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.
One way to think about it: we already have a basic income in the US.
Nobody starves to death in the US. Nobody is denied medical care in the emergency room. In many places (though not everywhere), there are shelters where a person can sleep inside. There are food stamps and a patchwork of welfare programs.
However meager they may seem, things like this amount to a form of universal basic income. Does it prevent people from working?
In some cases, you could say it does--there are populations in every city that survive off this safety net, though they don't live well.
But in most cases, it doesn't prevent people from working. The vast majority of people are willing to work for a better life than what the US "basic income" can provide.
What makes you think this would be any less true if the basic income was, say, $30k per year instead of whatever the equivalent is now to provide the meager safety net we have?
It's certainly possible to survive on a $30k basic income in many places in the US, but for most, it won't be an easy or especially pleasant life. Most people will want better.
With a basic income that's a bit more substantial (and has no strings or stigma attached), people will have more freedom to make choices that can truly improve their circumstances, rather than being stuck on a treadmill of barely making ends meet with no space to come up for air and consider education or career changes.
I am not trying to disagree at all, in fact I think we very much need to do more for the poorest among us, especially the kids. Where does that 30k come from though? For 300 million people, that's 9 trillion dollars a year, ~half of GDP. Inflation would be out of control, essentially Venezuela / Zimbabwe levels.
This might be solved by a Negative Income Tax [1]:
> In economics, a negative income tax (NIT) is a system which reverses the direction in which tax is paid for incomes below a certain level; in other words, earners above that level pay money to the state while earners below it receive money.
So we are going to raise taxes on the middle class to give free money to people that choose not to work? Every single family would then do a calculation to see if its worth the second earner working or if they make more just staying home and getting a UBI. I would not be ok going to work to pay people that have decided that they are fine living on the UBI and don't want to work anymore. Seems like a pretty antagonistic solution to the problem.
>So we are going to raise taxes on the middle class to give free money to people that choose not to work?
1. UBI aims to streamline redistribution of wealth and remove a lot of bureaucracy around it, reducing a lot of the cost of the current system
2. Why the middle class specifically? Upper class could shoulder most of the costs (if there are) easily
>I would not be ok going to work to pay people that have decided that they are fine living on the UBI and don't want to work anymore.
Then don't work. We already have taxes for things which are way less useful for society. You could choose not to work and live on with the bare minimum. That's the freedom UBI brings. Now probably you'd do something or another out of boredom which would end up being useful to society anyway. You'd just do it for free instead of having to convince someone to pay for it.
EDIT: A better way to put it is to see UBI as an investment into people instead of as a cost. You give them what they need to live so that, in aggregate, they can innovate more and worry less about making ends meet. Notwithstanding the fact that this is something we can do, for somewhat cheap and would help a lot of people.
Have you actually done the math? The reality is that there aren't enough upper class people to generate sufficient tax revenue for a meaningful UBI. While I do support higher taxes at the upper levels, you can only squeeze people so much before they decide to bail out and move to tax havens.
Interesting. Sounds like it axes Medicare, SS, and a large number of tax deductions (which is how the US implements a lot of policy). I'd love a simplified tax code, but unsure of the SS and Medicare removal. I wonder how that would look for people who are currently collecting, paying in at various stages, etc. That would be a massive windfall for most if the money paid-in was returned.
I'm not sure which veteran benefits they want to get rid of specifically, but this could be a bad idea. One of the main ways to increase economic class if one is poor is to serve in the military and have the pay for college after they get out (yes, the payment could cover part of it, assuming they aren't using it for living expenses which would be mostly covered during their enlistment). The VA is under funded and doesn't have a great record, but that's so highly beneficial to many.
> Sounds like it axes Medicare, SS, and a large number of tax deductions…
… as well various special-purpose programs including housing benefits, SSI, SNAP, TANF, veteran's benefits, WIC, Medicaid, SS Disability, and disaster relief. I'm sure those currently receiving these benefits will be thrilled to find out that they're being replaced by a flat UBI payment of $15k/yr (minus taxes) with no allowance for special circumstances or hardship.
> [SS and Medicare removal] would be a massive windfall for most if the money paid-in was returned.
Undoubtedly, but what are the odds of that happening?
It sounds like you’re being sarcastic, but it will be vastly preferable to avoid the bureaucracy that comes with all those programs. Not to mention the cognitive burden that comes from constantly being means tested.
Average Medicaid expenditures (per year) for persons with disabilities (age 0-64) was $19.7k in 2016[0]. It's probably higher by now. So by cutting Medicaid and replacing it with a flat $15k/year you're reducing benefits to persons with disabilities, on average, by almost $5k/year. Since that's an average, I'm sure there are some who will see much larger cuts and quite a few who will find themselves unable to afford necessary treatments or other costs relating to their disability.
That's just Medicaid; it gets worse when you consider all the other programs being cut.
Even allowing for realistic reductions in bureaucratic overhead, you can't just cut narrowly targeted programs and spread the same amount of money evenly across the entire population without significantly reducing the money available, on average, to the original beneficiaries.
> The sensible move would be to keep disability, etc. as a form of insurance where costs are spread across the populace.
And now you're back where you started—you haven't eliminated these need-based programs at all, or reduced the bureaucracy. You've just added the UBI as an extra expense.
I'm skeptical you can actually "avoid the bureaucracy" with UBI. At the end of the day there will still be people who need more aid than the standard UBI can provide (eg. people with mental/physical disabilities). We can't realistically let them fend for themselves, so you still need the bureaucracy to manage those people.
In an ideal world you would subsidize mental/physical assistance instead of giving them more money. It's both easier to do and fairer to those affected.
Yeah... letting the companies that provide those services, making a profit from them, determine who qualifies is probably going to rife with fraud and abuse. At best, you end up with inflated costs due to there being little incentivize keeping costs down, like we see with student loans and college.
To whom? The government, sure. The individuals using those programs, probably not. Healthcare costs alone would likely wipe that out (for the demographics using Medicare). Rent in many areas would eat more than half.
That's not a separate issue. One of the programs they would cut is housing assistance. So that directly affects it.
You could say that housing costs are a larger issue. However that issue is largely a non-issue for the demographic we are talking about currently since they qualify for stuff like HUD assistance (which would be removed under the plan).
That may be the premise, but as stated earlier in this chain, it appears to be false ($15k won't cover healthcare, housing, etc that would be removed under the proposal).
> Do you have any idea what HUD actually spends on vouchers, section 8, etc?
The actual amount varies by region and income, but e.g. the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (which is financed by HUD) says[0]:
> For CY2020, HACLA paid more than $582 Million to private Landlords on behalf of more than 44,000 participant families.
That works out to an average (mean) of $13.2k per year per family—and they're only covering a portion of the rent. A couple living on UBI and no longer receiving Section 8 vouchers would spend about half of two UBI payments making up for the loss of Section 8, while the other $16.8k/year needs to cover the rest of their rent, food, clothing, transportation, medicine, and any other necessary expenses for both of them.
HACLA isn’t solely funded by HUD so the actual figure is less.
Spending 50% of household income is fairly cost burdened, but not unworkable. The same problem exists under the current scheme as well.
Living in a big city affords more opportunities to earn income. Some would use their initial UBI payments to move to cheaper locales. Grants could help.
> HACLA isn’t solely funded by HUD so the actual figure is less.
Over 85% of HACLA's revenues in 2020 came directly from HUD[0]. Another 10% were from other government grants (which would also be cut). The numbers reported before were just for the Section 8 program, which AFAICT is administered by HACLA but fully funded by HUD.
> Spending 50% of household income is fairly cost burdened, but not unworkable.
That 50% is the part paid by Section 8. The part not paid by Section 8 is expected to be about 30% of income, which at the 2020 poverty level for a family of two would be about $5k (30% of $17.2k), so the total rent is more like $20k or 65% of their pooled UBIs. And again, this is just Section 8. If you qualify for Section 8 housing you probably qualify for some of the other programs which are also being eliminated.
> Living in a big city affords more opportunities to earn income.
Possibly, but then again we're talking about people who are already living in these places and still qualify for housing assistance. Telling them to get a (better) job or move somewhere cheaper isn't a viable solution. If these were reasonably solutions with UBI they would also be reasonable solutions without UBI.
> Grants could help.
I hope you're not suggesting federal grants since those, too, would be eliminated under this proposal. And really that just gets back to programs targeting specific needs.
"You think every homeless family gets a $7000 apartment?"
No, and it's pretty disingenuous for you to put words in my mouth.
It's not so much what HUD spends as what those individuals would need to pay. $500 is an extremely low estimate that would still mean $6k per year (assuming they live in the cheapest stuff they can find). Average costs in most cities for a studio apartment are generally over $1k, giving about $12k per year.
This is only one of the many things eliminated under the proposal. Healthcare is the real big rock and could bankrupt anyone needing substantial care. Even just premiums run from $150-300 per month for the cheapest plans (depending on various factors).
This is a transfer from the very poorest to the middle and upper middle class (how much revenue does a tax on millionaires really accomplish?)
I'll take it because it would benefit me, but that doesn't make it great policy. Also most UBI supporters aren't usually on the same side of an issue as AEI.
The chart shows a slight negative for the very poorest (that are eligible for benefits - it doesn't seem to take into account the people that don't pay taxes, aka the very very poorest, who would presumably not see such a loss).
Although this is fixable by taxing more the middle class if that's what we wish to do (aka, not being "budget-neutral")
> Why the middle class specifically? Upper class could shoulder most of the costs
Reach people have disproportionate political influence so the can carve some exemptions for themselves and they have resources to exploit unintentionally created loopholes. Middle class typically have no ways to avoid taxes.
Lets say we instituted a 100% wealth tax on the 1%, that's 45 trillion if somehow we could get the cash value for their stocks at a normal valuation(which someone would have to buy). How many years does that fund the UBI for until we run out of that money?
The stock market would go to zero as there would be no one capable of buying that stock and pretty much no demand either. People would know that their assets can be seized whenever the government wants. 401k's and retirement accounts would be wiped out. Pension funds would go bankrupt overnight. I feel like this is the scenario that so many overlook when they call for massive wealth taxes or the abolishment of the billionaire / millionaire class.
This is hyperbole. Removing loopholes and taxing the top 5% more will not destroy society. Just like taxing the middle class didn't make them stop working, or made them work shitty jobs just to not pay taxes.
It actually happened not that long ago, in the US.
And the country did not collapsed. It actually entered a era or unparalleled prosperity ( but that had little to do with taxes )
In 1945 tax rate was around 90% IIRC
Honest question : you do understand that a 100% tax rate means that 100% of revenu are taxed correct. ( as opposed to 100% are taken by the state ). Of those 100% only a percentage of it is actually “lost”.
Sorry if it’s obvious but the catastrophic scenario you are describing seems to correspond to “let’s take all the rich folks money, all of it”
I don’t know what is the wealth tax you are referring to and I don’t see it referenced in my comment.
I was pointing out a historical period where taxes were setup differently than now. We tend to forget it was the case; and it seems to be out of the collective psyché.
Indeed in 2022 nobody pays close to 90%. I was referring to the 1945 to 1960 period. ( see linked article, nice read )
lol, we are on the same page. I am not suggesting it as an real option I am stating it to describe the insanity of the people who think that just taxing the rich will supply all the money we need. I am using the example of a 100% wealth tax to show there is just not enough money to do everything that is desired. That regardless of taxation we would have to print money.
That "free money" is just enough to subsist on and pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Instead of "choosing not to work", think of it as "seeking work that's a good fit for them". The incentives are set up so that entering the labor market and improving their earnings makes them better off - which, incredibly enough, most poverty alleviation programs (which are a non-trivial chunk of all government spending) utterly fail at.
> see if its worth the second earner working or if they make more just staying home
The available experimental outcomes show that by and large, people that stay at home on a properly-designed UBI are those who can thereby make highly-valued contributions to the household, such as by raising young kids. Otherwise, they choose to work just as much.
Any credible UBI proposal always involves raising taxes to support payments to everyone. Usually the marketing pitch is that it will be a wash for the middle class (tax increases ~= UBI payouts). But of course "middle class" is poorly defined and spans a wide range of incomes that aren't taxed the same. Presumably a middle class family in San Jose would have a much different calculation than a similar family in Des Moines.
> So we are going to raise taxes on the middle class to give free money to people that choose not to work?
No, ideally, we would raise taxes on the upper class, to give money (compared to the status quo system where we already have means-tested poverty support aid) to the people choosing to do more work (since means-tested aid gets cut with additional income, but UBI doesn't, except by the effects of progressive taxation.)
One way to do part of this:
* Roll payroll taxes into progressive income tax (including basing eligibility for payroll-tax funded programs on total income, not just income currently subject to payroll taxes.) For Social Security, this may involve adding one or more additional “bend points” to the benefit formula.
* Eliminate favorable rates for long-term capital gains, taxing them at normal income tax rates; to better target fairness for gains that genuinely require an extended period and which would be overtaxed if treated as income in the year of realization, allow freely recognizing income (not just capital income) for tax purposes in advance of realization, and additionally allow deferral of some portion of windfall (based on recent past years as baseline) gains over a period of several years.
Taxes wouldn't necessarily be raised. The idea would be to replace many (possibly all) of the usual government social services by these payments.
You already pay taxes, and they are already used to fund other people.
The idea would be to allow people to choose individually how to spend this money. The goal is efficiency, fair distribution of benefits and elimination of bureaucracy and administrative overhead.
A system like this exists in many countries already, except it's framed differently; in my own country, if you're below a certain income level, you are entitled to stipends to help pay for rent, health insurance, child (day) care and probably some other things. It's a socialist support system, and it's framed in a way that doesn't make 'the rich' feel like they are paying 'the poor'.
Of course, there's a huge administrative overhead involved as well, plus there's a big case going on now of people falsely being accused of defrauding the system because some department got rewarded for finding fraudsters, or whatever the issue was. It financially ruined many people because they went from getting a bit of money to help make ends meet, to getting charged €30,000 or more in back pay and fines.
1. 22% of the US population are children. so it doesn't have to be UBI the moment someone pops out of the wound
2. we put almost a trillion dollars into welfare every year.
3. You don't have to provide Equal UBI to every citizen regardless of their income. You can make it like a reverse tax that decreases as you go higher in income that peters out at 100k or so (which 30% of Americans make).
No point in taking the plan someone gave as an example so literally. These are econimic problems that experts spent decades thinking aobut and would take months to draft in order to prevent these obvious counterarguments.
Automation technology has allowed a machine to create 100,000s to millions of a product with very little input from a human to put in the raw resources into it.
GDP grows instantly by at least 13% (in the US) if doing a $1,000/month UBI, for example.
Etc.
Andrew Yang has looked into this a lot - his last two books: “The War On Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future”, and “Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy”
This is nonsense completely disconnected from reality. Sure we could increase GDP in nominal dollar terms by 13% or 130% or any arbitrary number by just printing more dollars but inflation doesn't make us wealthier. At some point someone has to actually make things. Most forms of resource extraction, farming, and manufacturing are still quite labor intensive. The dilettantes who believe that automation will save us from working have probably never had to clean the conveyor belt in a mushroom packing plant; show me a robot capable of doing that.
Have you ever invested in yourself and did you become more valuable to yourself, to the people around you, etc?
And do you think people who are struggling to just survive, who are constantly stressed (which causes mental health issues, poor decision making, and long-term dis-ease progression) will become more productive to society, become more valuable/useful to society if their basic needs are covered - and that people will become less counter-productive (which has a cost too)?
What makes you think people who get UBI also aren't going to want to work? People being lazy isn't attractive.
The logic that people think people given money won't work doesn't fit because billionaires still keep working; yes, some people won't work, but better they don't work than go into crime and hurt society - and then cost society even more if they're caught and we have to pay for them to be in jail.
Dilettantes, neat word - it seems like you're the one who's under-studied in this area though - you seem to have all-or-nothing thinking as well, while catastrophizing while not working from first principles; I am certain you could create a system to efficiently clean a conveyor belt in a mushroom packing plant: high pressure air/water washers, robotic arms that can target specific areas (like how robotic arms move around material to then weld vehicles together, etc) - perhaps requiring innovation on the conveyor belt technology itself.
Have you ever searched for self-washing mushroom packing plant conveyor belt? Maybe someone's already developing/developed one?
What I think is the greatest about automating as much as possible is that that means we free up more time for humans to be creative, to develop themselves and their mind and knowledge, to raise healthy families, to build and strengthen community, etc.
I'm all for automation, let's build more of it. But the current state of automation technology is nowhere near the level that UBI proponents naively assume. In the real world that shit it tremendously expensive, not very flexible, and often unreliable.
