Endless Thread - The complicated, chaotic rise of 'antiwork'

Episode Date: January 28, 2022

"Unemployment for all, not just the rich!" That's the catchphrase of r/antiwork, a Reddit community of more than 1.7 million people who want to end work as we know it and reimagine its role in our lives. In this episode, we hear from members of this fast-growing community about what brought them to this online space, but also about recent turmoil within the subreddit that has left some wondering if it will endure. 

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Merotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, folks, we wanted to let you know that as we were putting the finishing touches on this episode, there was a big update in the story. Big enough that we debated whether or not to run the episode or hold it. But we decided that we still wanted you to know about this community, a community that right now is embroiled in an existential debate. And we'll tell you the latest on that debate at the end of the episode. So stick with us. Now, on to the show. WBUR podcast, Boston.

Amory, let's make like a news show and read some headlines from last month. Okay, Ben, let's. But like let's literally read the headlines, many of which over the last month or so, have been like this. Reddit Antework Forum booms as millions of Americans quit jobs. Reddit Anti-Work moderator says working was, quote, degrading and Quote, pointless. The Antework subreddit is taking IRL action. Reddit's anti-work sub has mainstream appeal. Inside the online movement to end work.

Final straw as Ozzy quits over boss's email. IT employee goes viral for automating job and playing video games. That was you, wasn't it? Is that you? I'll never tell. Lying flat, anti-work and the Great Resignation spreads. Some good stuff in there, but you know how we do. do like to hear the voices of the online communities we are covering. So let's do that throughout

this episode, starting now. Hi there. This is user Vesper underscore from Anti-Works subreddit. My name is Rebecca Hardy. I am originally from Ohio, but I now live in Virginia. L. from Minneapolis, Minnesota. My name is Ash from Texas. This is Mike from Toronto. You can just refer to me as Water Baboon 569. That's my Reddit handle. I was told at one company, that if I love something enough, I would do it for free, and they said that to justify no overtime pay. The general manager responded to me that she couldn't pay me $10 an hour because that's how much she made. They were just bullying a whole bunch of people in the job sites. It became a really toxic, horrible situation. The nail in the coffin for me was when I was told by a superior that I would, quote, have to lie in this

career in order to get ahead. No matter how good the moral compass of the owner is, people are sacrificed to the god of profit. My attitudes towards capitalism have changed since I was a kid and are still changing today. I don't necessarily believe in capitalism because I think that maybe there could be a better system out there. No, I ain't given any of that to anybody anymore. No. Yes, this week we're talking about the online and real life movement that has been galvanized in the pandemic by skepticism about capitalism, our current coronavirus malaise, and some truly viral, sometimes fake, always maddening. screenshots of texts with employers, bosses, and managers, and employees who have had it, the movement known as anti-work.

An episode we admittedly made at work. You're listening to Endless Thread. And we're coming to you from Boston's NPR station, WBUR. So we've been following the anti-work conversation on Reddit for a little bit, mostly lurking in the community, reading people's testimonials. Yeah, and I've been wanting us to cover this for a long time because I was seeing posts in that community hit the front page of Reddit more frequently. And they were often these kind of rage-inducing screenshots of text chains of bosses trying to force employees to come in when they were off or threatening them with losing their job if they didn't, that sort of thing. But when you'd read the comment thread, you'd see, among the snark, some real conversations happening around how employers treat workers, how workers treat workers, how workers treat the,

themselves and how this country treats workers and what to do about it. We were watching all of this, and then, near the end of 2021, this happened. Reditors have been spamming Kellogg's job portals in solidarity with the strikers. Yes, Kellogg's, the cornflake maker, had a bunch of workers go on strike over work conditions at the company. And then, instead of negotiating for a deal with some 1,400 union workers, it said it was going to just hire new workers to replace them. So Redditors found the online job applications for said new jobs to replace Kellogg's workers and started filling out fake applications. A TikTok user named Sean DeBlack even wrote a script of code in Python, which automated bogus applications. And it automatically applies.

