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 don’t really understand why there’s been such a meltdown over the interview. To me, they just came across as a normal person. What is it that people are so outraged/upset about? Am I missing something?
They barely made eye contact throughout the entire interview for one thing. It looked like they put zero effort into the entire thing.
As much as societal norms are bullshit, they still do matter to a ton of people. If you’re uncomfortable with eye contact, dressing up, and/or don’t have a nice place to do the interview, do one of those audio only interviews where they just show a picture of your face. Many people have done so, even ex presidents. If the news site won’t allow an audio only interview, reject it. Or just never go on Fox in the first place.
The fact that the other mods in a chat signed off on it pisses me off to no end, because there was no recognition of reality serving someone up to Fox News like that.
Yeah, this is probably the most disturbing aspect of the whole thing. “Oh yeah, let’s just give the fascist news organization what they want.” What the FUCK were they thinking? NO ONE should have been going on Fox News.
The sub specifically voted to not have the mods do any interviews as well in a poll posted by the mods. They then went and did this anyway. I get that shit changes, but c’mon.
Yeah fox news is well known to take advantage of LGBTQIA and neurodivergent people like this.
Did the other mods sign off on it? I thought it was the opposite, that the other mods didn’t want to do the interview. Whatever the case allowing this was reckless and opening themselves to ridicule from the chud sphere.
I’m neurodivergent too, so maybe I’m failing to pick up on how they got owned and abused during the interview, but to me it feels like we should separate the interview from the reaction. Because, to me, the interview felt surprisingly unconfrontational. I was expecting them to get attacked and openly mocked, but there was very little of that kind of thing in the interview itself. Like, the interviewer is patronizing, but otherwise the thing seemed pretty friendly and the ‘movement’ is treated as a kind of nonthreatening curiosity (it’s a subreddit, so kind of fair enough). I still don’t think the interviewee comes across badly in the whole thing, but I didn’t even notice that they didn’t make eye contact so maybe that’s on me. (Is that important when you’re just talking to a camera?). Personally, I thought they just seemed kind of well-meaning and sweet.
The reaction, on the other hand, has been extremely vitriolic and frankly weird. But, to me, it’s important to recognise that that isn’t the interview itself, but a question of its reception, something that isn’t neutral and is available to pretty easy manipulation. Given that an r/cringetopia post is one of the most popular threads on reddit, I can’t help but feel that people are falling for a rightwing op. I agree that people’s reactions are also to do with the amount that they felt invested in the sub as a source of hope, but those people are going to need to realise that any remotely leftwing ‘movements’ are going to have derision directed at them from chuds. To me, that is the bigger issue here. That people seem so invested in not being seen as ‘cringe’ that they’ll throw people on their side* under the bus.
Also, fuck the people on here saying that part-time dog walking isn’t a real job. Underemployment/unemployment is as big an issue as overemployment, and both are a structural feature of work under capitalism that reinforces the power of capital. The libs on here who don’t realise that should read some Marx. Strivers versus skivers is a classic means of dividing the working class and people need to remove the Tory brainworms from their heads.
*Broadly speaking, I know people have issues with anti-‘tankie’ stuff on that sub. But, come on, it’s reddit, what do you expect? For a sub to get above a certain size it’ll necessarily be filled with libs, because that’s what 90% of the users/population are. For those of us who grew up in the imperial core, the process of unlearning capitalist-imperialist brainwashing is, just that, a process.
someone else said that the interview gave fox all the reinforcement they needed that the caricature they painted of the antiwork community was true and that kinda makes sense. They appeared as the stereotypical reddit mod and even if that doesn’t really matter for most of us, like you said it really does to most people. They came on fox against the agreement the mod team had to not respond, in a dark room, with bad posture, making little to no eye contact, and really not seeming prepared (which is exactly was fox was preying on in the first place), and this is all the ammunition they need against the community going forward to convince the less online that the antiwork movement is a joke.
edit: also I want to make it clear that I don’t think they’re a bad person or they shouldn’t speak for the community, I’m just saying it’s important realize that fox news knew exactly what they were doing when they reached out and unfortunately the mod team wasn’t prepared for something like this.