Increased automation will raise living standards but it generally doesn't free up time for humans to do non-work things. People contine working just as much but on different tasks. And let's be realistic. Most people aren't very creative, and even the ones who try to be creative never produce much of value. If they don't have to work then a lot of them are going to sit around getting high and playing Xbox. I'm not a moralizer, I have nothing against people choosing to spend their time on such activities. But there's no way I'm going to vote to raise my own taxes in order to provide UBI for people who are capable of working but choose not to.
I think if you actually created a matrix and outlined costs and productivity of machines and their development and operations cost, you'd clearly see that your argument is wrong - but until someone thoroughly puts that effort in, it's all just conjecture from both of us isn't it?
What if you don't actually have to raise your taxes because the productivity increase, and reduced inefficiency, actually pays for itself? Or what if it is a temporary tax but then not only elevates the quality of life of the poorest who would arguably benefit the most (at least who's basic needs aren't met so Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs aren't met anywhere near adequately) but that also your own quality of life improves as well - more than the "$1,000"/month you're receiving in addition?
Also realize that companies/businesses avoiding taxes can't avoid a VAT, so that revenue leak is fixed and puts more money into the system that otherwise is draining it without replenishing it.
"GDP grows instantly by at least 13% (in the US) if doing a $1,000/month UBI, for example"
That really does not track though, sure GDP will go up if the money is spent, but its just spending money that we either borrowed or just printed. Not to mention a ton of that money would be saved, essentially removing it from circulation. Inflation would go out of control. If not, then why not just print 100,000 for each person?
12k a year for 300 million people is ~3.6 trillion. ~20% of gdp a year being printed.
It's too complex to rehash here in a comment - there are people like Andrew Yang who "have done the MATH" and it works out; you tie UBI to inflation also, so people only with UBI don't get priced out of the market, at the same time people can move to towns where things like housing inflation isn't running wild, etc.
Yang also has said you make up most of the difference with a Value Added Tax (consumption tax) - and you can say make Facebook ads have an 80% tax, and diapers - necessities having 0% tax, that way poorer people aren't impacted by the tax; if everyone's receiving $12,000 / year in UBI then you can design it so only people spending more than $200,000 per year are actually paying back into the system - otherwise the taxes you pay is just putting that $12k UBI back into the system. What Yang points out is with the UBI tied to inflation + VAT you can have many levers to pull on if you need to to increase/decrease tax.
Another chunk of covering that UBI comes from cash and cash-like social assistance programs that people will have to decide for themselves if the $1,000/month is better for them or if their current social assistance programs (for cash and cash-like things) is better for them; and no, it's not a Trojan Horse, Yang doesn't want to cut social assistance programs - but if people choose the cash because that's better for their specific circumstances (and they get to decide that, not a bureaucratic government) then that program's spending is going down - the cost of what's provided goes down (turned into the UBI) but then also the management/bureaucracy cost of managing different programs will go down as well depending on how many people chose the UBI over the cash/cash-like options.
And then there's even more that ties into this that reduces costs; stress going down, crime going down, emergency services costs (fire/ambulance/police) go down, etc.
Otherwise, you’d have looked at other comparable economic powers worldwide that provide a more socialist alternative and see that they are nowhere near the inflation rate you’re describing, e.g. France.
Granted, it’s not $30K a year, but $7.5K for a single person, with free healthcare & education that could be considered a form of income.
Doing the same maths as you did, round it $10K per person and you’re at 30% of GDP.
It’s been running for years and debt levels didn’t skyrocket much higher than the US.
Again, where does the 30% of gdp come from?
Frances tax brackets seem to run ~10 - 15% higher than the comparable US ones.
Now if I could get free health care and college for my kids I may be open to paying an extra 10% assuming the quality was good. Using round numbers though, we are taxing everyone an extra 10 - 15% but need to raise an extra 30% of gdp, we are still short. France has a VAT of 20% on goods sold, likely why their Debt to GDP is stable. So while they dont have inflation, everything has gone up 20% right off the bat.
Is a VAT a regressive tax? The poor likely spend 100% of their income so are taxed 20% on everything. The rich are able to save a good portion of it, so get to keep it tax free after income taxes.
Not sure I would be willing to pay essentially 30 - 35% more in taxes for 'free' health care. That's more than I save for retirement. How would I retire? Retirement would essentially be living on the UBI.
Frances Debt to GDP is similar to the US. What happens as population decline affects France and less people work? The Debt to GDP keeps climbing and begins to do so faster and faster.
Doctors and medical professionals would likely have to take paycuts as the federal government cannot afford to pay them 325k a year. You could argue that we could make up the difference by cutting military spending which I agree with, but the military is very much a jobs program as is, so a ton of those soldiers and military contractors including high paying engineering jobs at places like Lockheed go away now. Once that happens and the US can no longer afford to project force in europe, what happens in France when Russia gets aggressive, do they in turn have to raise defense spending and reduce benefits. If we have a military conflict, are we bringing back the draft?
So again I am not disagreeing, I think certain benefits should be given, including universal health care, I am just saying its very complicated and I don't have all the answers and would love to hear some.
I’ve computed the 30% of GDP using the same maths as you did before, by taking 10K per capita over 34K of GDP per capita.
Yes taxes are higher in France. Yes some budgets and jobs might need a pay cut to apply a similar model in the US. That doesn’t sound like an impossible task.
All I’m saying is that dismissing the whole idea of your parent comment by saying that a basic income representing a high portion of GDP would imply absurdly high inflation rates is not true, as there are at least a few counter-examples.
Maybe the amount is too high. But the idea is not as unreasonable as you made it sound.
Note regarding population decline: France is reaching its peak of aged population / younger blood to infuse the economy following WW2’s baby boom. It will likely not have a higher impact than it currently has today in the upcoming years.
The US DOD employs something like 1MM soldiers and 1MM civilian staff (actual numbers slanted more towards military personnel.)
There are huge savings there before you start cutting into contracts (which TBF also need cuts.)
Then the important part is to not think of those jobs as disappearing. Think of those bodies - educated, professionally trained bodies - that can now alleviate the hiring shortage faced by industry.
Think of the boost to GDP when that effort is applied to productive enterprise.
I like the general idea of UBI but I don't see it work without price fixing which is often the first step in an economical downward spiral.
Also I don't understand how any low-trust society like ours would survive the transition phase into UBI when people (even though they like working) might take an extended holiday if the UBI pays for all living costs. Suddenly millions of critical positions would be left unoccupied.
The inflation argument is one I don't know enough to be able to square myself. Don't fully understand how whatever the UBI is eventually reduces to being below the bare minimum of basic.
But, putting that part aside, the idea is that it's just the barest of basics. So if you have a decent salary now, the UBI that is 1/5th or less than that is not gonna help you pay your rent/mortgage that has gone from 30% of your salary to 150% of your UBI. People could likely realign their life though over time which would be massively impactful. Perhaps some would prefer having their basic needs met + working a very part amount of time for some spending money + engaging in a different core life pursuit. But, with that part taking time the market could presumably correct.
That's just for high earners though who can't currently just drop out / transition overnight due to present obligations. The folks who are closer to where a UBI would be putting them anyway it gets way more difficult. A negative income tax might work there, so that keeping the job is still more regardless of what that currently salary is. That flat UBI tends to have some problems in that regard. Then again, those same folks might be over night doubling their take home cash or being able to have no change in cash for a complete reduction in work and the temptation to just go to zero hours would be high (assuming they aren't in financial pain already where the current amount is still not enough). A flat UBI would probably need to be slowly rolled out. Basically get folks used to being more well off so that the flat UBI only can be appropriately viewed as less ideal than their (new) current situation.
Inflation and the national debt are way up. It might feel nice to have an extra $5K today but we increased the burden on our descendants and have nothing of lasting value to show for it. Shame on us.
No one is going to raise wages for a particular position just because it was arbitrarily classified as "critical".
The benefit of a market economy is that if people really do consider something critical, they will pay more for it.
The increase profit margins will attract competitive companies or existing companies will be forced to pay workers more for overtime to satisfy the demand.
The negative of this is that the poor or unemployed have very few dollars with which to vote. A UBI solves this by giving them at least some small percentage of the vote.
I think you're being disingenuous if you believe receiving a no-shit check from the government for $30k per year is the same as scraping by through food banks, homeless shelters, and one-time medical care in the emergency room. I would say all of those things absolutely prevent people from not working. No one would willingly want to live their life that way.
$30k is neither here nor there, but how many people manage to get hired for useful work while they're staying at homeless shelters? The simplest story is that the prospect of homelessness only makes it harder to engage in productive work.
There are a lot of other programs at work. Access is a mess, but 0 earners with children qualify for about 50k in benefits between SNAP, childcare assistance, housing assistance, medicaid, and CHIP.
If it's $30k per year, that's not very far off from the median salary in the US. So I think many people would be a fairly pleasant life, particularly for a couple making $60k. I think the dynamics of who would work or not changes considerably from your example of food stamps and homeless shelters (unless substantial inflation happens, which I think would be likely in that scenario).
Let’s not say nobody starves death in America because people do. Emergency room healthcare is also a poor substitute for most health issues beyond acute illness and trauma.
The working poor do get a lot out of social services that are available if they take advantage of those programs, though some states make it as hard as possible.
But I’m on the same page that UBI is a good thing and better for everybody. People have basic needs and they should be provided for.
I still don’t see how we get there in the US, sadly. The fact that the childcare tax credit was enough to lift so many families out of poverty speaks volumes and yet it seems to be politically ignored by conservatives/republican voters despite the fact that these programs and other social services benefit those communities in red states more than blue states.
The best trick the wealthy pulled was convincing the working poor that all the people they don’t like are abusing the system and living like kings while the working stiff is just getting by.
It seems like those who don't want their old jobs back, don't want to work for the wages offered in places like sandwich shops, or think they're above a certain class of work prove this out. The "everyone really wants to work" idea seems pretty squarely in the land of myth, at least here in California.
Someone has to wash dishes, dig ditches, empty bedpans, make sandwiches, etc. Further, the sandwich shop which employs family members etc. and doesn't pay an unskilled laborer $30/hour will crush the ones that do. Multiple businesses have demonstrated that virtue alone doesn't make overpriced goods sustainable in the long term. And nobody seems to want to examine the basic math behind adding $10 per hour to everyone's hourly wage.
It is definitely outside the box. But think of it like this:
For the last few hundred years, human productivity has vastly increased. Thanks to technological progress, farming has gone from what the bulk of people do to a niche activity that most see only driving by.
Who benefits most from the productivity increases? The rich. We are approaching gilded-age levels of inequality, while the wage for most workers is stagnant. What if instead of concentrating that wealth on a few people who won the "ovarian lottery" [1] we split the dividends of our ancestors' achievements among everybody?
So imagine a program like that but bigger. Maybe a poverty-level income for each person, like $1000/month. What would happen? Some people wouldn't work. But that's nothing unusual; only 63% of people in the US work right now. (And really, how many people are doing bullshit jobs that don't add much to the economy?) Others would keep working because they wanted more money, or just because they like working. (Personally, I'm in that last group.)
Could this work? Personally, I'm skeptical but curious. But it's definitely not impossible.
That's generally not the expectation. The expectation is that there's more than enough wealth to allow for everyone to have a baseline of income to meet their most basic needs. You want to buy a house, buy a car, travel, eat at fancy restaurants, buy expensive things, you still have to work. But if you want to quit your job and find another one you don't need to fear starvation or eviction because you are without income for a few months.
It's the same logic as preventative medicine. Instead of dishing out money for surgery you can catch problems earlier when they are cheaper to fix.
>> How exactly is this supposed to work? The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work?
I grew up around a lot of poor people. One issue in the US is healthcare. If you make <13k (or whatever your state limit is) you dont qualify for government healthcare. Also, 13k is too little to actually purchase private healthcare, so there is a "donut hole" where it makes sense not to work below a certain wage since you get less with income than with no income.
The solution here is obvious to me -- if you provide some of the benefits without means-testing (i.e., the "U" in "UBI") then people are incentivized to work even bits without risking losting healthcare/foodstamps.
Another example was in college -- if you earned even a bit of money, your student aid often went down commensurately. At that point, why would you work? You were no better off unless you could make a LOT of money. I realize this has changed over the past 20yrs.
Also, as someone who's gone thru this -- this is a very delicate process. You do one thing wrong, and you're in bureaucratic hell for months without benefits. The "safe" thing to do is to earn nothing -- God forbid you earn a thousand here or there and lose medical care. The whole system of means-testing makes no sense. It seems to be more a way to create jobs for bureaucrats.
So the "where the money comes from" part is a separate discussion (maybe another thread?), but I'll try to answer "how it (could) work".
So, let's say there's some amount X that is enough for a person to afford housing, food, reasonable transport etc. It's as simple as saying "everyone gets this amount now, rich or poor".
For a rich person, it'll be a drop in the bucket, but for a poor person it could mean the economic freedom to quit a bad job. A few quick points around this:
* inflation. People keep worrying about this. Wages have stagnated since the 70s, and whenever raising minimum wage is mentioned, people say it will cause inflation. My counter-question is, how have we stagnated wages and still have inflation as high as it is now? It kinda feels like inflation isn't a result of growing wages but tied to economic growth in general. If inflation will just happen as part of economic growth, why not cut poor people in on the pie a little bit? (I know why, I'm asking rhetorically)
* welfare. People think we're doing something like this already with welfare, except welfare comes with all kinds of random classist baggage. Should the person get welfare if they, say, try to buy some 'luxury' item that's not strictly needed to live but might give them a small hint of joy in an otherwise tough situation? This version just takes away the restrictions and qualifying conditions by saying everyone just qualifies.
* no one working. Of course people would still work. It's just they wouldn't be forced to do so under pain of homelessness or starvation. Imagine saying "I quit" and still getting your base needs met. What kind of working conditions would people have to give you to keep you wanting to work? What kind of job satisfaction would need to become the norm?
I realize many of these don't apply to many of the people in this forum, but it can make a huge difference in industries like food service, where working conditions and perks are... a bit different from tech.
Universal basic income is not "anti-work", it's pro-work. The GP seems a bit confused. The simplest way of putting it is that everyone gets a "baseline" subsidy that's at best just enough to live a minimally dignified life. But working to earn a supplemental income can never leave you worse off. And even when this can be described as "anti-forced" work, that's because having such a safe baseline gives you the flexibility of trying for a better fit. It's something everyone would want for themselves.
You still need a fish catching machine. In the literal sense. Despite all the innovations, we still need fisherman and sailors. Even if we have a fish catching machine who/what will make the fish catching machine? And there are still tons of other automation problems and a fish catching machines isn't even the hardest one.
The automation challenge is often conveniently underplayed, while it's an insanely hard problem. You might as wel say a wizard will do it.
Will it be possible some day in the future? Probably? In a relevant time frame? Probably not.
It's fascinating how some people view on manufacturing is oversimplified.
Fish catching machine needs maintenance, it uses consumable items to work properly. To produce all of that there should be tools, transportation, mining, engineering and so on. There will be no state in any near term future when it would be possible to have work optional for any meaningful group of people. All the welfare we have right now is basically a subsidy (mandatory charity) of working people to not working people.
I believed more in "corporate welfare" when a corporation finds a way to create a free product for large group of people while selling something else. But closer and closer connections between the government and corporations made this possibility less likely from my opinion.
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
Now I certainly agree that there is no realistic scenario where any significant portion of people can just choose free fish in 5 or even 10 years[1]. But the automation of work tasks is like Mike's bankruptcy: it builds slowly until we have the sudden realization that we're over the cliff. Robots making and repairing robots, people watched over by machines of loving grace, the whole 9 yards.
Personally, I would like to have the UBI parachute strapped on before we find ourselves floating Wile E. Coyote style over an economic collapse. Given the rate at which new legislation passes in today's society, the time to start the fight is at least 20 years before you really need it.
[1] Unless those singulatarian types are right, and human-level machine intelligence is 7 years out: https://longbets.org/1/
Check the percent of the population involved in agriculture over time, or involved in fishing. From a quick Google search something like 90% in 1800 vs 2% now.
We definitely have machines, not saying there’s no labor involved but it’s certainly less than it has been historically. It really is similar to the village where one person operates a fish catching machine.
I am against UBI because I think we aren't there just yet with technology but I do agree that we need a way to ensure that "everyone can eat" when the time comes.
Right now we also need to look at how we can provide job for those who are affected by automation and not just say that the coal miners need "learn to code" and move.
Edit to add:
We have some industries that are highly automated, ie. semiconductor manufacturing. Yet they still have raw inputs that take non-automated work. If we were able to develop a complete automated line, I would support gov/private group "socializing" the output.
We could at least be experimenting, maybe implement a $100/month UBI in one state, see how it affects their productivity/health/budget, consider trying other numbers in other locations.
Technology wise, there are a lot of diffrent visions of how it might look like.
I liked the description of the Universal Constructors in Diamond Age, toothed gears that captured atoms and placed them into buckets, sorting the elements out of the ocean water.