Application has been sent. President Biden, by the way, also criticized the company, though we don't know for sure if he filled out a fake application. But users and moderators in the... the community would likely say this isn't just about companies like Kellogg's. It's about something bigger. It's about the Mondays. We all, I think a lot of us really hate the work that we do. I mean, you talk about the Mondays, you know, oh, I have to get up on going to work on Monday.

This is Ria. There's no reason to intrinsically hate Monday more than any other day of the week. It's the fact that you have to go into a job that you hate that is the driving reason why you dislike Monday. day so much. I would think that a pretty reasonable goal for human society and for the economy is to serve human needs and to contribute to human happiness. And I think with the great resignation and the rise of anti-work, what we're seeing is a lot of people that are willing to really start looking at the economy and saying that the economy is a means to an overall end of human happiness and satisfaction and not an end to be served in and of itself.

Ria does work herself, by the way. She does back office work for an addiction recovery clinic. And at the time we spoke to her in early January, she was also a moderator of the anti-work subreddit, along with Dory, more formally known as... My name is Doreen Ford. I go by she-her pronouns. I live in the Boston area. And my username on anti-work is pretty easy.

You slash abolish work. And I am Ria. Usename on Reddit is Ria Skies, as it is in most other places. She, her pronouns. I live in the South Central United States. And I'm a recent convert to the anti-work movement. How did you get converted? Well, you know, I was born in 1991.

I went to college, you know, right through the Great Recession. Then I went to grad school. I ended up burning out, you know, started looking for jobs and work and realized that, you know what? This is all just kind of pointless. We're just going to, is this really all that life is about? Is it just working 40 hours a week for 40 years? And then is that, is that it? That's what life is.

We're the richest society and the history of the world. and that's the best that we can do with ourselves. I think we can do better than that. Ria and Doreen represent a kind of spectrum in the history of the online anti-work community. Ria was a recent addition, part of the subreddit's breakneck growth. Doreen had been moderating the community

since the good old days, 2014. But even among community moderators, there is a wide spectrum of opinion, just like the larger number of community subscribers. So nobody, including Dory and Ria, can really speak for the community at large, not these days at least. Before the explosive growth, it was pretty chill.

Dorian mostly was helping keep tabs on the thousand member strong community as a favor for a friend. She did not, however, expect anything to really come of it. I had been in radical politics for almost 10 years at that point. I was like, it'll be cool if this blew up or went somewhere, but how's that going to happen? How it happened was either ironic

or perfect? One of the things that helped the community get a bunch of attention was going viral at the office. The subreddit for The Office. They had a picture of all the main cast and stuff like that, and each individual member

were tagged with a given subreddit. And I believe the character named Stanley was tagged with R-slash-A-R-A-T-Werk. That of all things is one of the first time. I'm not saying it's the first time. I'm not saying it's like responsible for everything, but it's something that's always stuck in my mind. That's one of the first times we really blew up as a sub-reddit.

Internet jokes as a motivating force for a movement is admittedly something that some might look askance at. But then, when you actually listen to Stanley, the character, it kind of makes sense. I wake up every morning in a bed that's too small. Drive my daughter to a school that's too expensive. And then I go to work to a job for which I get paid too little. But on pretzel day, well, I like pretzel day. Stanley knows his priorities and his true. post-career dreams.

Yes, I have a dream, and it's not some MLK dream for equality. I want to own a decommissioned lighthouse, and I want to live at the top, and nobody knows I live there, and there's a button that I can press and launch that lighthouse into space. Speaking of launching into space, between just last October and January alone, which, by the way, coincides generally with the timeline of the Kellogg's strike story. R-slash anti-work has been on a tear when it comes to the growth of the community on Reddit. Between 60 and 70K, new people per week, still top 10 comments in days and post for three months now. Comments per day are at all-time highs and we're in the top five for most of December.

