Site with over a million users and one of the biggest agitprop vehicles of the last five years and now it's private. Lol. Lmao.
Edit: Ok, now the mods are saying making the site private is only temporary while they "deal with the cleanup from ongoing brigading."
I disagree. There was good discussion going on there, and it seemed like it was rapidly evolving past being just a glorified dunk tank. Its loss is, well, a loss.
Fierce disagree. Putting aside the almost inevitable fact it would be overrun by feds / liberals (assuming it wasn't from the get-go!), I don't see value in a bunch of atomized people logging onto a surveilled website and getting their dopamine hits by reading about how much it sucks to work at Walmart.
It had quite a lot of smug libs who boasted about making $80k - $200k+ for their do-nothing jobs -- people who are a billion times more likely to support a rightwing project than a leftwing one. It's a loss in the sense that Warren ending her campaign was a loss, imo.
I guess the question is what's the alternative? We can only work with the conditions we have; is there a better way to connect mass numbers of alienated workers? I don't think anyone expected the place to be an openly revolutionary Leninist site, but it still played an important role in allowing workers in a moment of crisis to realize their numbers and share examples of small victories over their exploiters.
Then there's also just the inevitability of it. People are congregating online like never before, that's just a reality. I expect that there will be other, similar sites that will come after antiwork, and so long as they exist we may as well use them to further class conciousness among users.
I take a very dim view of online-only political work. Maybe those workers did feel good when reading examples of small victories. But there's no next level -- all they're doing is feeling good and righteous from reading stories, some of which were probably fake.
What's the alternative? In-person stuff: tenants unions are something I'm impressed by right now -- stuff that gets you moving and meeting people in real life with real stakes. You could argue 'well we can do both' but I don't see the online stuff as leading anywhere.
To me, it's like the belief that, "Oh, canvassing for politicians is useful because it teaches people social / organizational skills!" But the situation of asking someone to vote for Bernie Sanders are much different than asking them to participate in a rent strike or direct action. Antiwork is similar to my mind, as would be campaigning for Bernie Sanders. You'd probably even hear the same sort arguments from its advocates: "Maybe this won't get us up the hill, specifically, but we're building the possibility of something in the future."
deleted by creator
Memes are the new pamphlets
Unironically kind of.
Oh yeah no that wasn’t really a joke lol
deleted by creator
It’s not the same as being in person. It’s time-asynchronous, you aren’t using body language or tonality to communicate, and your level of investment is significantly lower. Compare going to hang out a neighbor’s house vs. texting them on social media. One of those is a bigger investment than the other, and people feel it.
If you enjoy living like this, whatever. It seems to be the new normal they want for us. But with the ‘ease’ of communication comes a drawback imo: i don’t think we care the same for someone we’ve only met online. For working together? It’ll be fine. For recruiting them into a risky political project? I doubt it will be very effective.
Every time I browsed that sub, the posts with the most upvotes were the "professional" workers, mostly tech guys about how their 75k job sucked and how they easily found another job that payed better. The few posts from low payed workers were lucky to get 1k upvotes, any posts trying to radicalise the movement were lucky to get over 100 upvotes. With this group of users on that sub and anarchists mods, it was bound to go nowhere and get taken over by libs.
That was what helped me realize how ridiculous the sub was. That they considered it a victory for the workers every time some disphit techbro bragged about doubling his salary by changing his cakewalk job. It just looked like a hug box / sneer club to me. As I said before: a place for liberals to get their dopamine hits + use that moral outrage to think of themselves as radical despite not being part of any political project.