That is probably more fantasy though, more likely to like like how it does now with modular rock crushers, moving belts, etc.
Food supply is going to be interesting(read difficult), we can automate harvesting grains(rice, wheat, corn) easily. But things like tomatoes, lettuce, spinach rely heavily on human labor to tend and harvest. One of the things that is noticeable is that as we select foods that ship and store better(which we will be doing more of as we automate more) they are less tasty. Maybe we can engineer foods that are easy to harvest, tasty and transport well but that will necessitate us to get over our fear of GMO.
On the societal front, I would not want the government to have control of the manufacturing systems because the temptation to use control against political adversaries would be to great(See Biden's recent comments on how Spotify should do more about Joe Rogan and how Trump used his influence(Not taking a stance on any issues, just showing the issues exist and would have grave ramifications).
My thought would be that as you have a product more and more automated and vertically integrated, let's say bread. Planting, harvest, milling, mixing, baking are all owned by a handful of companies with minimum human labor. Government should then hold bids to see who gets to supply the market, limiting each supplier to below a 20%(?) share as to keep multiple suppliers in the market but also spread the risk so you don't have a too big to fail.
The companies would be paid via taxes and everyone would get free bread.
Now, you would have to deal with the effects of that; people wasting bread because it's free, health effects of eating more bread because it's free are two that I can think of off the top of my head.
One other thought on the after effects: We will have no way to educate and no way to punish those who commit crime. I like kids but I doubt I would want to spend the majority of my day trying to get a group of them to learn when I don't have to. And honestly, they would also feel like it is a waste of time because it is not needed.
No one will want to spend their time policing ,running prisons, jails or courthouses either. Hell, you have a hard enough time trying to get people to serve jury duty now.
I know we like to that crime will cease to exist if we have plenty, but there is more than the lust for physical items that drives crime. Desire to control others, lust.
The transition to a society where everyone can get what they want, when they want it is fraught with pitfalls and traps. The best cases would end with up something like the Isaac Asimov's utopias or Ian M. Bank's Culture universe. Middle case is dystopias like Snow Crash and Diamond Age. Worst case is that humanity falls into a hedonistic loop, people stop learning and then things break. Probably wouldn't kill everyone but humanity would be reset at that point.
Random tidbit that I didn't work in: If you can't design a system that is 100% perfect and requires no maintenance, you should design one that requires ~yearly maintenance. If the maintenance cycles are too far apart, no one will remember when to do it and how to do it. Later when it breaks, there might not be anyone who knows how to fix it.
Kind of reminds me of The Mitchell and Webb Look skits about the Angel Summoner and the BMX Bandit. BMX Bandit (the workers) want to be useful, but they just can't compete with an Angel Summoner (automation machine) that can just summon an angelic horde every time and solve the problem without hardly any effort.
At face value, and with traditional neoclassical economics, it does appear to be an infeasible facade. Ex nilho creation of Robison Crusoe style goods.
From a practical reality, we already have a UBI of $0 guaranteed, and with time cost that increases if people want to seek welfare benefits. A UBI could be implemented, potentially, solely on streamlining of processes to decrease the costs of welfare benefit search.
Likely a realistic funding would be a mix of improving services delivery (lowering costs) and taxation of capital holders (offset some of the gains that put labor out of work). Under neoclassical theory, there are major differences in the two workhorse models of overlapping generations versus infinitely lived agents. An OLG model better approximates groups of people and their lifecycles.
In my view, this is a slow-burn fight w/in the optimal taxation literature, based solely on the papers themselves and having not participated in the conferences!
You cut most of our bureaucratic social safety net (food stamps, disability, social security, etc) and replace it with a system where everyone gets enough for the bare basics. If you were smart, you'd fund it with a carbon tax.
In all honesty I don't see UBI becoming a thing until we start automating ourselves into unemployment. People say this would increase inflation. Maybe. Let's trial it with 1% of the population and find out.
That's a tad bit insane - disabled people won't be able to find jobs, whether you want it or not. You are pushing them deeper in poverty by giving them the same amount of money as you give to someone who chooses not to work.
Well I think for ubi to accomplish its goals you'd have to index it to the federal poverty line. I used to be on disability and let me tell you, the FPL would have been a drastic improvement. People really don't understand how little someone on disability makes. It was not enough for me to live a remotely dignified life even in a very low cost of living area.
There will still be those who spend all their UBI on drugs or whatever and have nowhere to stay. Do we just let them die on the street since there's no more social safety nets?
There are those that do so today. Given we have no real mental health facilities, those people simply wind up in jail on drug possession charges. It's inhumane, yeah, but I don't think replacing things with UBI would make it more so. Maybe one of these days we'll actually get our act together to help those that need it most.
I assume with more 'normal' people being liberated from the yoke of work there might be more volunteers and volunteer initiatives to help those in need out. The question is how much of the self-destructive behaviour if a product of a 'sick' society where mental health treatment seems prohibited by the cost.
From a political perspective, it is easier to profit (in terms of political capital or actual capital) from a crisis than it is to prevent it. If you prevent it, then you've spent a lot of capital all for most people to say "well, nothing even happened!". It is a sad state of affairs.
> How exactly is this supposed to work? The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work?
I'm not a committed supporter of UBI, so my opinion should be taken with a grain of salt (or more) but I assume the whole point is to promote wealth redistribution. Not print money. So you give everyone some amount, say 12K/year, and then support it with taxes.
It sounds infeasible with the current budget, because of course it is. But modeling the final result isn't that simple I'd guess. More money into the circle, so the circle gets bigger, etc. So while it'd be easy to shoot it down using a single iteration of the circle, I'd like to see someone do a longer term simulation. I'm sure they have, I just haven't seen it.
> Not print money. So you give everyone some amount, say 12K/year, and then support it with taxes.
I’m trying to say this with utmost respect. But $12k x 330M is $4T/year.
In 2021, the US collected about $4T [0]. The US spent about $7T [1]. So it would take lots of iterations to figure this out.
I think there are some efficiencies so you can reduce some of this budget but introducing a UBI like this would up the spent to $10T and require an extra $6T in taxes every year.
It just seems so non-sensible. As the only way to reach this level would be to inflate money so it bought nothing much.
Proposing this seems less likely than just researching Star Trek replicators to reduce the need to buy food or something.
Or free housing for everyone is more feasible since that seems more achievable than increasing tax revenue by 150%.
Even if you seize every penny of US billionaires assets that’s only $4.2T [2]. At least that covers the first year but then those assets are gone.
> Proposing this seems less likely than just researching Star Trek replicators to reduce the need to buy food or something.
The problem with that is, without UBI, replicators don't solve the problem. The corporation that invents such a thing would get rich and charge the poorest to use it.
We currently HAVE enough food, shelter, and health care as a society to cover everyone, but the efficiency/productivity gains haven't sufficiently sufficiently benefited everyone. UBI is one proposed option for correcting that situation.
As for the actual cost - just as an exercise for trimming, without going into excessive detail:
* About 80 million of the 330 million in the US are under 18[1]. Let's assume 4 year olds don't need UBI. Maybe there's a childcare credit, maybe not, but for the sake of NOT encouraging parents to have kids just for the paycheck, let's start UBI at 18+ years old
* About half of US households make over $75k right now[2]. 33% make over 100k. I'm handwaving a bit here, but let's say the tax changes to support UBI result in increased taxes, and the "breakeven" point is somewhere around the 75k mark (i.e., above 75k household income - which would be 87k for a 1 person home, or 99k for a 2 person home, with the UBI - there's enough taxed off that the household is paying as much or more in taxes than they get from UBI).
With those two tweaks, you're down to 125 million people or less that are getting more than they put in. And that comes to about 1.25T USD. And... if you look at our spending trends[3], that 7T USD number for 2021 you quoted already includes 1.6T in "income security". So it might actually be possible to hit UBI with the current budget/deficit by rearranging how the money is distributed.
I think the answer to replicators isn’t to give people enough money to buy replicators. The issue is to make replicators free to everyone.
I think this is parallel to “free college.” I don’t think we should give everyone $20k/year to go to college. We should make college free and low cost.
I don’t think it’s fair to funnel UBI to billionaires as the goal is to help people, but make some people really rich with the new transfers.
> I’m trying to say this with utmost respect. But $12k x 330M is $4T/year.
I don't disagree, it sounds infeasible. But it's such a massive stimulus that I think it's really hard to model the real outcome. I just think it's probably not accurate to try and model it using a single iteration of the current budget.
Ultimately I think we have to collectively decide whether or not our society can support a basic level of civilized existence for all members, or if there is a core requirement that some people are going to need to suffer so that a plurality will be able to live comfortably. Same for health care -- can we simply not afford for everyone to have a basic level of health care? Must someone else suffer so that I can get adequate care for myself and family?
UBI and things like it are just a means to that end.
No, it’s really easy to model. And all models show it as not feasible. Saying something is “hard to model” is not accurate in this situation.
It’s like saying “it’s hard to model how prepend will marry Katherine Hepburn.” It’s true, I suppose. But it’s true because that’s an impossible situation on many dimensions.
And again, it’s not about some suffering so others don’t (although I think that’s an unhealthy way of looking at it). Even if you take all money from all billionaires. Like every penny and they suffer. That doesn’t even support a simple UBI of only $13k/year. So there’s not a suffering model that works out. There’s no proposed taxation plan that would account for this.
When more work is automated the same amount of work is completed with less humans doing it. Currently that means that normal people make less money, but it doesn't have to be that way. Wealth distribution could remain the same as more things are automated. A lot of people believe we passed the point where the country makes enough money from a small enough number of people that they could re-distribute it as it used to be.
A lot of people also believe that a huge percentage of society is engaging in "bullshit" jobs because there isn't enough real work that needs to be done.
The ideal way would be to pass a national Land Value Tax, and use the proceeds to fund UBI. The country has plenty of money, but it's all accumulating to landlords. An LVT is the most effective way to both moderate the excesses of the wealthy and continuously fund a social safety net. It would also let you eliminate most other forms of social safety and taxation, since Land/Natural Resources are the greatest stores of value.
The Land Value Tax is tied to the assessment of the value of the land. If the landlord raised the rent 20%, sans improvements (which are not taxed), the assessed value of the land itself would go up 20% as a reflection and nullify the incentive to raise rent in the first place.
The only way you can raise rents (in a way that nets a profit) under a LVT is to improve the property or provide services. If you own a 4 unit complex and you want a higher return, you need to build more units, a gym or provide on-site dry cleaning. This also means more efficient land-use in areas of high land value (i.e. densely built town/city centers). Since no more land can be produced, and speculation cannot produce profit, the incentivized usage is a productive one (building more housing where it's in high demand).
Philosophically, a person who supports this concept wouldn't view it as the landlords paying everyone's UBI. We can respect every American's right to enjoy private property, while also holding the value of that property as a public trust. The LVT payments represent the capture of that value, and the UBI is the mechanism by which the public share is distributed.
It's the land VALUE, meaning things built on the land add value, say a skyscraper for example with offices... these would pay quite a bit more than say an un-utilized piece of land for sale in Utah without water rights.
Then there's land that doesn't have buildings but still has high value because of the resources (oil, natural gas, minerals, etc) that sit underneath.
I think this works swell, but we should maybe have a variable VAT too that makes it so even UBI recipients pay some taxes back on everything they purchase, etc...and I think the system should be pegged at making the amount doled out and taxes raised from land-owners equivalent to 3x rent, aka rent should account on average 1/3rd of the amount given out.
Could also simply have a program where everyone's given 1k, plus vouchers for rent upto a limit, plus foodstamps... could be foodstamps are usable to pay rent, to make it easier to manage, and whatever's left over is your food budget... then the extra 1k pays utilities, insurance, etc... of course there should be free healthcare and better education deal....
Personally I'd prefer usd moves to crypto and only allows 1 account per person with a 50 million dollar max-limit, basically making all income over a threshold taxed, so billionaires can't even exist...and redistributes to those who hodl less and spend more. but I'm a bit more radical in my thinking....
This really is the only way to make it work. Only problem is that once you eliminate poverty the no-longer-impoverished have a tendency to pull the ladder up behind them
> How exactly is this supposed to work? The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work?
Nobody HAS to work, correct. If they only want to survive, they don't need to work. Everyone gets money for food, water, shelter and education; no questions asked.
If you want an iPhone or eat something nice, you should probably get some money though.
Universal basic income isn't much usually, it's enough to survive, enough for a livable life.
That's paid by taxes of the majority of people that will still work, because people usually want more than just to survive, so they'll work. They'll just not work at Starbucks for 10 years to pay their student loan, they'll find a job that they like, a job with meaning.
ubi is ultimately about control: continue to extract wealth upwards and everyone who's left gets locked onto the money-printing teat (so that taxes don't even need to rise for said wealthy). it has its own logic: the already powerful and wealthy get to ossify socioeconomic stratification, creating a permanent gentry class. we should be fighting this dystopian gambit at every turn (note that dynamism is what makes political economies great, not stagnation).
note that what we should instead be doing is pushing for more meaningful work up and down the economy.
It is unfeasible. The reason money works is because it is an abstraction for someone's production of value that is way easier than bartering for everything. physical labor, skilled labor, educated thinking, management, knowledge transfer... anything that is valuable to someone else.
If you just pay people to sit on their asses, many of them are just going to sit on their asses, creating nothing, simply consuming resources. The host (civilized society) cannot survive when everyone is a leech.
Most people don't actually want to live at the UBI subsistence level so they'll work to live at a higher level. Some people need help for a while, and the infrastructure needed to dole out services to those in need creates waste and neglect.
People who work bullshit jobs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs) are already unintentional leeches. UBI would disincentivize that inefficiency. Then those who want to sit on their asses with their $1200 could do so guilt-free, and, in my rosy vision for the world, the fraction who want to do something more fulfilling than making money for "the host" (e.g., FAMAG, Wall Street, I dunno) would be empowered to focus on things that are important to them, and probably to humanity as well.
> government prints money and gives it away for free
In some circumstances this is actually a good idea. One core idea of Modern Monetary Theory is that printing money is only inflationary when the economy is at capacity.
So giving money to people that can't or won't work actually drives growth because they can spend.
If you moralize about economics or think MMT is wrong, this sounds like a horrible idea. If you only care about results, then it's a great idea.
The comments here at the time of my writing don't provide a good explanation of it. There are practical UBI proposals out there that are revenue neutral for various countries that would largely replace income transfers of the existing social safety net, better go look them up. (There is no fundamental reason it needs to be RN but it's a good starting point to understand why it doesn't intrinsically mean more funding).
It's not a panacea, generally it can make current recipients of means tested transfers well off in exchange for eliminating some problems associated with means tested programs.
Pool together all ( or most ) social benefits in one single payment to get some economy of scale.( removing the need to have specific admin XYZ to distribute XYZ benefits )
I live in the US, and from what I understand you guys have little to no benefits.
But in place where it does exists, similar sums are already being spend between unemployment, rent assistance, affordable healthcare and the likes.
To give you a idea the RSA in France is around 400€ / month. That’s pretty much a given if you do some paperwork )
A transition to UBI would mean to consolidate it to reach higher level.
I think that many yearn for an idealized life in a small, relatively isolated community, low tech and free of fiat currency. They try to imagine workarounds for the fact that it's not actually currently possible in reality.
UBI, anarchism, antiwork and other radical ideas are proposed patches to the cold and lonely reality of modern metropolitan life. They would probably not work, but they are not really the point. The point is to imagine some escape from the current crushing system.
> The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work?
Counter question: assuming there's no UBI, and automation eats the world - Amazon Warehouses and delivery are 99% automated, as are Walmart and MacDonalds - nobody can work[1]. Corporations are still paying close to 0% taxes. How exactly is this supposed to work?
Except a few in repairs and automation, and a handful of industries less amenable to robots.
> What do uber rich people do all day? Why do they work?
For the most part they are the "uber rich" precisely because they prioritize earning, saving, and investing much more than average individuals, who for the most part put in just enough effort to fund what they deem an acceptable lifestyle comparable to their peers. If you want to know what UBI would look like for the average person, don't look at the handful of exceptionally successful entrepreneurs—instead, look at lottery winners, ordinary people with ordinary priorities who are suddenly given enough money to guarantee them a basic (or more than basic) income for life. It doesn't usually end well.
> If you had infinite money, would you do nothing?
Not "nothing", no. But I probably wouldn't care much about whether the things I choose to do have any value to other people, since I don't need to worry about whether they'll pay me to do them. Therein lies the core economic problem with eliminating the need to work or otherwise offer something of value (like access to capital) to earn a living: People will do things, sure—but most of what they'll choose to do in the absence of meaningful economic incentives will be unproductive.