Wow. If that sounds a bit like Greek, it really means that among the 1.7 million accounts subscribed to the community and the many more who peruse it, a lot of people comment and participate and act. The real-world impact of loosely organized groups on the internet gets debated a lot. But if movements are groups of people working together to advance their social, political, or artistic ideas, then anti-work is a movement. The tagline of the subreddit is unemployment for all, not just the rich. And when this particular group focuses its efforts on

one thing, it does have real impact. Popular posts in the community call for boycotts and for organized efforts to raise the minimum wage. The most apt comparison of anti-works crazy growth might actually be another Reddit community that destabilized a capitalism hallmark. Welcome to the new world of Wall Street Betts, the small D Democratic tout sheet that's been able to All Street bets, the crazy popular community that had a big impact on stock option trading, enough to draw the ire of regulators, eviscerate hedge fund wealth, and become a constant topic on mainstream business television programming. And Stanley from the office quotes aside,

Dorian and Ria both actually do point to Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi as inspiration for what they feel is one of the most important tools in the anti-work toolbox. Direct action. The subreddit even has a library of relevant literature, which Dorian Ria seemed to have read pretty closely themselves. Back when I first started working, actually, is when I got into anti-work around 2011, 2012 is when I started developing that sort of ideology in my mind about what it was and when I read Bob Black's abolition of work, which was very influential essay on the movement. You know, John Maynard Keynes, yes, the famous Keynes of Keynesian economics, suggested that by the year 2000, We wouldn't have to work more than 15 hours a week to do basic government structuring tasks and do our little bit of oversight.

But why was Keynes so wrong? Part of the answer, according to Ria and Doreen, is the way that we deal with work in a capitalist free market neoliberal society. And the common denominator among a lot of people participating in this online community is offline experiences with toxic work environments. I used to work for a business magazine that was horrible in so many ways I could take up an entire episode and not get through half of it. Once we got a new website and a newsletter template that was absolutely completely 100% broken, it was my job to run the website and send out the newsletter, and I was told that it being broken wasn't an excuse to not get the newsletter sent out or the website updated. So for over a week, I had to stay at the office until sometimes as late as 10 p.m., trying to fix it myself. It was working my ass off at my first job as a line chef, stressed out, burning myself, getting shouted at every night, destroying my will to live for minimum wage, and finally asking my managers why I was working 40 hours a week when I was supposed to be part-time, only to be told 40 hours wasn't full-time in the restaurant biz.

One time I was sick, like deadly sick, had to get morphine from the ER, and I didn't eat solid food for a week. And I had a doctor's note for that week, but I was still sick afterwards, so I went into work. and I said to my boss, hey, I was on morphine and I came in without the morphine, and I worked while I was sick and in great pain. Remember that. And about a month later, it fired me. A couple of years later, I learned that I had been approved at the time for a $2,000 bonus for all the overtime and fixing the code, but I never got it because my boss took the money

and spent it on 10 Justin Bieber tickets for him, his kids, one of our coworkers and her kids, and then, like, one client. I ended up getting fired and I'd been there for the longest for two years, longer than the new owner, actually. And I didn't get to tell them to go screw. I, like, cried in my partner's car after I got fired because I had never been fired before. And it's a pretty freaking emotionally distressing thing, especially when you work. That was Doreen at the end there. Ria also has a tough employment story.

Back in 2019, she was working at a forensic accounting firm. And she says her employers changed her job from. accounting work to more direct cold call and email sales. And she didn't like that at all. She felt like she was being set up to fail. I felt like I was going to be terminated within the next few days. So I just decided to go out of my own terms. There are a lot of stories about people who have experienced emotional trauma at work

trying to take back some agency in their own lives. And in the anti-work community, they're starting to find ways to push back. More on that and a few. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing, or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully, make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know.

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Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org. creative studio. Hello, endless thread. My name is Nick Cloughcorn and I'm in Phoenix, Arizona. Hi, my name's Allison. I used to live in New York, but I left after losing my job in the pandemic. Last year, I was working at a factory here.

A kiln exploded during ignition and nearly killed me. Despite the fact that I am an expert in this area and the factory itself was all running on antique and improperly maintained equipment, they decided to fire me instead of improved safety or equipment at the factory. I joined the anti-work movement because since I started my working career at age 16, I've never once had an employer that didn't harass me or discriminate against me for my gender, my age, or my disabilities. I know with certainty that my experience is not unique. We are all treated as replaceable objects of low value and frankly, it's BS.

