second meaning of ditching work would be unquestionably good, but the former one of ditching work MINUS THE HUMAN SLAVERY PART would not be a uniformly positive outcome... and in fact I think it would be quite negative, overall.
I can't speak for living like a king but we were able to recently confirmed again the whole lazy proletariat myth is a capitalist fiction. During the COVID-19 lockdown we had furloughed workers with a perfect opportunity to just lounge for months, and they just couldn't. Healthy adults just can't couch potato and watch TV for two weeks. When they try, they get cabin fever and start leaning how to ~~widdle~~ whittle wood into bear sculptures. The Great Resignation was driven partially by lockdown hobbies that became lucrative,
I, personally, can couch-potato out for weeks, but at my worst, I have slept for months, getting up only to eat and excrete. I didn't sleep always; sometimes I'd lie there awake but my inertia would be so great I couldn't lift a hand. This is avolition a symptom of mental illness, such as major depression. When doctors noticed that I can make like a log for almost a year, I was diagnosed and qualify for disability.
When all your workers are lethargic or crabby or stealing all the nitrous canisters, maybe your workplace is toxic. Maybe the managers aren't actually managing but acting like children who need to be handled. Or maybe you're not paying them enough to get out of precarity, which is a major cause of chronic mental illness like major depression.
Work as capitalism defines it is alienating. I am very much against unfulfilling drudgery.
Most of us are, including me. Chase your bliss - I truly hope you find it:-).
But please, don't make other people into your bitch.
Your choice is one thing, but why force others to do your work for you? Read the OP again in case you missed it: in addition to living like a king and eating Doritos, it also says "while other people do all the hard work" - the keyword there is people, as in human beings, not robots.
If, as you claim, you are "very much against unfulfilling drudgery", then why would you support having others do that work for you?
And maybe that's not what you meant, so it's all good and we are in agreement. But it kinda sounded like the opposite, and you were against work only when you might have to do it, and thus by implication perhaps for work so long as it is others who end up doing it? So I just wanted to make sure that I did not leave that unsaid.
You do you, that's great, so long as you allow the same of others. That's all I'm saying.
Listen, I'm from the rural south. We do basically everything ourselves. If a toilet needs repaired, we fix it. If the road needs to be graveled in in the potholes, we fix it.
Nobody is asking to do no work. They're just tired of doing work at the behest of the capitalist class. The problem is that work is both an adjective and a noun. Nobody likes the noun.
What? A left wing movement that uses the wrong name to make people understand what they truly mean? Really? Nah, that would never happen!
Adversaries to a movement will split hairs and redefine a movement anyways.
That's all we are seeing here. Look at now they tried to frame Black Lived Matters, something quite clean cut.
No. We suck at naming things. And communication in general.
"Black Lives Matter Too" would have been more clear.
"Replace the Police" would have been better also.
Even mainstream Democrats suck at it. They should be shouting every day, how they're taking on big corp's, going after antitrust abuses and unpaid taxes; While refusing to audit anyone making less than $250,000. But instead they just keep saying some variation of "The economy's great, stupid."
They would have willfully misinterpreted both of those alternatives and convinced you they were poorly named anyways.
"too" implies
a) they don't matter yet
and
b) mattering is a new concept we should consider.
The statement is clear without modifier and requires no qualification, clarification or context: do black lives matter or not?
Or to take the inverse: under what circumstances do black lives not matter? If the answer is "there are none" then obviously black lives matter.
You're not wrong, I guess the biggest issue with it being misconstrued was by people who watch Fox news, but honestly Fox news was gonna find a way to spin it no matter what.
Law enforcement based on the Peelian principles is not a tennable thing. Sure, every US beat officer will learn it in training but they also learn the public is the enemy, which has been the way of things for over a century.
if we could imagine a new age of policing, it would involve much less enforcement and much more prevention, mostly disincentivising people from engaging in desperation crime. Heck, we might even end retributive sentencing for a more restorative system.
If we dropped our current law enforcement -- the whole thing -- and turned to investigating and intercepting elite deviance (white collar crime) we would save more lives, prevent more damage and more cost by orders of magnitude. Not that law enforcement actually does much to reduce crime.
Yeah, but that interview on Fox News really killed the movement pretty hard lol
Why? An interview with any right wing idiot doesn't dent their movement
Because their movement is idiots.
Is that right? To the average person, "Anti-Work" sounds like you're straight up against working, and unless you want to explain this to every single person individually, Fox News is going to keep having a field day misrepresenting your movement.
Honestly that mod torpedoing the whole movement with a dumb interview and forcing the rebrand to work reform was probably one of the best things that could've happened.
Leftists really suck at marketing. Between that, antifa, and defunding the police, they really don't seem to know how to put a name to an idea that can't be misconstrued by an opponent with the maturity of a 5 year old (which, as luck would have it, is most opposition). I'd even argue BLM should be on that list.