You tax a couple dozen ultra rich billionaires and a couple dozen ultra profitable companies. There's plenty of money. We don't need to print more. And each doesn't need the spare $20B anyways.
Even if we zero out every US billionaire (imagine that for a second; take 100% of their wealth and leave them with exactly $0) it would not even cover 1/5 of the US national debt.
We can't see taking their money as a viable long term solution to UBI. Our debt is out of control and our day of reckoning will come eventually. Nothing is free; markets will correct for UBI and people will become just as poor as they were over time. Existing UBI studies cannot take into account for the _universal_ aspect of UBI because they are controlled studies — there will be unintended consequences.
The COVID stimulus programs were a sort of UBI program. We're now starting to see mass inflation in part due to lower labor participation and excess liquidity.
Obviously only part of the picture as quantitative easing and low rates are also driving excess liquidity, and omicron is also driving lower short-term labor participation.
Emphasis on the sort of part; universal means universal—everyone gets it. It's not Universal Guaranteed Income, it's Universal Basic Income. My wife and I worked the whole time and we made too much to ever get any stimulus. So we worked while we saw many people our age goofing off and seeing just how long they could ride the unemployment wave—yes, they really were proud of this.
Meanwhile another half our peers want their college debt forgiven because they can't cut it in the real world with their liberal arts degree. Mark my words: if they ever do get around to slashing college debt, those who did what they were supposed to will be left there with their bill in hand while everyone else who made every ill-advised decision gets off for free.
> You tax a couple dozen ultra rich billionaires and a couple dozen ultra profitable companies. There's plenty of money.
The federal deficit is 2.8T for 1 year.
If we confiscated the 100% assets of the top 10 US billionaires we don't even get close to half of 1 year of federal spending. It's not plausible that a massive increase in taxes would pay for UBI.
As is, people not participating in the workforce right now is implicated in large parts of the various shortages. It's not clear how UBI improves things.
The "ultra-wealthy" are not where the money is. Besides, what many leftists actually end up saying by focusing on those is that Gates and Buffett should not be allowed to put their money towards eradicating malaria, giving every African safe drinking water, and countless such high-value causes. Instead that hard-won wealth should be taxed from them and frittered away to fund a one-time super binge of mindless political activism and foolish "green" boondoggles in the highly developed West. Needless to say, I think this is a very bad idea.
You want to tax Larry Ellison's yacht and other ludicrous spending, fine by me. But that's the ultra-wealthy's consumption - it's not even their income, much less their wealth. If you can't tell the difference, you're not getting the point of this debate.
I agree with you, taxation does nothing but enable the government to work on projects it deems important in the name of helping the public. It's inefficient and obviously open to corruption.
If we really think that it is unjust for money to be concentrated in the hands of the rich and should go to the public instead of their heirs or private interests, there should be an option of zeroing out one's bank account. That is, literally destroying money (not to be confused with wealth). This should have roughly the same effect as dividing up one's fortune and distributing it evenly to all holders of that currency.
False. You'd need 4 trillion dollars a year to give 12k to everyone in the US. That would mean doubling US federal expenditures. And some people would stop working, hence stop paying income tax. Some businesses would leave the country.
I do expect someday it will be feasible though. Maybe in my lifetime.
Emphasis on the 'some' in some cash. As bloated as the US military is, it 'only' has a budget of $700B and a good portion of this is veterns welfare programs. This should put into perspective how ludicrously expensive UBI truly is
Lucky, tricky problems get solved when there's a trillion dollars on the line. For the most part, this idea that taxing the rich is in-theory difficult is just an illusion created by them, to dissuade people from even thinking about it.
And yet I have 22% of my equity sold and sent straight to the IRS every year. This is behind the scenes a complex multi-step process, and yet it happens like clockwork, easy as pie.
The core observations of the universal basic income drive are that:
a) The amount of actual human labor required in the developed world to maintain an acceptable standard of living for everyone in the society is decreasing (with no end in sight),
b) Much of the profit and control of that decreasing cost of providing for the society is concentrating in the hands of a very small number of extraordinarily wealthy people
c) The process you noted:
> The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work?
... is already how things work, we just dress it up in a byzantine (and expensive!) welfare/social insurance/corporate bailout system and the proliferation of "jobs" that provide no meaningful value to society [0].
If a system could be created that replaces the indirect spending with direct spending, the people who need to be could still be motivated to do the societally valuable jobs (because people want more things still!), and the people who want to do things that are prosocial but not well-remunerated by the capitalist system (arts, education/research, activism/humanitarianism/social work [because there will assuredly still be problems]) will be more able to do so.
>How exactly is this supposed to work? The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work?
Given the tremendous inflation occurring because of non-universal benefits, UBI pretty well died as a subject. Everything the anti-UBI people have said would happen, is happening. So if it were universal, it would be worse than this.
Trying to discuss UBI is complex because every single attempt at it has failed.
There is a simplistic idea of UBI = $1000/month to every single person. Just start delivering cheques and see what happens? Everyone earns $1000 more and everyone bumps up in the progressive tax and hopefully you tax enough to keep the budget balanced and inflation under control? We know this doesn't work now. MMT is dead as a subject. We must do much more than just free money.
Lets look deeper.
What if we dismantle every single safety net. Welfare goes away, employment insurance, child benefits, old age pensions, indigenous UBI, etc. These all go away. We take those budgets and combine them and disperse equally. In essence what happens is that from a government budget point of view we aren't broke. At exactly the same time we also make a constitutional amendment requiring the government to balance the budget.
> Given the tremendous inflation occurring because of non-universal benefits
The amount of inflation is not especially high, it would've been quite normal back in the 1980s (post Volcker, even). That's why the Fed is slow at addressing it. And of course, the global pandemic had much to do with it.
In the latter part of your comment, you're talking about two versions of the same thing. Calling budget constraints 'MMT' does not change how they work.
From a historical point of view sure. The thing about WW1 boomers retiring in the 80s and causing major inflation. Sure it was a huge problem. This time it's the WW2 boomers retiring that will cause major inflation. But that effect hasnt quite kicked in. The inflation stems from benefits and low rates. Which low rates can be just called benefits as well.
> it would've been quite normal back in the 1980s (post Volcker, even). That's why the Fed is slow at addressing it. And of course, the global pandemic had much to do with it.
So here we sit post-benefits. You and I can both agree people who couldn't work because of the pandemic shouldn't be left to starve.
The consequence is extreme inflation, but worse. The USA has entered another recession. Nearby recessions means they are connected and therefore this is a depression. Which we can verify by the high correlation with psychological depression. What do you think, do you find more and more people around you are getting depressed?
>In the latter part of your comment, you're talking about two versions of the same thing. Calling budget constraints 'MMT' does not change how they work.
The countries like Germany and Switzerland that have implemented this are brilliant. Though to be fair countries which dont even need the amendment are that much smarter.
I would prefer to fund it via a land value tax, which is seen as the most efficient form of taxation due to having no deadweight loss.
Like the other commenter said, the concept of a UBI is already practically the reality in countries with strong welfare states where no one technically needs to work. We just disguise it with all this means-testing because as a society we're still devoted to this pro-work capitalist grind mental model of everyone needing to make a buck to justify their existence.
Not absurd at all and it doesn't need to be framed as a handout either.
The US should have a single land tax and every American should be paid a citizen's dividend out of that. A "UBI" easily emerges from this fair and rational tax system.
Economists across the political spectrum have advocated a single land tax. How we would force politicians to enact it is left as an exercise for the reader.
> technological advancement and automation should enable greater freedom for individuals to spend their time how they choose
I work in ML. Antiwork seems like it takes its understanding of automation’s present capabilities from fiction, imagining that we could automate people’s basic needs today. We can’t. It’s as simple as that. People are working hard (the irony) on advancing the tech, but we can’t do that today.
It's more about class. The 1% are absorbing almost all the new wealth created and the rest of us get breadcrumbs and they -own- most of the government with occasional concessions lest the rabble rise up and overthrow them like in almost all civilizations where the powers that be eventually went to far. No one thinks we have robots that can replace all physical labor, low wage jobs. I think the 99% occupy wallstreet was headed in the right direction and that the powers that be have been using the media to polarize us all with poltical, racial, and political differences and keep us concentrating on our differences rather than our common enemy and the most valuable prize, self determination.
I was going to say the same thing. Let's say your toilet breaks, who's going to come over and fix it? You're not going to automate a plumber in the next 50 years...
You're not going to automate a plumber, but we can design plumbing systems which are less likely to have issues and/or are easier to repair for non-specialists, and thus reduce the demand for plumbers. You'll still need some for the exceptional cases, of course.
Not that I disagree with the core point: There are jobs which are both necessary and very unlikely to be automated any time soon.
How does UBI work if everyone just decided not to work anymore?
How would it work if everyone involved in say medicine decided not to work anymore of if everyone involved in the military or border patrol said 'nope, I'm done'? Would we just print more money to give to the people that streamed over the border? What if the people that print the money or send the checks decided to quit?
> How does UBI work if everyone just decided not to work anymore?
If too many (which with any reasonable near-future level of productive capacity, and any level of UBI, is a lot short of “everyone”) people don't work with fixed nominal or dedicated-revenue-stream-based UBI, inflation erodes the value of UBI decreasing the lifestyle sustainable on UBI alone until enough fewer people opt out of work to stabilize things.
With inflation-indexed UBI you get a positive feedback UBI -> price feedback loop, so don't do UBI that way.
But mostly “what happens if too many people don’t work” is irrelevant to real-world UBI proposals: these tend to target a poverty-level income, replace existing means-tested poverty-support programs, and remove barriers to outside income that come with existing means-tested programs.
As such, they structurally incentivize more people choosing to work than under the status quo system (and a move from under-the-table to above-board work.)
It wouldn't, but I'm not sure that would happen (everyone deciding not to work). Especially if UBI is only enough to live ~reasonably comfortably. I'd imagine a wide spectrum of people, some of which are fine with that level of income and don't really work much for money at all, some people who work part time, and others that keep working because they enjoy it/really want more money.
It feels TBD how stable something like this would be, but feels fundamentally workable. I think you could at the least tune the amount of the UBI until it does become stable; I don't think the only stable value would be $0.
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
It's all in the moderators. They could delete meme posts or even filter posts and have some guidelines they stick to. Also, the “big” groups are almost all owned by the same cabal of 10-20 “super-moderators” that do it only for name recognition. I got pitched out of like 5 subreddits because I posted 1 comment in an anti-vaxxer sub to rebuke an obviously wrong anti-vaxxer rant. They didn't care, and after I cooled off I didn't care either when I realized those subs were all garbage anyway. I also sent them all strongly worded and curse filled responses to the most prominent “super-moderators” to let them know they are all garbage for blanket bans. One of them tried to get me pitched off Reddit and a Reddit employee that I know said the people over at Reddit couldn't care less about what moderator opinions are, and they don't really have any power outside their subs.
Circa 2016 Reddit became a political propaganda free for all with a ridiculous amount of shill accounts trying to incite others and diminish viewpoints purely on political lines. Serious money was invested by interest groups to eventually help shape Reddit into the hive mind it became. I watched this transition as a long time Redditor and I hated every second of it.
Reasonable, discourse seeking people left Reddit in droves, the effect being that there's then a distilled concentration of politicized accounts, gen Z, and trolls. A few subreddits buck the trend, but frankly I kind of hate Reddit and hope someone makes a new one for the reasonable masses.
You absolutely do not have to sell your labor to someone else.
If you learn to hunt, fish, farm and forage, you can sustain yourself. You can move to Alaska or the Canadian wilderness and do so. If you don't like the cold, there is the Amazon.
There are people who live like this.
The problem is: we want modern medicine, TV shows, cellphones, nice clothes, etc.
Living is the fight against entropy. In order to live, you have to put in effort.
You inevitably have to pay taxes in a good 95% of the land, and you don't get to choose which plot of land you're born on. That's the kicker that prevents this "truly sustainable" life you propose.
> 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.
The September that never ends. This has been a problem in the internet since its initial days (in the Usenet for example). The problem with systems like Reddit (less so news.ycombinator) is that the "ethernal september" cultural shift gets amplified by content voting. Given that the masses have equal right to vote content, the "minimum common denominator" is the pattern that arises in the system.
Sites like Slashdot or news.ycombinator try to work around this by giving voting powers to certain "filtered" populations (Slashdot algorithm was actually nice when I read about it). But I feel the current approaches serve to "delay" the inevitable path towards low-effort content, instead of cutting it from the beginning.
The one thing that was nice about usenet is that all comments were equal, so there was no "amplification" of the low-effort content. I think for people to provide higher effort content, there should be some kind of incentive. Social incentives is what StackOverflow or Quora used to have, as well as Slashdot at certain level (you knew you were in a conversation with highly technical individuals). I also think that using real names would help.
I personally think hacker news hasn’t fallen victim as much mainly because it’s so small in comparison.
I feel like once any community starts growing faster than a certain rate, its core focus inevitably dilutes because there are not enough older members to impress the culture of the community onto newer members.
I'm not sure that real names would help much. Look at LinkedIn. Lots of personal details in each person's profile, yet it is still devolving into Facebook level low quality content.
Reddit (or any social network for that matter) was never meant to attract the same quality crowd and comments as HN.
Social networks, in their design, are destined to degrade over time no matter how much technology is used, because it is a refection of the collective corrupt human nature.
HN is not a social network and hopefully stays that way. The slight degradation you see might be due to COVID, where people flooded online in general. But you can still find great content because its core community and function remain fundamentally the same since inception.
Note: I mainly use HN as a information filter and research tool.
> We could already have this reality today if we just implemented a universal basic income
This is at best naieve. How can you possibly reduce all of the complexities of a nation's multiple economic wants and needs to that conclusion? This is the problem with the movement, myopic and idealistic notions of being free from work. Universal income basically drives up inflation, if you give everyone a free $10 everything becomes $10 devalued. Money works partly because it is scarce and takes work to accumulate. Other people want to exchange their effort for yours. If there is no effort, there is no value.
Even if the above is not true there are surely numerous other forces at play that don't fit in with your simplistic idealism.
If you think it's the boomers keeping you down, wait until all the YouTube and social media players get into their 40s and see how they feel about giving away their wealth. People are greedy, selfish, family first, and tribal regardless of a generation.
There are already many countries with generous welfare states where one does not have to work and could theoretically live off the government, yet they manage just fine.
Even if universal basic income was a pipe dream (which I vehemently disagree with, and again point to the examples above as evidence that not needing to work does not lead to societal collapse), I don't see why enabling everyone the freedom to work on whatever they want should not be a goal.
If it were up to me, taxes would be funded via land value tax (commonly referred to as the fairest and most efficient tax since there's no deadweight loss), and the proceeds would be distributed uniformly to the population as a citizen's dividend.
Communism has never worked because the people in power who decide exactly how to divide the wealth fairly are humans and humans are greedy, selfish assholes.
Who evaluates your land value?
Also, if we all do what we want to do who is gonna pick up the garbage, who is going to slaughter cows for your burger that no one wants to flip?
I mean, these are the easy things I can think of.
Additionally any of the welfare states and experiments with UI are with small scale countries who have simpler socio-economic makeups. Try doing what you are prescribing in America where Trump, Bezos, and any number of psycho CEOs and politicians are doing very well for themselves. Not to mention the fundamental myth of America is bootstrap to individual prosperity.
Edit: to expand on "doing what you want", what if what you want to do is build a huge multi national corp and accumulate stinking piles of cash and yachts? What are you going to say to all those folks?
> There are already many countries with generous welfare states where one does not have to work and could theoretically live off the government, yet they manage just fine.
I didn’t know there were any countries like this? Would you please link to a few?
I'm not deeply familiar with welfare policies, but anecdotally it sounds like much of Europe - the Scandinavian countries Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, along with others like Germany - have very generous welfare states, where I believe (someone can correct me if I'm wrong) one could basically live off of welfare indefinitely if they wanted to.
In Switzerland, apparently it's possible to work for 2 years, quit your job, then keep something like 60% of your old salary for 2 years until you find your next job. Yet this isn't something that many people actually do.
In Denmark, university students get paid a UBI.
Someone else mentioned taxation. Taxing land value would be the fairest tax and reduce the tax burden on labor, yet none of these countries really do that.
Probably alluding to the Scandinavian countries. One or two of them tried out UI for a limited time. In France they have very generous unemployment benefits, but you pay for them with heavy taxation which has its own problems .
> if you give everyone a free $10 everything becomes $10 devalued.
Inflation happens, but the poor benefit much more, as their gains from UBI(as a percentage of their existing income) are more than the loss through inflation.
For rich people, the loss can be more, but this is how inequality is reduced.
>...similar to Hacker News in comment quality (which has also lowered significantly). I watched the site devolve...