Heads up: The mod is apparently non-binary. I’d use they/them pronouns as a default since I haven’t seen confirmation on which they prefer.
Yeah that’s why Fox let them on, they’re well known to do this, especially to people from the LGBTQIA community. Which is why the rest of the antiwork mods didn’t want to do an interview with Fox News.
I was pretty involved with Occupy Wall Street and dragged a few friends there. One of them took an interview with Fox despite everyone telling him exactly what was going to happen. They edited the fuck out of it and made him sound like a complete moron. They played this clip of him saying “My mom told me to get a job, and I was like… I tried!” Made him into a complete laughing stock despite the fact that the whole movement emerged from an unemployment crisis. *
You should only talk to journalists you are willing to promote. You don’t go on Tucker Carlson to “reach an audience.” That’s politician shit. You cannot be a politician and a revolutionary unless you’re like Moses or something. If you cannot find a single journalist to talk to who’s capable of holding the line, you should start writing.
It would be much cooler if an r/AntiWork mod took an interview with Maximillian Alvarez and got 2000 views rather than going on Fox.
* For real though. There were people camping out in Manhattan who came from Detroit because it was a better option than dealing with the job market there. I got this really cute girl’s number then washed it into oblivion the next time I did my laundry. :agony-deep:
Lol remembering owning urself a decade earlier over some petty shit like that is incredibly relatable thank you
I still don’t see why these reasons account for such a massive meltdown. Like, they looked like 80% of the population looks at any given time and their answers weren’t terrible. It would have been worse if they’d gone on and spouted a bunch of incomprehensible theory or something. Yeah, they probably could have done better, but they’re a random person and subreddit moderator, not a politician. The intensity of reaction afterwards seems super weird and manufactured to me. Like, what were people expecting? That the chad meme would manifest on TV and in two and half minutes usher in the new age of the revolution? For me, the bigger issue is that people’s sense of movements (and come on, this is a subreddit, so barely even that) is so fragile that they meltdown and despair at almost nothing
Thank god, I thought I was the only one. The reaction is so hysterical and trumped up it feels like a fucking corporate op. I watched the interview with no context this morning and was like “yeah of course Fox news laughs at a dog walker.” Then I’m checking comments and it’s just a complete meltdown like the mod jacked off live on camera.
What the hell is going on? It feels so weird and, like, manufactured to me.
Also fuck off anyone who thinks being a dogwalker isn’t a real job.
I’ve been a dog walker before and its definitely the easiest job out there, especially at 25 hours a week. The mod, while trying to defend themselves after the interview, also revealed that they only actually work 10 hours a week. They’re just not a good representative of the community. Most of the users work long hours at difficult jobs and complain about barely being able to scrape by, while the mod is basically a 30 year old NEET who is genuinely lazy.
The privating isn’t actually to deal with “brigading”. The mod is just butthurt that everyone thinks they did a terrible job preparing and that they are losing tons of their internet points.
Idk, underemployment is just as big an issue in the contemporary job market as overemployment. If the point is that capitalism produces irrational and exploitative structures of working, then we shouldn’t throw people who are underemployed under the bus. Otherwise we’re just falling for the strivers versus scroungers style discourse that capitalists have used for decades to divide the working class
Same. I also assumed that they must have done something completely awful given the response. Even the reasons that people gave in their replies don’t account for the level of reaction. Like, they looked like 80% of the US population does at any given time and their answers weren’t ‘inspiring enough’? It feels like a bigger issue that people’s faith in movements (and, come on, this is just a subreddit where people complain about their jobs. It’s popular because capitalism makes exploitative as fuck. Peoples’ experiences of that aren’t going to change) is so brittle that something like this causes this level of meltdown.
When I saw the stuff on reddit and there’s r/news and r/cringtopia threads at the top of popular, I was like, okay this is some organised rightwing brigade. But then I come here and people are also melting down.