I've never received a 401K contribution. I've never received help for paying. my $60,000 in college loans. Quit your job, organize your coworkers. My entire career, I felt like a lemon being squeezed for more juice by my employers. Unionize and protest. It's never enough for my corporate overlords, and it will never be enough for me to pay off my loans, buy a home, seek medical care without financial stress, or achieve financial

security. Rally around the fact that you've seen your entire working life being treated like garbage. Recognize your value. companies are nothing without us. There are a lot of stories about toxic work culture on R-slash-ante-work, and they get upvoted like crazy. Remember the tornadoes that killed scores of people last month across the southern U.S. in Ohio Valley?

One post is just an exchange of texts, reportedly between an Amazon delivery driver and an Amazon dispatcher. Radio's going off, driver says. Dispatch. Okay, just keep driving. We can't just keep driving. call people back for a warning unless Amazon tells us to do so. Driver. Just relaying in case y'all didn't hear it over there. Tornado alarms are going off

over here. Dispatch. Just keep delivering for now. We have to wait for word from Amazon. If we need to bring people back, the decision will be up to them. I'll let you know if the decision changes at all. I'm talking with them now about it. The text chain goes on with the driver deciding to turn back for their safety, and the dispatcher telling them that if they do, they won't have a job. job tomorrow. The title of this post says, in part, your life is just numbers in a machine. Make the correct call. This post has 116,000 upvotes and almost 7,000 comments on it. Moderators deemed it to be verifiable, and it stayed up. There are lots more posts that detail more aggressive disputes between employers and managers. People quitting and going out with a bang. Bosses being unreasonable in

requesting people show up on short notice or while they're at a funeral for a family member, taking care of their kids. The list goes on. Some of this stuff is almost definitely fake, mocked up to rile people up and get internet points at the same time. But a lot of it is real. And Ria says these personal stories get at the essential ethos of anti-work. It really kind of started once COVID took off and people had more free time to think about and process and be like, you know what? hey, there's, you know, a lot of this work that people do, it's not really all that necessary. And I think a lot of these, you know, positions that are being tasked as being absolutely essential are some of the most strenuous, most disrespected, low-paying positions out there.

Whereas the positions that are in high regard, high esteem, high-paying, they just took furlough or just switched over to not having to work or working from home doing a little bit here and there, and society didn't seem to need them. So isn't that a little bit, it's weird, that the jobs that are so utterly essential are the ones paid as though they are utterly replaceable? Hello, this is Gabriel from below the Mason-Dixon, and I used to work as in the first. central worker during the pandemic. And I'm anti-work because my employer forced a coworker of mine to come back to work about three months into the pandemic, even though she was still touching positive for COVID. I ended up getting fired because every time a district manager

or a higher level management came, I always ask, you know, when are we going to be able to have paid enough that we can afford to live in the area? There are a lot of people in the community that have seen something like this or experienced it firsthand. And the result is feelings. Sometimes those feelings translate into politics. Dori and Ria described the politics of the subreddit as generally pretty far left. Democratic socialists and progressives are in some ways the more low-key examples. Anarcho-communists, Marxists, Leninists.

In fact, when our public radio podcast posted on the subreddit asking to hear Rediter's stories, we got dragged, somewhat hilariously, to us at least, for being enemies of the movement or in the pocket of our sponsors. And here I was thinking we were doing pretty well on that front. Seriously. Still, we were struck by how even though the current political spectrum in the U.S. might deem anti-work users as far left, a lot of the people we heard from had what struck us as not super radical positions. It wasn't like kill all capitalist pigs. It was more like... In the future, I would just be great to see that people could work, not to live, but out of enjoyment and out of passion instead of being forced. There's enough suffering in this world naturally, and we need to end the self-imposed suffering under the system.