Imagine if HN could have pro-free market articles in the same volume as submissions like this. Every day there's a submission from Jacobin, The Guardian or something truly partisan (some might say deranged) like this Medium write up. Yet, laissez-faire articles are immediately flagged. The comments fill with drivel about Koch brothers or "the oil companies funded this".
>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.
Yes HN, a site for entrepreneurs. A site for people who like to build stuff, ideally profitable things which can sustain them. A site with only one homepage for both people who would like to build. HN, a site not just for visionaries and entrepreneurs, but also those who demand that work is slavery?
When I say 'not just for', I should clarify. The site's editorial position is to promote these communist diatribes and shadow ban mises.org.
>...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).
Hm? Would you mind expanding on why and how you feel my piece is hyperpartisan? I'm neither a leftist nor particularly sympathetic to them; my own economic preferences usually lie pretty firmly in the neoliberal camp. Your comment seems to be calling my piece a "communist diatribe", and I'm struggling to see where you got that impression.
> 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.
It's not acceptable, but it is necessary. People always point to increasing automation and productivity, but they gloss over the fact that those aren't uniform. Most of the economy is only more productive because of other parts of the economy. A trucker today is only more productive because the stuff in their truck is more valuable, not because anything has changed about the job. We need just as many truckers, if not more, now that their 'productivity' us up.
There are tons of jobs no one wants to do, but everyone needs done. What keeps wages in check for those jobs is that 1) they are low skilled and 2) people have to work, so the segment of people that have been unable to make themselves valuable in other ways trickle down into those functions. It's a harsh and shitty reality, but, until we have a big population of people laying around that love scrubbing shit off walls and drowning baby chickens, this is where we're at.
It's wild to me that people don't see this. Literally every utopian uprising has been followed by an immediate famine.
All that being said, uniform supplemental income isn't necessarily bad, but there is definitely a threshold where the harms out-weight the benefits, even for those it is intended to help.
> There are tons of jobs no one wants to do, but everyone needs done.
If these jobs truly are necessary, then wages would rise to the point where people would be attracted to do them. If truck driving paid as much as FAANG software engineering, I assure you there'd be no shortage of truck drivers (even if it required grinding a trucker Leetcode).
Higher wages further incentivize automation, or alternative means of coping. Truck driving for example will most definitely be automated within the next decade or two. If chickens became so expensive, then more people would opt for vegetables and subsistence farming (actually I heard it's feasible to have a pet chicken in one's apartment. There's your morning eggs).
> If these jobs truly are necessary, then wages would rise to the point where people would be attracted to do them. If truck driving paid as much as FAANG software engineering, I assure you there'd be no shortage of truck drivers (even if it required grinding a trucker Leetcode).
This is exactly the problem though. The costs for all of those basic necessities that aren't fun go up relative to everything else. Most of the things poor people rely on fall into this category.
This would not disproportionately harm poor people. In fact, poor people would be significantly better off due to the increased income from UBI + higher wages. Poor people are the ones doing those sh*tty jobs you're complaining about wages rising for. Those at the bottom would have their incomes multiplied.
Actually those at the bottom are homeless, and UBI would virtually eliminate involuntary homelessness, so the idea that UBI makes poor people off is ludicrous and divorced from reality.
> In fact, poor people would be significantly better off due to the increased income from UBI + higher wages
You're assuming two things that exclude each other. Wages will only rise if some people drop out of the workforce, lowering supply. Those who drop out then don't benefit from the raising wages, and only end up paying increased costs.
The likely result is a kind of bullwhip, where people drop out, prices and wages rise, the value of the UBI diminishes, this forces the people who dropped out right back into the shitty jobs they left a year or two prior, now with the relative prices of many goods jacked up until a new equilibrium is found. Depending on the UBI the new equilibrium may be better for them, it may be worse, but, as of now, some people will be forced to do those shitty jobs.
No amount of Government intervention will prevent low skilled labor from being low paid relative to other goods. Market competition just won't allow it.
Why would the cost of those unpopular jobs go up? If a company can't find anyone at "market rates" they can just get temporary foreign workers and never raise the wage. As long as everyone is cashing in on the cheaper tfws the price never goes up and they never need to hire anyone at a riser wage.
All these market conditions for wages don't work with all the policies set in place to depress worker wage increase.
Yes this is also possible as well. I mean it's already the case that immigrants (eg. from Guatemala) seem to do much of the dirty work in the U.S in places like NYC where I used to live, farms in Texas and middle America, etc.
>We need better alternatives to Reddit, or Reddit needs to fix the mess because the post/comment quality there is straight trash there.
I've looked for years but nothing's popped up. Everytime I saw a lead it had other issues either with population, or cultural problems which would make it even worse than reddit.
I don't even want a true reddit alternative per se either. Just a subspace where I could talk about games and anime and not feel like I'm walking on landmines just because some people see a one-off potentially offensive scene and think suddenly that games/anime are the source of all problems.
>All the default homepage subreddits are trash
FWIW, defaults aren't a thing anymore. It still is in spirit because the design of reddit means the old defaults still have the most subscribers. But new users aren't instantly being thrown into gifs/videos/earthporn/etc.
Completely agree, the comment quality is generally low and has decreased over time. Ironically, sorting comments by "Controversial" often leads to the most insightful ones, it's still hit and miss and depends on the discussion topic.
>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.
I see this trend in nearly everything online. Anything that becomes sufficiently large will eventually decline this way. A lot of niche communities intentionally engage in gate keeping behavior which I suspect is to avoid ever succumbing to the de-evolution of their niche.
I feel like memes become dominants when negative communication starts to overwhelm positive contributions. Deep thought is costly; creating and re-using memes are effectual communication for ever-decreasing depth of thought in high noise environments.
Perhaps we need anti Twitter —Where comments need to be at at least 280 characters to encourage explanations and discourse. I self censor in this regard where I start many replies, but discard them if all I have typed is two lines of witty snark.
The organization itself has become very user hostile as well which I think has played a large part in the overall quality drop. There's a reason everyone links to old.
People can still get jobs if they want. In fact, most people probably still will. Otherwise nobody would be working in countries where welfare isn't capped, which obviously isn't the case.
Also just think back to all the rich trust fund kids and financially independent people you know (eg. multimillionaires). What percentage of them don't work anymore? In my experience, most continue to work even though they could just live off of their savings/investments. That's because they are free to work on what they themselves enjoy, rather than simply having to sell their labor to make ends meet.
I wish everyone had that freedom. If it were not possible, then at the least it should be a goal we strive towards.
I dont understand the logic in this at all. Is the idea to have some sort of free flowing money pool a la UBI that ensures all people can obtain basic necessities? If so, then what will ensure those necessities exist in the first place if the intent is to remove money as a tool of trade? You cant just make supply and demand magically disappear.
This sounds just about as superficial as the dude on fox news who wants to walk dogs and teach philosophy as their profession. Surprisingly or not, none of the antiwork activists are queuing to work in rice fields or other gritty but absolutely necessary jobs.
So lets say 50% of farmers quit and become philosophizing dog-walkers, please explain how you avoid a global famine and / or how you distribute food to people and simulatenously take five minutes to think what happens to food prices when its suddenly a scarcity, and what happens to the value of your monthly universal income
Protip: we’re experiencing the same effect right now thanks to liberal money-printing for ”covid relief”
Most anarchist philosophy starts from the idea that "general populace" is a bad idea to begin with. People should be living in small, hyper-independent communities. They sidestep the scalability question by asserting that a community of a few hundred (or even a few thousand) is already unnatural.
(Not a philosophy I agree with, but one that I observe as pretty cornerstone).
Localism should be encouraged more, I agree, but I just get the vibe these antiwork activists arent arguing for that, but rather for some subjective right to spend their days doing what pleases them while someone else provides the basic necessities for them.
There are some good, well-moderated subreddits - r/covid19 comes to mind. But the emphasis has to be on "moderated" - r/covid19 is very strictly moderated and that keeps it useful - a lot of doctors, virologists, immunologists seem to comment there. If that strict moderation wasn't there it would quickly become useless.
I don't see any problem with where r/antiwork wound up.
Look at what the right wing does tactically to get their message across. They setup forums which are gateway drugs, which offer watered down cryptic messages where they go around joking to "hide their power levels" and shit. If you remember the nazi babytalk subreddits that were all about "frens" you know what I mean.
That is effective outreach of propaganda efforts. They do it because it works.
Leftists had a great, popular tool here with the new r/antiwork which nudged people one very small step in the leftist direction. Leftists should embrace that for it became and the function it was serving. Instead it sounds like you're going to burn it down because it is insufficiently pure.
Even if they're only talking about how and why their boss sucks and they want a new boss, you should focus on the fact that you've created a common place in the public where everyone can start commiserating on how their bosses suck. That's not a zero. It just also isn't the glorious workers revolution I guess so we have to burn it all down.
EDIT: looks like there's been a switch in the mod group and the people currently running the show are actually NOT taking a hard line and are more in line with exactly what I'm talking about:
> 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.
That won't be enough. Not just because there are an awful lot of Boomers and post-boomers who can't even go to retirement because they don't have a pension they can live on (which in turn is a problem because all the jobs that the Boomer pensioners occupy can't be done by younger people)... but also because the status quo is not a result of Boomers being Boomers (as group of people born in the decades after WW2), it's a result of how society itself is set up.
In German, we have a saying "wer mit 20 noch kein Kommunist ist, hat kein Herz - und wer es mit 30 immer noch ist, keinen Verstand", roughly translated to "who is not yet a communist by age 20 doesn't have a heart and who still is a communist by age 30, has no common sense".
Basically, society itself has over millennia evolved into acquiring wealth and disbursing that wealth down to one's children (which up to maybe a hundred years ago meant, the male children), and it's no coincidence that age 30 was around the age where young men and women bought their house and "settled down". And once you have that house, your car, your family after a decade of education and another decade of hard work... why would you be incentivized to allow others the same status as you have now, without them having to put in the same work? Why would you risk your freedom, your job, your investment, your assets and go on the streets and riot until the elite comes crashing down like it deserves?
Of course, there are idealists who nevertheless take on that risk, and those who have failed the rat race or got left behind somewhere, but let's be realistic: the numbers alone are an advantage to the elites.
The danger that modern Western capitalist society is now, of course, that it has allowed too many people to fall behind economical progress - which is what fueled the rise of right-wing populism across the US and Europe over the last decades. And I'm afraid that even though it may seem like we have passed over the worst (with Trump and Netanyahu getting booted out of office, BoJo going down in flames, even Italy's right wing being unable to put up a candidate)... I'm afraid that the events of the last six to eight years have only been a tiny warning and we are headed for something much bigger and especially much worse.
The world needs to do a lot of change to hope to tackle the climate crisis... lots of the current standard that us Westerners are used to is simply unsustainable (e.g. always a wide selection of fresh, world-wide sourced produce and meat in the supermarket, cross-continental flights for under a hundred euros) which means that an already disgruntled population will have to cut back, and the population of poor and rising developing countries that sees the Western abundance on Instagram will not be happy to hear that they won't even get the chance of obtaining that wealth level.
I'm 31, have a well-paying job, and enough assets to be able to retire in a third world country if I wanted to (I'm nomadic so that's not as far-fetched as it sounds), yet I still support a universal basic income. I have friends way richer than me who definitely don't need to work who also support a UBI. I guess we're not as selfish as the last generation?
Even if one were to not go as far as to support a universal basic income, I don't see why it's not a goal worth striving towards if we can afford it, or at least finding a happy medium. For example I envy that higher education in Europe is free, and in countries like Denmark the government will even pay college students a "basic income" to cover their living expenses (was listening to a podcast the other day where a famous Danish entrepreneur said he used that to help bootstrap his first businesses). Also in countries like Denmark and Germany it's normal for high school graduates to take a year off and travel the world, something extremely rare in the U.S.
UBI for me is the equivalent of VC funding for all. Maybe most won't give much back, but all it takes for 1% building the next innovations for that to be a worthy investment (not that I think the humans should be reduced to profit calculators, and value goes beyond profit)
I've traveled to 43+ countries including living in third world ones. Honestly I don't think life in the west is that much different from the western ones to the point where they're disgruntled at the west or really missing out. Not everyone cares about the rat race and hedonist treadmill.
> I guess we're not as selfish as the last generation?
One might also guess that our generation (you're a year older than me) did not grow up with as much anti-communist propaganda - we were born right after/during the fall of the Soviet/Yugoslav Bloc and there was no need for more.
What we have grown up however is the realization that global problems (especially climate change) are growing ever more dire - and that unlike past global problems like CFC gas or acid rain, politicians not just don't do anything meaningful but actively deny that there is a problem.
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.
> 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.
Representation is really at the heart of it. What the article left out was that Doreen was asked by mods and by the community(by poll) not to participate in the interview. She did it anyway.
The broader social epistemic question of "what makes someone a representative?" or "How do people gain the social status: representative?" is the most interesting part of this. Reddit itself plays a role in the construction of representative status by visually framing mods in the sidebar under the subreddit rules section leading people to mentally label both as the rules and rule-makers of the space. There are examples of mods in other subreddits also being representatives, making it natural to apply that syllogistically and generally to all Reddit communities.
If a mod created the sub, and actively participates, but is disavowed as a representative, are they still a representative? Would this have changed if the interview had gone well? How does representation work when communities disagree? Antiwork members don't see Doreen as a representative, but individuals outside of antiwork do. Does that make her a representative or not? It's fascinating that what is obvious to one person is a tremendous number of questions to another.
>If a mod created the sub, and actively participates, but is disavowed as a representative, are they still a representative?
by reddit's rules, yes. You have to be fundamentally destroying a decently large and active sub before the admins step in and kick out a mod. But the number of times this has happened in 15 years can be counted on one hand.
Otherwise, admins don't care about what mods do with their subs. seniority first, most senior mods ultimately has the power to kick out everyone else and ban every user if they wish. And that's why these kinds of "movements" are doomed to fail under reddit's structure.
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.
> Point being I doubt anyone at Fox was unhappy with how the Doreen interview turned out.
Yeah, and what else could you expect from Jessie Waters? He's a smug propagandist, and people like Doreen Ford are perfect for his message. It's pretty stupid to cooperate with him unless you 1) agree with him, or 2) have good reason to believe you're up to effectively representing yourself to a hostile audience through a sleazy host, all of whom are more interested in mocking you than listening to you. And frankly, if they ask you for an interview, it that's probably good reason to believe #2 is false.
Fox is a selective amplifier like most news media. They pick topics that make their beliefs look good and much more importantly topics that make their enemies look terrible (see the antiwork interview)
And on more than one occasion, I've seen them pick interviewees who seem completely unqualified to speak on a topic. For example, I once saw an advocate for free universal college interviewed. It was some idealistic college student still going for their undergrad talking about how it's what "everyone deserves" and would "make the world a better place". The interview was a brutal public lashing. Regardless of where you stand on the topic of free universal college, I think we can all agree that it makes sense to speak to an expert on the topic, not someone in their late teens still trying to find their footing in this crazy world. That interview was uninformative and just plain cruel.
Yes activism is hard, which is one of the reasons why social media gave rise to slacktivism instead. It's a low effort gratification that is reinforced by ones social network.
It's one of the issues with subreddits as they get larger. Low effort "look how great I am for standing up to my boss" posts win the day.
Subreddit's changing their spots isn't uncommon, it's the norm for reddit.
The author has a very clear agenda here, and while they're welcome to construct a case for that view, they've left out inconvenient details while attempting to appear neutral.
The core issue is that the subreddit already had an agreement that no one would attempt to represent the movement or do interviews. The forethought there was that a reddit mod (or similar) are unlikely to be sufficiently prepared to act as a spokesperson for a politically sensitive movement. Doreen's actions were entirely self-serving and the subreddit was absolutely right to make a stand, especially as Doreen did not represent the community or its views - as given by the enormous backlash.
It's deeply disingenuous to suggest that the work reform principles of the subreddit are moot because a mod started the original subreddit as a protest against work.
> It's deeply disingenuous to suggest that the work reform principles of the subreddit are moot because a mod started the original subreddit as a protest against work.
This point might stand better using a word other than "principle," from principium (beginning), from princeps (initiator).
This is the key, I think. It's possible for an individual to start or grow a movement. It is impossible for an individual to own or control a movement, at least for long, because that's not what a movement is. The movement will eventually either die (which might happen) or escape control (which might also happen).
The phenomenon of a movement's founders going on to reject what the movement has become (or maybe has always been) is pretty common. If I take the article's claims at face value, this is just the inverse of that. The movement became something that rejected its founder.
If you see the interview with Doreen, it seems like she is actually in favour of what the author refers to as the new movement. What stands out to me is that she says that the movement is to reduce the work that people are forced to do, that they still want to put in effort and labour but not in a position where they feel trapped. This seems to contrast what the author says was the original purpose of the subreddit; to abolish work.