Edit to add: global warming.
I believe it stems from Liberalism. Class consciousness is on the rise, but newly-class aware liberals aren't yet aquainted with Leftist theory. These ideas are popular among liberals that are becoming more familiar with leftism but are disconnected from the centuries of leftist progress.
Once I saw a guy arguing for pure capitalism because otherwise the state would have to force people to work with threats of incarceration or whatever.
It's like some sort of trolley problem delusion. It is fine shoving desperate people into whatever jobs they can get, but only if the Invisible Hand does it. It's fine if the threat is homelessness and starvation, but only if the Invisible Hand does it.
They may think they believe it, but the lockdowns of 2020 showed otherwise. Unless you're one of the "lucky" nonneurotypical people with a disorder that makes it possible to just lay around and do nothing, people go stir crazy. Feeling productive may as well be on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. That's one of the reasons the great resignation happened. Way too many of us are working bullshit jobs, and we got to face that reality head on, and didn't like it one bit.
Why the hell haven’t you guys shifted the movement name over to work reform after what happened on tv? It’s not helping
Exactly! I have a genetic illness that caused congenital deformities and injuries and disability later in life, starting around my teens thanks to puberty.
From an early age my relationship with work was distorted because I found myself trapped in the gap between two pathways. I was obviously capable of work, with the right treatment and support I had a lot of potential. But I was disabled, and I required expensive supports and medical intervention, and under the public healthcare system there reaches a point of disability and limitations in capacity that you are written off by the system. Shoved in a residential group home, given a pension below the poverty line, and expected not to try. (genuinely, we're expected not to try, if someone on a disability pension works a job, they can loose their pension, which is many cases is also tied to housing and access to medical services)
I'd flip between the two systems, I'd have a great few months with regular access to treatment, I'd get a job plan from the dole office, I'd sit through work readiness courses, I'd be getting healthier and looking forward to working and being a good little contributor to society. Then I'd hit a waiting list for my medical care, my health would slip, I'd be re-assessed by the welfare department and deemed too disabled to work, my job plan would be shredded and I'd get a pension support plan. Then I'd get to the top of the wait list, resume treatment, and get back to getting to work.
I didn't start a "real job" until I was 24, it was a call centre gig and I near killed myself trying to do it.
It wasn't even hard. It was a true 9-5 (no overtime, no bullshit) and you mentally didn't need to bring any of it home with you. It was easy for me, but my body decided it was too much. My health suffered and it took years to fully recover, with me barely pulling myself together here and there for gig work in between being bounced on and off the disability pension system.
The whole endeavour was far more expensive to tax payers than a system like UBI. Processing my case 70 times because the disability support, and employment support eligibility requirements are so strict and the lines between streams so black and white took a lot of administrative resources.
I've been in my current industry for 10 years this November. I work part time, 12-20 hours a week depending on my health. I'm highly successful in my field because I'm working within my body and mind's means and playing to my strengths. I'm a whole person with a life outside work and I bring that range of experiences to my job, enriching what I bring to my organisation - which is good, because my job is a mutual exchange between me and my employer, it's not exploitive towards me the worker, which further prevents burn out for me.
But we exist within the capitalist system of funding and our wages are set by the department of health and human services. I make $34,000AUD a year and it's not enough to survive.
But if I work any harder my body will not survive.
I'm asking to do what I can do for my community, while living a safe existence.... Not being forced to choose between litteraly breaking my back working for someone else's greedy profit, or starving in a tent (though realistically, a lot of people are doing both)
Anti-work is anti-exploitation.
It's not about people wanting to be lazy yet still have all the niceties, it's about not being coerced into a lifetime of labor to enrich the ones coercing you. A person's labor should enrich themselves and those they choose.
OK, that’s what you’re against, but what are you for?
Mutual aid, free association, common ownership of the means of production, coalescing into a society where people contribute out of genuine gratitude to be part of it
Honest smiles. I'm sure exceptions are sure to exist, but for the majority. When I've even been adjacent to them, they're pretty awesome. I don't care if it's a wedding between two wonderful ladies or my dad getting a Russian WW2 M1891. There's that grin, half not believing, half awe, and half pure childish glee that really can't be beat. I stand for everyone getting that at some time.
It's gonna suck most of the time, and some people are gonna need a hand to get there, but damn, it's worth it.
Get to work bum. If your job hurts you, better yourself and get a better job. Either way, stop whining.
Didn't they have a whole civil war over that in the Reddit sub? Some genuinely thought the sub was for people who just don't want to work at all and some were more thinking of work reform
Personally I am in favour of the former definition, just substitute "othet people" with "automation"
We're trying to reduce the numbers of hours a person has to work.
We talk about the end of paid work being mandatory for survival.
Partnerships:
/join #antiwork)