I hope we can continue to grow as a movement short in the work. We can raise a standard of living for everybody. You know, I'm not even anti-jobs. You know, I'm fine with people having professions and things that they want to do. Um, you know, I, I don't think that's inherently a bad thing. I just think it's a bad thing under capitalism in the state and the way that it's done there. Like, I would still take care of dogs if capitalism didn't exist. Oh yes. Did we not mention? Dory has a job too. She's a dog walker. I mean, look, I, I, I work with literal angels put on this planet, you know, I'm talking about dogs, and there are still mornings where I'm like, nah, I'd rather not get up and go to work. And by the way, my workplace is, and I'm not bragging, I'm just saying, it's a five-minute walk for me.

I don't even have to get in a bus or a car. I got very lucky. I'm very fortunate, yada, yada, yada. For people like Dory, who describes herself as an anarchist, maybe it's just about sticking to some kind of jobs and wishing for the demise of others, opting out of the rat race and hoping to help convince others to do the same. Like, I'll take a really non-controversial example, like war profiteering. Like that kind of companies that benefit off of wars Probably wouldn't exist as much if capitalism and the state didn't exist to be in one So how about corporate corporate lobbyists or day traders?

I would say that there are certainly positions including very well-paying positions That don't just not contribute to society but actually harm society But because they enable wealth extraction from the public sphere into the private sphere and they do so very efficiently their very richly rewarded under the current system because when there's money to be made and scams to be scammed, somebody's going to try to scam them. Ria talks less about the state ceasing to exist and more about finding ways to change it. One piece of legislation she thinks about a lot is the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which restricted and regulated unions more aggressively.

She says it peeled back protections put in place by FDR, stopping things like general strikes, while setting in motion some power dynamics that rea thinks are problematic in the workplace today. In order to illustrate the power dichotomy that exists between capital and labor, think about the fact that it's considered unprofessional to leave without giving a two or and sometimes three, four week notice, whereas it is apparently considered completely professional to tell somebody that they're going to be leaving and they're going to be immediately escorted out by security, will send your belongings to you in some period of time to be determined. So looking at those labor structures and the legal system that encompasses,

I think that would be a potential avenue for change. And I think building up a groundwork of organizing. In late December, Kellogg's backed down on hiring a bunch of workers to replace their union employees. The global food brand that employs 31,000 people pulled in 13.7 billion, million dollars in annual revenue and nearly two billion in profits at last check in 2020, bowed to 1,400 striking workers and ratified a new contract with the union. And some credit the anti-work subreddit for that, and the direct action it inspired among users who buried the company in a reported deluge of fake job applications.

But anti-work moderators have to be careful, too. So I think there is very much a thin line of how much direct action we can. can organize, you know, in terms of Reddit's rules, in terms of... Yes, Reddit has rules about harassment and abuse. And not always a crystal clear history of rule enforcement. Sometimes it seems tied to negative press coverage. I mean, they tolerated some pretty ugly subreddits out there for a while until they decided that, you know, those...

They were breaking too many rules and inviting legal troubles. The company is also reportedly moving towards an initial public offering, and many users have been voicing fears that once Reddit becomes a public company, the anti-work community's anti-capitalism stance won't survive the demands of powerful shareholders. Ria and Dori are pretty skeptical of that concern. Still, there are pitfalls for such an explosively growing community. Some users want a lot more naming and shaming of companies from whence the personal workplace horror stories come, which could get the community banned by administrators. And every once in a while, there's the suggestion of committing violence against capitalism, which moderators moderate with the remove and ban buttons. And that's why we're so hard-lined about it. People are like, oh, but the state is violence and capitalism is violence,

and so many people are dying. And like, how can you not want to at least have us defend ourselves as how they put it? And it's like, yeah, I don't necessarily disagree with all that ideologically. but like terms of service-wise, it's not going to go well for us. I'd rather have the platform than not. And also, I prefer nonviolent solutions over violent solutions just about any day. Ria agrees. Do you really think your flimsy second amendment is going to be the ultimate defender against government tyranny? No, it's going to be your first, fourth, fifth, and sixth amendment rights that are going to defend

you from tyranny well more than the Second Amendment ever will. Don't get it twisted, though. At the end of the day, Dory says Antiwork does have an agenda. Maybe not a political one in the traditional sense. And to be sure, even when there's a corporate boogeyman to topple, it's still not easy to get 1.7 million internet users to try to march in the same direction. In our own threat, asking for personal stories from Antiwork members, some were arguing that the movement needed an MLK-like leader.