If you subscribe to a subreddit literally called antiwork that clearly states its ideology in its sidebar, you shouldn't be surprised by Doreen celebrating laziness as a virtue. Just like with politicians, just because your representative is a disliked doesn't mean that they aren't your legitimate one.
Where did the author say Doreen Ford was still representative of the current user base? It was pretty explicit that she represented its original form, not what it had become. The whole takeaway for me anyways was the shifting nature of group ideals and membership. One person or founder may represent the typical ideals of the original group, while later they may be wildly unrepresentative due to an influx of more “moderate” members. Again this was a pretty clear takeaway.
As someone completely detached and not a part of this “antiwork” movement in any way, your post reads to me like someone who joined the community in its later stages and are bristling at what you think is a takedown that is trying to misrepresent your “totally normal, reasonable views of advocating for better working conditions”. And maybe the replacement of anarcho-communists with people advocating better working condition is a good thing! The tragedy is that the current, moderate ideals are mismatched with the original, extremist group name and ideals. Thus the need for “sane-washing” like so—
New member: “Actually anti-work isn’t about not working, it’s really about improving working conditions.”
Original anti-work founder: “No we literally are anti-work and want to abolish work.”
New member: “Nooooo you don’t represent us!!”
Like that is the exact process described. Same dynamic if you s/antiwork/abolish the police/
Author of the article here. The user above you is correct. My claim that Ford is indisputably the best representative of the space has nothing to do with its current user base and everything to do with its history. The user base shifted, but I don’t hold that a place’s present is so extricable from its past that 7 years of history become irrelevant when the space grows.
Then it's odd to call her the "single most accurate representative" then if you agree that Doreen is not representative of the users or the movement anymore. The historical information about the sub was well-researched and interesting, though.
Anarchists are going to have a hard time accepting this, but I think the lesson here is that you can't have a coherent community focused on its original subject without quite a lot of gatekeeping.
On Reddit, r/AskHistorians has a good approach. The blogging model (as revived by Substack) also seems to work.
These are explicitly non-democratic. AskHistorians gives historians higher status. A blog is about whatever the blog author wants it to be about.
Hacker News has good moderation but it's a lot more anti-tech than it used to be and that's a reflection of the broader culture. If they really wanted to resist that then it would require stronger moderation at the expense of growth.
Once you eat the cake, you can no longer possess it
EDIT:
Let me make it more clear, as English may not be your first language, if you're asking this question in truth (I sometimes miss sarcasm online, sorry).
Cakes can be beautiful things which people (of a certain time period, especially) wanted to show off as a sign of their wealth, as refined sugar was expensive. Once it was eaten, you could no longer display such wasteful extravagance.
There's a similar idiom in a couple different languages. The French supposedly say 'avoir le beurre et l’argent du beurre' (have the butter and the money from [selling] the butter), and I once recalled hearing that there was a Spanish idiom along the lines of having a chicken in both the pot and in the yard, but alas I'm not able to find that phrase.
| i hate how americans always assume we are from there and understand everything they say |
It's a forum where everyone was typing in English, so my first assumption was that English was your fist language. I didn't say anything about American. And I tried to fix my mistake =/
> 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.
> 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.
That's what I like about 4chan. In a sea of ungodly acidic garbage lies a golden heart of contrarianism. The posters will argue for a side one day, and 2 hours later will vehemently adopt opposite arguments. Some of the best leftist arguments I have ever read came from /pol/.
4chan argues for the sake of arguing, and I think that is absolutely beautiful in today's environment of everyone taking everything so seriously.
It probably has to do with the post incentives. On Reddit, if you get downvoted into oblivion, your post disappears even if you get thousands of comments. On 4Chan, the more active the post, the more it gets bumped to the top. So being inflammatory on one makes your post disappear, and on the other it sends it to the top of the feed.
Reddit is grossly overmoderated. You have a vote system that enforces a hivemind by itself, on top of a normal moderation system that deletes an enormous amount of content, on top of automated moderation banning posts if you use this or that word, on top of a shadowban system on top of a global content policy system.
The result is that only stuff that the majority of users allow will get displayed.
This explains Twitter too. Even before the infamous trend-boosting algorithms get involved, being more controversial gets you more retweets and more chances to be seen. Tumblr used to be the same way and its users had similarly controversial/aggressive politics.
I used to love the 4chan-style contrarian attitude until, in high school people I knew were killed in Iraq. Then I started to realize that those kinds of nihilist attitudes have real-world consequences. Since then, that attitude has become mainstream (or perhaps just my awareness of it) and following has been a constant trail of death and misery. I can't not take it seriously anymore when my friends and loved ones are dying and turning on each other.
If we're assigning blame for nihilism and Iraq, let's not forget that WaPo, NYT, CNN, ABC, FOX and the rest of the pro-war media bear orders of magnitude more responsibility than fucking 4chan.
Oh I fully agree, that's what I mean by that attitude becoming more mainstream. Just growing up I saw that expressed more fully on 4chan before I saw it being adopted elsewhere.
4chan didn't even exist when we invaded Iraq. And the justification for invading Iraq was anything but nihilism, it was a bunch of patriotism and xenophobia wrapped in religious crusade. By the time we invaded we had killed (and acknowledged killing) a million children due to sanctions.
I can't make the connection you make. When people were protesting against the Iraq War, they were told that they didn't believe in anything. I don't understand personal tragedy as an argument against 4chan; everybody you know is going to die eventually, and virtually everybody you're speaking to has known two people who died prematurely and preventably. I, in particular, don't understand people who traveled to kill instead being killed as an argument against humor.
The idea that a 4chan that didn't exist created Judith Miller is bizarre.
iPhone September filled the internet up with people that never had "don't believe a single thing you read there" driven into their skulls. 4chan posting was and is a performance act. The attitude isn't the problem, pretending like context isn't a thing is the problem.
When the internet media and regular media merged one of two things had to happen. Either expose how much of a performance act the old school media was from jump street. Or make the idea of believing everything online at first pass a reasonable position to have.
Q anon grew and continues to exist precisely because it is in the best interests of "respectable" media outlets to not teach media literacy to their consumers.
I feel like contrarian techniques adopted by sane mind at cooperatively manageable scale (of zero) is great, but IMO users of reactive contrarianism that eventually emerges just deserve downvotes as external means of value judgement. However that leads to communal polarization, and to solve that, regular exposure events would be necessary ... I admire Reddit, at least for its architecture.
As far as I can tell, 4chan is vehemently against the current neoliberal wars. They laughed their asses off at the US abandoning Afghanistan and are questioning why the NATO has to be in Ukraine at all. Perhaps I misunderstood your tone.
I am not familiar at all with 4chan and its functioning, but if I remember correctly there is no "they" in 4chan, similar to the "Anonymous" group... everyone can go into 4chan, sometimes a radical leftist will go there, next day a radical rightist will post. Is there actually a "cultural leaning" in that site?
>"I have no interest in /r/antiwork nor their ideologies, but they kept popping up on /r/all"
The /r/popular and /r/all pages are intensively manipulated by a constellation of leftist activists. Have you ever noticed just how often the same "screenshots of tweets" submissions from people like AOC end up being reposted ad nauseum across several subreddits that basically share the same message - and most importantly - moderators and power users?
Funny you mention u/LrlOurPresident, as I was tempted to mention that user specifically but didn't so my post wasn't too wordy. Their previous account IrlOurPresident was banned for manipulation but the admins don't seem to care in this situation.
Reddit corporate is exceptional at making you driven and angry, literally "engaged" with the website. Keeping Reddit account for fun stuffs only or leaving Reddit altogether, for couple months to years, or to never to return, is a great idea at every point of baseline spacetime that the Earth possibly traverse through.
Don't you think those Redditors are a bit too often bit too dumb to argue with? They ARE! 9/10ths are corporate shills and half of them are bots and the rest are complete boneheads, yeah yeah I agree wholeheartedly. Why not relieve yourself of duties and use that extra time to morally ascend yourself a bit? Watch them run into walls and cry from couple miles away. MSMs are gonna cover them, you won't be missing single bit of it.
Just quit. Click "logout". Going back is as easy as buying a pack of cigarettes and lighting it.
There's a difference between a large amount of users who lean left making posts and comments that align with their views and what looks to be an obviously coordinated effort from a few dozen powermods and powerusers who seem to work 365 days a year to shape the content and discourse of the site through what appears on the frontpage and in the default subreddits.
It's pretty clear from things like Bernie, the rise of antiwork, etc, etc, the site doesn't exactly align with the mainstream DNC talking points nearly as nicely as the front page and popular subs would make you think.
If the NFL craps astroturfing all over the online sports community that still constitutes manipulation even if the occupants of the sites in question were marginally more predisposed to those ideas than the general population. What the mainstream left does to Reddit with their astroturfing is no different.
> Almost every single post on r/MurderedByAOC is made by u/LrlOurPresident, and those posts hit the front page on a nearly daily basis.
Do you see the same content when browsing in an incognito window?
I ask because I've long suspected Reddit tracks even logged out users, and generates a front page showing them more of things that keep them on the site.
I don't think most moderators don't know this option exists.
It's located on a page that you only visit once to set up the subreddit, or to make large subreddit changes. (On old reddit, not sure about new reddit)
To Reddit's credit, they have been adding new features over the years to help separate communities and ensure they are somewhat able to maintain their culture.
E.g. Crowd Control which limits the posting / commenting abilities of individual users based on their history or other heuristics.
How so? It's a black box algorithm owned by Reddit Admins. Moderators only have the ability to set the threshold, with very vague terms (low, moderate, high, or something similar)
If admins wanted to disappear a viewpoint, it would be a lot easier to just autosuspend the accounts, or shadowban without a trace.
Just because the admins can do (and have done) worse shouldn't make Crowd Control an acceptable measure by comparison. If anything, I'd say a black box algorithm dictated by the admins is worse than the preemptory auto-mod banning that goes on in a number of political subreddits. I have little confidence the admins won't eventually use it to police subs at a mass scale without the need of the moderator.
The one sub I know opts out of r/all is r/nfl. Which is kinda strange for such a rather non controversial topic, but judging by the treats on r/all probably wise.
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps, if you consider, there is genuine feeling of resentment among a large portion of the population trying to survive, and that resentment stems from actual material conditions in the labor market. And a community focused on that could garner actual popularity?
Perhaps "casuals" are simply a product of the content they consume, which is determined by the algorithms of the platforms they consume.
Maybe there's something about Reddit's algorithm and mechanics that predisposes it to low effort neutered meme content. After all, the default Reddit homepage subreddits are all trash (by the way this isn't unique to Reddit, same goes for say Youtube).
This is why we need platforms where users actually own their data, and can customize their own algorithms and UIs (ie. what web3 hopes to solve).
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.
"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.
> 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.
There are a number of socioeconomic factors that are believed to be the underlying influence on violent crime. My own personal summary on this is that people tend to become criminals when they lose hope in having a fair shot at a successful life, or see an opportunity that they don't find morally reprehensible ("well, it's really the bank/insurance money so it's not hurting a person"). So I think this hopelessness is mostly what drove the pandemic crime increase.
If you spend a huge amount of money on police, and get bad outcomes for both crime rate and negative impacts of policing, there's really two options:
- The money is poorly spent, and better (perhaps less) spending would obtain better outcomes
- Because of other factors, we're doing approximately as well as we can: if we deployed resources away from the authoritarian, heavy-handed mechanisms, we'd have even more crimes and bad outcomes.
I think the former is more likely, but I can't entirely exclude the latter.
> 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.
I think people both understate how splintered the US society really is, and overstate the importance of this divide.
Imagine a country with a HUGE historical and current influx of immigrants that bring tons of different cultures and ideologies into the mix. The country has traditionally been hard to govern, especially at the federal level, precisely because it encourages freedom of thought and expression through both law and immigration policy. Its economic structure further encourages division by being one of the most meritocratic systems on the planet, where material gains for good decisions are quite the norm, but where the divide between the haves and have nots is always growing, and always on display.
In a country I describe, why is it any surprise to anyone that criminal behavior will be more common than in a more cohesive environment, therefore necessitating a more strict policing approach? And in what world does it make sense to reduce police powers in such a country without suffering the obvious increase in crime that will follow that?
It's not that US is fundamentally broken or fucked up, it's just a very different place compared to the "liberal utopias" of Northern Europe, so often cited by leftist activists in the states.
Correct, but that's just how the country is. If people want cultural changes, they've gotta address the causes of the divides in the US and understand that they'll have massive negative consequences too, not just positive ones.
Or they can move to a country that is already more in line with what they want out of society.
I think it was always pretty clear that the movement as a whole advocated redistribution of resources toward less violent and more efficient alternatives to police, like better social programs and mental health resources.
Relying on the police to prevent crime is like relying on firefighters to prevent fires or paramedics to prevent injuries. Sure they have a role to play, but logically they should only be the last resort in case everything else goes wrong.
From my own experience, and the discussions I had with my peers, the specific term "defund" does not imply advocating redistribution. I sense that in the vernacular "defund" means to stop paying for something and the implication is you are getting rid of whatever is no longer being funded. Defund also tends to be used for line-items and programs rather than organizations and departments, which adds to the confusion.
But the key difference is that you said "fund NASA", rather than "defund NASA". Fund definitely implies there is not currently enough money, or that a new program is being advocated for.
I would likewise think that anyone who wanted to "defund NASA" had the intention of getting rid of the agency, rather than a more nuanced position of "we should stop funding SLS so that we can reallocate the money on high school STEM outreach and climate satellites."
Defund is the opposite of fund. If fund doesn't imply that they had no money at all, defund shouldnt imply removing all their money. If the intention was to get rid of NASA, then the phrase would be "abolish NASA", "dismantle NASA", or some other word that actually has that meaning.
I'm talking about the word "defund" in the vernacular. Which, for many people, absolutely does also imply abolish or eliminate.
As a thought experiment, I'm going to conjure a slogan: "Defund the Humane Society".
What is the first thing that comes to mind? I expect most people would think "you want to get rid of the animal shelter?" And I would reply, "no what I actually want is to re-allocate money from the euthanasia program so that we can have increased adoption rates and make this a no-kill shelter."
Putting aside the vernacular implications of "defund", my slogan is totally ineffective at actually capturing what I am trying to accomplish. And, it has the added downside of giving people a terrible and inaccurate first impression.
When a criminal is arrested their future crimes are prevented.
I think there’s an assumption that crime is random and that people randomly commit them. In that case it doesn’t matter if you arrest because what’s the point, it’s random.
But people usually commit crimes intentionally. And they commit multiple crimes.
Fire is different than crime in that it’s not conscious.
I don’t think police are alone in preventing crime but they aren’t a last resort. I also think we spend too much on police. And we spend on the wrong things. I want to reform the police to make them more effective.
I’m thinking the latter as it seems so crazy to use a specific word and then argue against its understood meaning. Why would I want to bother with that confusion when I could just call it “reform police” or whatever.
Gaslighting is very mainstream and seems so commonplace in even banal, insubstantial things like debating whether “defund police” means to remove funding from the police or something else.
If someone advocates for more funding for social workers and mental health care, they can just say so. That funding doesn't necessarily need to come from police budgets.
If someone advocates to "defund Planned Parenthood", they would be disappointed with a mere reduction in funding.
I think the article articulates the counterpoint. Most movements start with radicals. A milder slogan wouldn't have gotten traction with the radicals, who actually do want to abolish the police. If the radicals weren't protesting, the mainstream wouldn't have taken notice and come on board. This leads to a conflict of views within the protesters and ultimately the revision of the slogan definition
You could say literally the same thing about any political slogan. For example, please explain "government accountability" or "serve the people"? That literally could be anything. Another example, "Medicare for All", pretty straight forward, but what does it look like as a policy?
Or "Make American Great Again" or "Build Back Better". Any slogan can be questioned. IMO, "Defund the Police" is almost the most straightforward political slogan I can think of and if you Google it, near the top result is a website explaining exactly what it means.
The problem with a lot of people who were questioning "Defund the Police" in my experience is that they would go to BLM protests but then be much more moderate and not actually interested in what the protests meant or what defunding the police actually means; the slogan wasn't unclear, it was wanting to look like you cared but not actually doing the work to convince yourself or learn more.
A far better slogan would have been "Demilitarize the Police". I do not know why so many people who want police reform want to stick to "Defund the Police" when it comes with so much baggage.
That's a good one. Maybe even demanding "competent police" would be a good aggressive tack. If there's footage of police killing unarmed people in their homes or in broad daylight, then we should absolutely demand more competence and professionalism from them. That puts police unions in a tough spot of not being able to argue against that.
But that's not what the movement is about. The "Defund the Police" and "Abolish the Police" slogans are based on even "better policing", "community policing", etc. still being incredibly harmful to communities.
