Takeaways
In 2022 #Antiwork became a unifying brand for anti-establishment dissent.
Media and politicians on both left and right invested in building the brand - the movement was a convenient rallying point for leftist indignation AND rightist derision. Without strong leadership within the #Antiwork movement, the original founders lost control of their brand.
Rather than eating the rich, #Antiwork is itself being digested by society. Consumer culture is exceptional at absorbing counterculture and making it…just culture. That's how it stays alive.
Eating the rich since at least 1979
One day, I was walking down the street in San Francisco, when I saw this graffiti on the front porch of a $2MM+ Victorian-style house:
The year was 2014. #OccupyWallStreet was fading from view, but the modern anti-tech movement in Silicon Valley (the ‘techlash’) was blooming. The lyrics of the 1979 Kennedys song I was listening to at the time ('Jobless millions whisked away / At least we have more room to play') felt prescient.
Since then, momentum around the Labor movement and disgust at wealth inequality have exploded. There is renewed energy in the US around unionization, and the public mood in Europe and the US seems ever more anti-corporate.
#Antiwork emerged as a unifying banner for this movement. Over the last year the r/antiwork community on Reddit rose to 2 million members, and one of its moderators rocketed to international infamy in a disastrous interview on Fox News. Gallons of digital ink are still being spilled over whether #Antiwork is ‘booming’ (FT) or ‘dangerous’ (Daily Telegraph) or simply ‘WTF’ (Vice).
There is a sense on some parts of the Interwebs that the #Antiwork movement has already crashed and burned. What I think is interesting though is #Antiwork as a brand - what it represents, who ultimately owns it, and how such movements in general tend to be used and recycled by the very culture they seek to disrupt.
Antiwork 101: Unions, LAARPing for karma and…being pro-work.
#Antiwork is slippery. Visit the r/antiwork subreddit and you will be told it is:
“A subreddit for those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, want to get the most out of a work-free life, want more information on anti-work ideas and want personal help with their own jobs/work-related struggles.”
Spend a few minutes browsing the forum, though, and you will see that it has long departed from the vision of its founders. Almost none of the discussion is about ending work or living work-free - it nests into a few major categories:
Serious discussion on the forum is dominated by the topic of unionization, and how workers can take back power through collective action. Perversely, the antiwork subreddit is mainly about how to improve working conditions.
r/antiwork suffered from an affliction common in Progressive politics - without the kind of populist demagogues that typically unify the right, territory is constantly fought over by different groups within the movement, jockeying for influence and their own goals.
On Reddit, the largest of these groups are reddit users themselves, posting a mix of real and made-up stories about horrible bosses and work revenge. They do this mainly to get ‘Reddit karma’ (upvotes) from their peers.
There are also earnest advocates for collective action, who drive much of the 'serious' discussion on the forum. Then you have teenagers making memes, anti-western astroturfers lamenting the decline of American capitalism, and a host of other groups. From the inside, r/antiwork is a hodge-podge of earnest reformers and self-interested trolls.
So, without clear leadership and vision, how did the movement grow influential enough to make headlines around the world?
Who owns the #Antiwork brand?
#Antiwork grew in prominence so rapidly because it happened to be *useful* to several powerful institutions:
1. The first of these was Reddit users themselves; anti-corporatism resonates strongly with the community, and so the content being posted became popular, attracting other users to share and post about it.
2. Secondly, it made for great news. ‘Left-leaning’ outlets used #Antiwork to make the case for a growing grass-roots desire for better worker’s rights, and for ‘right-wing’ outlets like Fox News the movement was perfect fodder for the narrative that the US’ problems can be blamed on work-shy young people living in their parents’ basements. Fox engineered a masterful humiliation of one of the subreddit’s moderators live on air, propelling #Antiwork into everyone's living rooms, and simultaneously causing a meltdown within the #Antiwork community.
3. Lastly, politicians and activists used the debate to burnish their own credentials. Within a few days of one another, union organizer Chris Smalls wore an ‘eat the rich’ jacket to meet president Joe Biden, and Democratic politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wore a ‘tax the rich’ dress to the Met Gala, in a nod to the same anti-capitalist slogan.
The flywheel accelerated until the community burned out spectacularly. With internal conflict and finger-pointing amongst the community moderators, and hundreds of thousands of community members embarrassed and disenchanted after the Fox News interview, the growth of r/antiwork stalled. Without its meteoric growth, it wasn’t a news story anymore, and without news coverage, politicians had little interest in getting involved. Depending on their motivation, Redditors migrated to smaller forums like r/workreform.
Who owned the #Antiwork brand? Lacking clear direction and leadership from within, what #Antiwork stood for ended up being defined by whichever news outlet had the biggest loudhailer and the incentive to tell a story. Outlets like Fox with huge reach and resources on the Right invested in their definition of what #Antiwork was, and political institutions on the Left co-opted it to bolster their narrative. In simplistic terms, traditional institutions on the Right and Left in the US ended up owning and defining it for their two quite separate groups of supporters.
1) Eat the rich 2) ??? 3) Profit
Countercultures like #Antiwork are always a minority…if they weren’t, they would just be part of mainstream culture :-)
And movements within a counterculture rarely stay part of it for a long time. Some fizzle out into irrelevance - like Mod culture in 60s London - while others implode - like the brooding nihilism of Grunge in the wake of Kurt Cobain’s death.
Mostly, though, counterculture movements are inescapably assimilated into the mainstream…and tamed.
The Hippie movement of the 60s permeates every level of society today - from the Beatles to astrology to microdosing psychedelics - but last time I checked we don't live in a free-love utopia. Rap and Hip-hop started as an outlet for disenfranchised youth and are now part of a multi-billion dollar profit-making industry that helps Apple sell you headphones. Drag performers now have their own slot on prime-time television in RuPaul's Drag Race; even Mod and Grunge enjoy periodic revivals in the fashion scene.
Resisting assimilation is - for the most part - futile. The more you succeed in spreading your message, the more you will become part of the mainstream. And it is by no means positive - many subcultures are wholly appropriated in the pursuit of fashion and novelty; losing their message and meaning to commercialism.
What we can learn from #Antiwork, though, is that to avoid being simply stripped for parts by the media, politicians and society at large, any new movement needs intentional branding and zealous protection. If you intend to change a culture - rather than just be eaten by it - keep the following in mind:
- Thoughtful and intentional definition of your Brand. Big corporations invest serious time in codifying their cultural values - to ensure consistency as you grow you need to do the same. On the topic of work reform, Amazon's cultural values are a good example.
- Constant revision and refinement by trusted leaders. Culture never stands still, and brands need to adapt with the culture. The US constitution codified the values of a countercultural movement, and has been subject to constant revision and amendment of its meaning over time. The recent outcry over Supreme Court rulings on abortion is also a good example of how trust can collapse when these decisions are made by leaders that the public does not have faith in.
- Consistent communication of your message by you and your followers for as long as you intend to stay relevant. Nike - with decades of billboards, t-shirts and world-class athletes telling us to 'Just Do It' - is maybe the best example of consistently communicating what you stand for, and having trusted people advocate that meaning.
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