Others felt the opposite. And some swore off talking to the press. But still others said that not talking to the press would result in anti-work never being properly understood or taken seriously. And even though we didn't know it until two days before this episode dropped, that discussion would become prescient. Very prescient. Because earlier this week and several weeks after our interview,

Dory did an interview with Fox News and it did not go well. And is there something you want to do besides being a dog walker? Do you aspire to do anything more than dog walking? Or is that kind of your pinnacle? I love working with dogs. If I had to do the rest of my life, you know, I wouldn't be super complaining. You know, dogs are wonderful animals. But I would love to teach.

I would love to, you know, work with people and stuff like that. What would you teach, Dorian? A philosophy mostly. Philosophy. Philosophy. Critical thinking, reasons, stuff like that. Okay. Well, I would love to take your class.

After the interview, the subreddit exploded into an argument over who exactly gets to represent the anti-work community. And who doesn't? And how those decisions are made. Honestly, familiar challenges to any growing movement, right? But it got pretty messy. Dory and other moderators were arguing with users. The subreddit was made private for a number of hours, which made it impossible to view or join. And then it was public again.

and Dori and Ria are no longer listed as moderators of the community. We reached out to them to see if they wanted to comment on what's transpired over the past couple days. Ria confirmed that she and Dori are no longer moderators, but for, quote, differing reasons. Dory wrote back, quote, I don't have any statement to give that would fix things or make them better. Groups of angry Internet users can cause a lot of harm when they march in the same direction too. So the anti-work movement on Reddit can be a powerful and maybe dangerous force. Supporters would say that if that means making sure a corporation mistreating workers has a very bad week, that is a good kind of danger.

Dory would like people to remember. We are a radical anti-authoritarian leftist movement. We're not non-political. We very much have concrete demands about capitalism and subverting it. We're not all anarchists and communists necessarily. You know, there are social Democrats and people from more liberal backgrounds and stuff like that. We're pretty big tent. But I think generally, you know, we're very anti-authoritarian at our core and really want to undermine capitalism as much as possible.

It's hard to know how the recent blowup in Reddit's anti-work community will affect its trajectory from here. We reached out to the remaining moderators to get their thoughts on the circumstances behind Doreen and Ria's departure. Their response? Quote, year-long struggle for workers against toil and exploitation falls apart due to two people, then those two people are more powerful than all the kings, despots, and billionaires that have come before and now. The struggle continues and will continue. No matter what happens, we'll be watching and listening. The Black Death helped end feudalism, and this pandemic has shifted the

labor market, and I hope it ends our wage slavery, and we are able to reclaim the time and some of the dignity that has been stolen. My personal dream is a post-scarcity society, where people all over the world are allowed to pursue the work they find meaningful. There's enough suffering in this world naturally, and we need to end the self-imposed suffering under the system. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. Want early tickets to events, swag, bonus content, Amory's vacation to-do list, Ben's retirement plan, join our email list. You will find it at WBUR. slash endless thread. This episode was written, produced and hosted by us, Amory Severson.

And sorry, I just got tripped up. I forgot my own name. Nope, that was your one chance to say your name. We're leaving it. And me, wadio. Yeah, and Ben Brock Johnson, mix and sound design by Matt Reed. Additional production from Dean Russell, Nora Sacks, Kristen Torres, and Quincy Walters. Our web producer is Rachel Carlson.

And special thanks to all of you out there who sent us your anti-work stories. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between digital communities and an office full of dogs in suits making photocopies of bones. You've done it again, Ben. You've done it again. If you've got an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or a wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up. Email Endless Thread at WBUR. Thank you.