> If there's footage of police killing unarmed people in their homes or in broad daylight, then we should absolutely demand more competence and professionalism from them
This happened so much. Did you see all the videos of police violence during BLM and before and after? I don't think the problem is the slogan.
I think this is a really good example of an effective slogan, both in Reagan's initial use and later Trump's. It has some really critical properties: it's easy to comprehend, while also nimble enough to fit anyone's notions, and you can't argue against it directly.
If you have to direct people to "Google it," then your slogan is a non-starter. I'm not a marketing expert (hence the rather dry alternatives), but I am aware of how wildly effective conservative-leaning messaging is compared to the often off-putting (even if well-intentioned) liberal-messaging on the other side. So then, why not use the same tactics? Government accountability is a good thing, and you really can't argue against it. If it makes sense to demand a lot of accountability at a high standard from teachers (and teacher unions), then the very same demands should be put on police (and police unions). Use the same exact messaging.
My point about "Make America Great Again" is anyone can be like "I don't get it what does it mean though?" which happened a lot from liberals and left for this slogan specifically. Conservatives get the benefit of being easily aligned around their leaders and values, so sure "Make America Great Again" works really well in that context where everyone wants pretty much the same thing.
"Defund the Police" had a specific meaning which was to actually defund the police but, as with any actual implementation, when you get to the specifics people have a lot of different views and opinions. I don't think you combat that by making a better slogan, I think you just deal with it. The handwringing over what "Defund the Police" means was a huge distraction IMO and mostly bad actors who disagreed with the premise fundamentally and weren't looking for real ways to implement policies.
> If it makes sense to demand a lot of accountability at a high standard from teachers (and teacher unions), then the very same demands should be put on police (and police unions). Use the same exact messaging.
Okay, what's the exact, unquestionable slogan you would use here? Good luck.
>My point about "Make America Great Again" is anyone can be like "I don't get it what does it mean though?" which happened a lot from liberals and left for this slogan specifically. Conservatives get the benefit of being easily aligned around their leaders and values, so sure "Make America Great Again" works really well in that context where everyone wants pretty much the same thing.
I absolutely agree with you here, and this is the point I'm trying to emphasize. Slogans have to be aspirational and adaptable and unassailable. "MAGA" is all three. "Defund the police" is really only aspirational and sort-of-adaptable. Its weakness is that it's easy to oppose it and look like you have the moral high ground (i.e., being a crime-fighter). You can't attack "MAGA" directly without sounding like you hate America. That's the brilliance of it.
>"Defund the Police" had a specific meaning which was to actually defund the police but, as with any actual implementation, when you get to the specifics people have a lot of different views and opinions. I don't think you combat that by making a better slogan, I think you just deal with it. The handwringing over what "Defund the Police" means was a huge distraction IMO and mostly bad actors who disagreed with the premise fundamentally and weren't looking for real ways to implement policies.
This is where we disagree. The policy specifics don't matter. Not at the slogan/rallying level. "Defund the police" has a pretty clear policy roadmap, even if it could take on varying shades. "MAGA" is completely devoid of policy, and that's what makes it such a strong talking point. Anyone can attach whatever aspiration they want to it without getting mired up in boring details. This results in widespread acceptance.
>Okay, what's the exact, unquestionable slogan you would use here? Good luck.
I never claimed to have the correct answer here. All I'm doing is pointing out how horrifically bad "defund the police" is and offering field-tested examples of slogans that are so much better at inspiring action, for better or worse (e.g., MAGA). Something closer to a jazzed-up version of "government accountability" or "police competence" would have all the desirable properties of "MAGA" that I've described: aspirational and adaptable and unassailable. "Defund the police" ain't it.
Given the long history of the US culture broadly being anti-left, what possible slogan could there be that's "aspirational and adaptable and unassailable". I think you put effort into a slogan but it's pretty much impossible for any leftist slogan to meet those criteria.
And anyways, again, I highly disagree that any slogan is unassailable. A lot of people still attacked "MAGA" so where is the line that you measure "unassailablity"? I could say to someone against "Defund the Police" that you hate Black people but there just isn't widespread support for that opinion like there is with being anti american. "Defund the Police" is a compromise slogan, "Abolish the Police" is the more radical version and arguably even clearer and less assailable but again mainstream US culture just doesn't want to face that reality.
Also, adaptable slogans are great for campaigns (where you probably don't want to assign policy specifics) and conservatives (who largely agree on everything already) but not for positions that are supposed to end up with policy changes. What adaptable slogan is there for leftist movement that's asking specifically to tackle the issue of police violence? The problem with adaptable slogans is they become compromised or co-opted. "Black Lives Matter" became a the conservative rally "All Lives Matter" and "Blue Lives Matter". Can this be avoided on the left by a more adaptable slogan? I doubt it.
So, okay maybe there's some slightly better slogan than "Defund the Police" but at the end of the day it's not the slogan that's the issue, it's liberals that don't actually agree with the basic idea but want to pretend they're still pro-left or whatever.
Edit: to complete the thought, all of this is to say, all the disagreement with the slogan is overall to a bad faith, pointless end. If the media and liberals and whoever are spending a bunch of time arguing about the slogan, it's time that could have been spent discussing and negotiating policy specifics. But liberals and mainstream media didn't want to do that. So we ended up with a lot of arguing about a slogan and not much actual policy and the police won.
Well, not really. While it isn't necessarily a mainstream view, many people do believe that the police in the United States function an unaccountable armed militia/gang, killing at will, and paid for by the public. Hence, the view that the public should defund the police.
Another facet of the same view is that the police are assumed to be inherently so far gone and corrupt that reform is not possible, and to assume that it is is futile.
Only because opponents of it deliberately misinterpreted it.
Defund the police means defunding the police. Over half of all city taxes go to funding the police forces, who do little to no good for the community with the money they're given. Buying more tanks and assault weapons and fancy cars and employing people who live in big macmansions in the suburbs isn't helping us.
Concervatives act like the word "defund" means the same as "abolish" when talking about the police, but then are happy to talk about defunding education, or defunding planned parenthood, or defunding medicare, defunding social security, defunding sanctuary cities, etc fully expecting their base to understand that they don't mean "abolish".
Conservatives do mean abolish for those things, though.
They want to abolish sanctuary cities, abolish planned parenthood, abolish medicare, abolish social security and abolish state-run education standards.
Moderates don't want to abolish most of those things, but hardcore conservatives completely do.
These terrible slogans are the product of social media. A good slogan is only going to get juice from one side. A slogan that is supremely dunkable by one side yet scratches the itch on the other is going to surface like curds in spoiled milk.
What slogan have you heard is "A slogan that is supremely dunkable by one side yet scratches the itch on the other is going to surface like curds in spoiled milk". No slogan is going to be 100% perfect because it's compressing an enormous amount of political opinion and legal implementation into a few words. IMO "Defund the Police" worked because it got a lot of people talking. The detractors were bad actors and not actually interested in implementation.
Here in Canada, many of those same voices are now begging the Ottawa police to take on a _more_ violent and confrontational approach in response to the ongoing protest. The hypocrisy is absolutely surreal to me.
Is it really surprising that all kinds of different people are a part of a political movement? You would find this same kind of diversity of thought in any group of people.
No that's definitely true, I should have been more specific. In my case, I was referring to some past acquaintances who are very vocal about their views on social media.
Specifically, the perspective I'm bothered by, is that of being pro-police intervention when it's for a cause you don't support, but calling to defund the police when they're disrupting a protest you _do_ support.
I'm sure you could find some folks in the world who would support that for any protest, but most just want the Ottawan ones to stop honking, stop blocking, stop whining, achieve their political ends via democratic means, vs. by force, and suck it up when they're unable to convince enough people to subscribe to their newsletter.
I think in both of these cases, and in the case of the Cap Hill Autonomous Zone (No we mean Cap Hill Occupied Protest actually!) the shift in rhetoric is not so much from the new people joining, but from the movement getting a reality check and embarrassing itself, then scaling back its ambitions.
Edit: The analogue on the right (but not as clean I guess) would be the attempt to reframe the Jan 6 protests after that utter "embarrassment." They wanted to overturn the election but now the right is spinning hard to reframe the rhetoric. Basically your radicals work hard building a groundswell and excitement around some idea, eventually embarrass themselves, and you have to do damage control. That's modern day national politics.
Actually defund the police means exactly what it says. The proposal is that police budgets get diverted to mental health and rehabilitation programs.
The budget moved to mental health & rehab would be handled under a different agency than the police, which is something that is constantly argued over. Many opponents of defund the police agree with the overall budget reallocation, but they believe the budget should not change agencies.
What opponents need to understand about the movement is that police would have less to do, as many emergency calls would be handled by actual professionals. So if they still need their mini tanks, assault weapons, and SWAT gear, they can still make a case based on their newly lightened responsibilities.
A lot of the mini-tanks, assault weapons and SWAT gear is based on how the police are funded, not necessarily the amount of funding they have.
The amount of funding a police department has is determined at the beginning of the fiscal year and by how much was spent by the previous year, including any shortfalls or excesses in budgetary spending. City councils and Mayors/DA's are always looking to trim the police budget (believe it or not), so a lot of the time, the department will take any excess budget they have at the end of the year and spend it on military auction items (a whole other mess), in order to keep their budget and show that they've been able to stretch their budget as far as they can and get the most value for their dollar (I read a very good article about it like 2 years ago, or so and can't find it). But departments do this so they don't lose their future budgets, "just in case" they need to hire future officers, need more "real" equipment, etc. etc.
This has lead to the increase in militarization of the police and the militarization of the tactics of the police as military personnel are already familiar with the equipment. There has been no same said impetus to increase nonviolent intervention tactics on an ever increasingly divisive nation, who's "news" cycle and social networks actively work to stoke division and tension as it feeds interaction, which provides more eyes on advertisement (sorry, I went down a rabbithole in the end, there).
It would be better, well it would be a start, to have quarterly budget reviews and performance reviews tied to the needs of the community and training. But, we all know that isn't how politics works =(
> Actually defund the police means exactly what it says.
…to you. Not everyone agrees and the simple fact that this discussion is taking place and you are defending this slogan would seem to render this purported clarity moot.
Most of the confusion is semantic in nature. Whether defund means remove all funding or just some funding.
I think some radicals wanted to remove all funding, and radicals on the other side latched onto that and spread that as if it were the truth.
Defund the police has mostly been about reallocating budgets between agencies. There are, however, a few specific branches of police that protestors have want shut down, but not to remove policing entirely.
Yeah, this word "sanewashing" as popularized by the article -- while I have mixed feelings about portmanteaus -- is going to be really useful. It's a word I didn't know I needed until I saw it.
At face value, many police departments do seem overfunded. In many small towns you'll see too many patrol cars for the area, new patrol cars too often, unnecessary improvements to the department, etc. while other areas of the budget languish because it's politically unpopular to go against the police department and people fear retaliation for advocating against them.
I think if you asked 100 people what it meant at its heyday maybe 70-80 would say "abolish the police." Connotation of words and all that. Just for humor's sake, google dictionary definition of defund is "prevent from continuing to receive funds" thus kill/abolish.
And those same people would happily call for legislation to defund sanctuary cities, defund education, defund planned parenthood, defund medicaid, with the full understanding that the proposals aren't intended to wipe those things from the face of the earth.
I mean, do you want to build a winning coalition or do you want to keep sending out confusing political messages and complain amongst yourselves about how the game just isn't fair?
I disagree as the “defund planned parenthood” want to kill the whole org. I mean, that’s why it’s a dangerous proposal as planned parenthood performs many positive functions. So defunding them would harm more than just the part people dislike.
No, I don't think it actually did. It was created by prison abolitionists, who believe in abolishing prison as a whole, an end to punitive jailing and moving to restorative justice with a community problem-solving system, like that advocated by Danielle Sered.
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 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.
2020 was marked by a 10x increase in comment volume, largely coming from both incredible, pandemic driven, market volatility as well as stimulus checks and stay at home orders.
It is very unlikely (I hope) that this environment will happen again.
Nonetheless, can you express exactly what it is that "just [isn't] the same anymore"?
Not OP, but IMO WSB used to be interesting because it represented a small contrarian movement within the highly structured world of finance; a ‘secret club,’ if you will. I always browsed WSB primarily because it was fun, not because I expected to get mega-rich; after the GME blowup/meme-ification/massive media coverage, now everybody and their grandma trades OTM options (and now penny stocks and cryptos and NFTs etc etc) and it just isn’t cool anymore.
I agree, I think there's definitely been a large cultural shift when it comes to retail investing. Lots of people these days want to find the one play that gets them to retirement.
That culture shift extends well beyond WSB, but I think its at least somewhat less obvious here. In my experience, most of the time when people throw out price targets, at most they're predicting a 20%, 25% move, and not the 10x, 100x, or 10,000x you see elsewhere.
I don't think there's really a way, from a moderation perspective at least, to take the dreamers out of the equation... other then waiting and letting them get blown up by their high risk plays.
And just a note, r/wallstreetbets hasn't allowed penny stocks, crypto, or NFTs for many years. (NFTs never)
> but there are definitely fewer recognizable names amongst the volume of comments
I find this interesting because to me one of the biggest attractions to Reddit (and HN for that matter) is how deemphasized the user is. I almost never read usernames and rarely remember who anyone is.
That's a good point. The situation definitely has it's pros and cons.
For example, in the voice chats, its great when users follow up with one another on their trades, or know each other's specialties so they can call them to provide insight.
On the other hand, deemphasizing the user makes it more about the content and less about the person creating that content, which at best avoids bandwagoning and the whole "I called $foo, so listen to me when I say buy $bar".
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.
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
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.
> 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.
Actually most revolutionary and astute observations about state of affairs recently came to me through tiktok. I wouldn't encounter them even if I watched network news 24/7
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.
> 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.
This is a great comment. And of course you're aware that I largely agree with it.
So with that proviso, all I will say in response is that I think it would be helpful to consider the opposing view point:
If the goal is to elicit an emotional or political response that one desires through one's actions, why should perfect, literal truth be in the way of achieving those goals?
My answer to that is that it destroys good faith and good faith is never worth sacrificing. Never. I literally can't think of one instance where mutual understanding exists and I would consider sacrificing good faith. So for me that's what the kettle of fish boils down to, and quite frankly it's one of the main reasons I'm happy I no longer date the person I mentioned above, even if she was otherwise wonderful and my ticket into many fancy parties.
Yea, agreed. In the distinction I was highlighting, the women I've dated were all operating in good faith, which is what made it possible for us to work together to overcome their temporary lapses of the ability to think clearly.
I didn't see this as implying anything about their character or intelligence other than the fact that they weren't perfect. It felt like exactly the same thing as the lapses of compassion that I tend towards when arguing, where the focus on truth makes me choose my words less carefully and casually say hurtful things (this was also something we worked on together in those relationships).
This is in stark contrast to the people for whom dishonesty is core to their being, who literally can't comprehend the level of honesty you and I expect from (and deliver to) those we're close with. It sounds like you're saying that your experience with that gf was closer to that than she was to the good-faith-but-imperfect type of person I was referring to. In that case, good call.
I think the moment where she was capable of voicing what it was that she was doing was the moment where she should have known better. I'm still not sure if she just had a values difference from me or not, but with time to think about it, in retrospect I have higher standards now for this type of thing. But you're right that it does depend on whether or not language is just deployed in the heat of the moment or not. Even so, I think it betrays something deep seated when someone speaks falsehoods during an argument.
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.
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"?
The promotion of 'work reform' is not what the author is describing as sanewashing. It's the co-option of a more radical movement, followed by an explaining away of the radical parts of that movement to make it mainstream-acceptable.
As someone who is sympathetic to anarchist positions while being temperamentally a reformist I can see the merit in both positions. But if I held the radical one and saw its slogans appropriated just as it had begun to get traction I'd be cross too, I think.
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.
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"?
> instance of an (attempted) "transformation of a radical viewpoint into one that's palatable to the mainstream" ...
I again think this is misunderstanding the point. The "transformation" we're talking about is one that betrays the initial goal. It didn't become palatable by convincing the mainstream, it did so by _changing its goal_ to something the mainstream already agreed with, contradicting the core beliefs of the original cause and community.
> "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"
Apologies, but I really do feel like you're misunderstanding both the article and my response. Your comment is full of claims that something that everybody believes is radical, while the whole framing of the article is defining radical as "things that few people currently believe" and mainstream as "things that many people currently believe".
Your comment asked:
> "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"?
and the simple, clear answer is that "sane" and "radical" are being used throughout the article in the sense of "popular" and "unpopular".
I'm quite familiar with the author, having interacted with him many times on a couple of small, related message boards for many years. I can guarantee you that he holds and can eloquently defend many views which would be considered radical. _That just has nothing to do with this particular article_, which is about the dynamics of how popular views wash out unpopular ones.
Hmm - actually I was using "sane" and "radical" in the intrinsic sense, independent of their popularity at any time after another.
Hence the view that the current workaholic "normal" as a radical departure from the social contract which preceded it.
And that it's worth asking how, exactly, this came to pass -- and in effect become the "new normal", before most people were aware this shift had happened.
>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?
It's not really a "religion" though. People aren't working "wildly out of proportion to the amount of work we actually need to do to sustain ourselves" so they end up in Valhalla or whatever. They're doing it because they want to be able to buy goods/services with that money, or for the FIRE crowd, doing it so they can stop working a decade or two later.
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.” :)
> 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
>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.
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.
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?
So in the 3rd case, someone needs to provide food, shelter, and other needs for someone while they work on this tough coal problem. That means that others in society need to either 1) agree and recognize that it is a problem that needs to be solved and voluntarily support them or 2) Trust that whatever people choose to do with their time must be important for the greater good and support them in whatever they do.
I guess the Annaco-communist answer would be the latter.
Yes, in Marxist terms you need to produce the surplus value to sustain development. So whoever wants to exclusively work on that coal problem presumably has to convince others to help him, either by providing supplies or by helping directly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course the mainstream does nlt care as they internalized the cultural hegemony of workaholism. The sub and splinters remain a fringe far left anarchist ideology.
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.
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.
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.
> It's against the rule to say that you did not read the article, so I won't say it
Maybe it should be against the rules to say you know it's against the rules, and so on recursively. This loophole is often exploited to make these remarks equally useless and extra snarky.
The spirit of the rule isn't that you can't point out when the article addresses the exact questions that the parent is asking:
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
My comment sole focus is not that parent didn't read the article. Instead, I chose to answer the comment's question with the answers from the article.
> Useless and extra snarky.
Making a top comment based on an article headline, with no knowledge of what is actually discussed is what's useless and against the HN discussion spirit where we usually try to foster meaningful conversations.
> 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.
Could have been shortened to
>> 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.
I happened upon the r/AntiWork comments section from time to time before that Fox News segment and it always struck me as full of people who were making every excuse not to take responsibility for their own circumstances and who have a fantasy that low skill jobs should some how pay enough to be life long careers instead of viewing them as stepping stones to bigger and better things.
A lot of the most popular threads had less to do with lifelong careers and more about being treated with basic human decency by your employer (and telling them off when the labor market turned in worker's favor).
That said, to address your point head on, is it possible in the US for everyone to move on to "bigger and better" things? I don't think so which is why we have so many adults with families in min. wage or lowing paying jobs. There is no pool of well paying jobs for them all to move into, there is no magic solution where everyone can have their needs met just by pulling harder on their bootstraps.
So the question then becomes: should a person (or two people) working a full time job be able to provide for themselves and their family? I think the answer to that question is yes. You might disagree, but I don't think its fair to write them off as having a "fantasy".
There are a lot of low skilled jobs in a service economy. I imagine that a significant fraction of all jobs are low skilled ones. Not everyone is chasing the hustle or whatever either, so there's a significant amount of people will be working those low skilled jobs their whole lives. What quality of life do they deserve? Does society want a permanent underclass that are treated miserably?
There's also a lot of overlap between these jobs and ones that were essential to keep society running during various lockdowns, so the value these jobs provide doesn't seem to be reflected in the remuneration.
What I don't understand is why many see it as acceptable for any business to pay less than a living wage under any circumstance, it's just a roundabout way of making taxpayers pay for a businesses labour force
>so the value these jobs provide doesn't seem to be reflected in the remuneration.
that's because remuneration isn't based on value, it's based on market conditions. value merely provides an upper bound. as an extreme example, clean water provides near infinite value to you (you need water to survive, so you're willing to pay infinite dollars for it), yet you can get it from your tap at less than a penny per gallon.
>What I don't understand is why many see it as acceptable for any business to pay less than a living wage under any circumstance, it's just a roundabout way of making taxpayers pay for a businesses labour force
But those people on welfare would receive welfare regardless of whether they're hired or not? I don't see how that's "making taxpayers pay for a businesses labour force".
I don’t believe your premise that such a large share of the available jobs are low skill that there is no room for people to move on to something better. If you look at fast food for example I’m seeing there are about 2.5 million workers which is a tiny percentage of the overall workforce. Looking at the age distribution of the US work force you could staff every fast food restaurant with only 16-19 year olds and still only be employing about half of that age groups work force.
why would you seek out statistics for one single industry that you perceive as low skill rather than just finding low wage statistics specifically?
44% of U.S. workers are employed in low wage jobs with a median annual wage of $18,000. [1]
Sure we can staff fast food with only 16-19 year olds but what about every other sector of the service industry and the myriad of other "low skill" jobs? are there 40 million plus "high skill" jobs out there waiting for the taking? The answer is no. [2]
That is the "sanewashed" viewpoint. The original message of r/antiwork was that nobody should have to work to live a comfortable life in modern society, and their needs should be provided by others who do.
What would provide for people? It seems to me we would either all starve and die, AI would do it for us (impossible in its current state), or we rely on effectively slave labor of poorer countries (which would mean work is not abolished for everyone).
Thanks for the response. There are some interesting ideas on hat site. I guess this is another example of something discussed extensively in the rest of the thread, the name/slogan of the movement not using the conventional meaning of terms.
You cannot structurally expect everyone to have a good career in the us. It is not currently mathematically possible. Please don't delude yourself into thinking the economy could function the same as it currently does without lifelong service industry workers
there is no reason to believe that a service worker can't have a good career.
This may not be the case now, but that can change.
I'm always wary of paraphrasing Graeber, but it's possible that living in a world where a small handful of individuals own the majority of the wealth has led to the market rewarding various jobs in a way that creates more misery than is strictly necessary - for example corporate lawyers being paid hundreds of thousands because they can help billionaires get even richer, while farmers producing the most important of all resources, food, are constantly hovering around the poverty line.
EDIT:
and as a mathematician, I would appreciate a proof of your "mathematically impossible" proposition. :)
Sorry, I think you missed my point. My point is that our economy is currently structured with so many jobs paying too little, having no benefits, no pto/healthcare, that "people should just get a better job" argument doesn't hold water numerically. I think the solution to that is to ease the wealth gap.
For me antiwork is just anti forced wage labour. If we had a universal basic income, then that would be accomplished and people would be free to work on whatever they want. If technology is advanced enough to be able to afford this which I'd argue is already the case, I don't see why this shouldn't be the case.
Technology isn't advanced enough to be able to afford this. Have you ever actually worked in a factory or on a farm? Have you done the math to calculate how much taxes would have to raise in order to give everyone a UBI at even the US federal poverty level? This is magical thinking disconnected from the reality of how the economy works.
Related to this, but is there ANY explanation out there from proponents of UBI that would clarify how UBI can be done sustainably and perpetually, without causing runaway inflation where UBI is always below poverty level anyway?
I'm obviously too retarded for such an advanced concept, but in my head there's no scenario where a utopian UBI-based society is possible, even with more advanced tech. To allow everyone to have food, shelter, and other necessities regardless of their usefulness to society, at the very least we'd have to have severe birth rate restrictions, strong law enforcement, and other fun authoritarian systems that would no longer qualify the environment as a utopia in the eyes of UBI supporters.
Seems like yet another liberal pipe dream that is entirely disconnected from reality, though I'd love to be proven wrong, if anyone has some good reading suggestions on this subject.
Personally if I were in charge, I'd start by slowly phasing it in via distributing it from the proceeds of a land value tax (the most efficient tax, Henry George called this a citizen's dividend). Then the UBI amount is anchored and there's no possibility of runaway inflation.
I still don't get it. If rich people own land with value X, and you tax it and produce Y amount that gets distributed to everyone, doesn't that Y directly increase the cost of food and shelter or any other thing that the poor people would want to buy?
Moreover, what's to stop rich people from selling their land? Or abandoning it and moving to another country?
UBI doesn't make any sense to me as CONCEPT. Sure you can find some creative ways to raise some money this year and give it to the poor (or everyone), but how do you create a such a system that continues to function over years and decades?
Money that is given to someone just for existing inherently has no value, so it cannot possibly have much purchasing power. The only things it can buy are things that are subsidized by the government anyway and exists already, such as low income housing and food-stamp-eligible food. What I don't understand is that people seem to think UBI would somehow result in a higher standard of living for people who are already in low income housing and on food stamps, and I just can't think of a mechanism for that.
> I still don't get it. If rich people own land with value X, and you tax it and produce Y amount that gets distributed to everyone, doesn't that Y directly increase the cost of food and shelter or any other thing that the poor people would want to buy?
You seem to be presuming inelastic supply of all of the stuff they'd ever buy. This is relatively true for some stuff (housing supply in the largest urban markets).
But, most of these things are elastic and/or have larger world markets to bid against. Food, consumer goods, housing in other markets, etc. Therefore, while a UBI would be somewhat inflationary, it would still increase the purchasing power of the poor and lower middle class.
> The only things it can buy are things that are subsidized by the government anyway and exists already, such as low income housing and food-stamp-eligible food.
This isn't true, but this is the biggest benefit to UBI: unwind the administrative apparatus involved with entitlements, and remove the lower income regions which have over 100% effective marginal tax rates. A complicated patchwork of programs can be simplified and reduced in scope (SNAP, section 8, EITC, disability insurance, etc..) and we can ensure that people always have a positive marginal incentive to work. Milton Friedman himself proposed a UBI in a form of a "negative income tax" to avoid these economic distortions.
>For me antiwork is just anti forced wage labour. If we had a universal basic income, then that would be accomplished and people would be free to work on whatever they want
What type of living conditions are we looking to guarantee? If your baseline is "prehistoric living conditions", I'm sure it's quite affordable. If it's "21st century middle class america" it will be ruinously expensive. Incremental improvements in technology can eventually bring us to a point where we can afford to give arbitrary fixed standard of living to everyone, but not if that standard of living is constantly increasing.
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.
Did you read any of the article? The whole point is that it was specifically a radical space, founded and filled by radicals, with a (somewhat) coherent radical message. The fact that there was a shift to "we should have mildly better working conditions within the same system" and "lol funny quitting text" may disqualify Doreen from being the representative, but the discussion being had here is how exactly that shift in the community's purpose is managed.
I'm extremely far from agreeing with the anarchist view of work, but your comment contains precisely the dynamic that the piece describes: a cause-focused community gains steam and followers, at which point the message is neutered (despite retaining a now-contradictory name) and those responsible for the movement's success are written out of history and ostracized as unrepresentative weirdos.
Seriously, I recommend reading the piece. It's too late to do so before commenting, but you may take away something more than "God why is this weirdo claiming that she represents antiwork when it's obviously just a board for bored teenagers to post memes about how they hate their job and tepid centrist messages about overtime pay"
What I'm noticing the past 5 to 10 years is the right outsmarting the left in activism and public imagery. Not with arguments, with wording. It's hard to watch.
One way I'm trying to make sense of is the following: The left is used to being the underdog, the ones fighting for reform against powerful, conservative institutions. They are used to not really stand a chance, it's the spirit that counts. In that position, it makes sense to yell loud, provoking slogans. The people in power will laugh it off, the people you're trying to reach will hear you. But we're in a situation where there are pockets of real power occupied by left-leaning leadership. University campuses. Some parts of the media. Large cities. Certain internet communities. The people in power (who are still largely conservative) are no longer laughing, they're scared. They will use your words against you if they aren't worded well. But it seems left-wing organizers refuse to change their tactics, refuse to acknowledge they entered the mainstream arena.
I still don't get what "abolish the police" is supposed to accomplish. Everyone who bothers understands what it is really about but you don't even have to twist the words, you just have to take them literally and it's a call to pure anarchism. The "blue lives matter" bullshit could have been stopped by changing the slogan to "black lives matter, too". A comedian should not be cancelled for actual, clear-in-context jokes, at least not when genuinely apologizing. A confused college student quoting some Jordan Peterson logic (which he'll likely feel embarrassed for in 5 years without any outside help at all) should not be yelled at in public or you get that shit on Tik Tok as "lefties suppressing free speech". Don't call your work reform movement... "anti-work". Sigh.
Laugh at right-wing stupidity. Take left-wing politics (i.e. European conservative politics) seriously and consider how to implement it in the real world. Do what the right has been doing for centuries, learn from it. They're in the defense now. And the most powerful move on the offense is appearing calm and composed.
Are the right really in defense mode? They managed to instill a majority in the supreme court, they have veto power in the senate and after 2022 will likely hold the majority in the house. They are successfully chipping away at the gains of the FDR era.
At the same time the left is fractured into two major camps. One camp is the leadership that seems to end up controlling major movements like Black Lives Matter and subduing it into nothing. This group chooses to not fight. They are benefiting from the status quo.
The other is the "progressive" left that is aiming for European style systems and policies. All they have as a weapon is Twitter and they are not really achieving their goals. What power do "Twitter People" really have if their efforts only translate into gestures from the higher ups(eg. BLM painted on the street in front of the capitol)?
> One way I'm trying to make sense of is the following: The left is used to being the underdog, the ones fighting for reform against powerful, conservative institutions.
This isn't necessarily true. The Democrats in the US had a near stranglehold on Federal politics from the 1950s through the mid-1990s. The Republican ascendence in the 1990s came about in part because Democrat-oriented institutions; e.g., large blue-chip companies, labor unions, and the Federal government itself were viewed as inefficient and corrupt by a portion of the voting population.
> But we're in a situation where there are pockets of real power occupied by left-leaning leadership. University campuses. Some parts of the media. Large cities.
This also isn't necessarily true. Democratic sympathies != left-leaning. And the actual truth is that, going on voting records alone, people in the US mainly vote based on whether they live in more or less densely populated regions. The institutions you've mentioned are all Democrat-leaning because they are predominantly located in more urban areas. Which makes sense, since the policies that Democrats generally support are all more effective at higher population densities.
I wonder what it's like to have such a naive black and white view of the world. You speak of left and right like it's a fantasy movie with some long narrative about good and evil. And you speak as though the concept of right and left has been an unchanging thing ("the right has been doing this for centuries"). Do you believe you are some stoic warrior engaged in a centuries long battle for some ideal?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> "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. ;)
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.
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?
>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.
This is how I read it. And in that context there's a heck of a lot to read between the lines.
Nobody gets their kids out of the house and then starts another family because the first try turned out great.
Sounds like dad doesn't want to spend time with someone. When your options are the middle aged dude putting in OT and raising more kids and the person airing their family drama on the internet who gets the benefit of the doubt isn't much of a choice.
To be fair if I was the dad I would not want to see this kid either nor anyone else that states they want to punch me in the face. Dad worked for 20 years to provide for his family, lost his wife and keeps providing. Wonder how much of the dad's salary still goes to supporting this 'kid' who has 3 kids of his own. 50 hours a week working is really not that much in the scheme of things, its not optimal but its not really workaholic level.
What about the dads who are away from their families for weeks or months at a time, working offshore or on military deployments? Are they "bad"? I think some people just have a skewed sense of entitlement.
On the other hand, the argument can be made that the kids' lack of respect for the dad's career might be what's leading to the dad hiding away at work in the first place?
I feel this would be something relatable to a large portion of the people on this site, given how many of us practically live our tech careers. Even if we aren't putting in overtime at work, many of us spend time not at work on personal projects or learning some new tech. We might think of it as different from work, but for an outsider it'll just seem like more work.
It's also a sort of hypocrisy since if the point of the movement is to allow people to be free to do what they find meaning in, surely it's contradictory to diminish what someone finds meaning in just because you don't think it pays enough.
I know that if I had someone who didn't care for how fulfilling tech work is to me, I'd probably end up avoiding them too. Back when I went through a similar phase with my family, I too just buried myself more in work to not have to deal with them. Now they do understand, so I end up spending more time with them.
I can't even grock the writing to get a feeling from it. They have 3 kids and his dad has 3 kids also? Or are their 3 kids the dad's grandchildren and the author of the comment has 2 siblings? And the dad's wife passed away, I assume is not their mother? But why would that be relevant? And since he is a boomer, he is at retirement age probably? His kids must be fully grown right?
When I read this, I think there is a possibility their dad uses work as an escape from family, as I have known many coworkers over the years who 'hid' at work. It's possible their dad doesn't want to visit them. That is not work's fault, necessarily.
> 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. ;)
These kids need to travel to find out the reality of the world.
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.
"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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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
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.
>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.
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.
> …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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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)
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.
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.
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.
Read the article, it's explained. The term was coined in r/neoliberal, 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]”.
It is internet lingo and I would not recommend using it contexts other than describing internet events/drama. Even in that context, I personally would only use it carefully while quoting someone else. It does not create productive conversations as it automatically casts the opposite party as "insane".
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.
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.
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.
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. ^_^
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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:
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.