[Future of Work Seminar Series] r/Antiwork as a Neoliberal Labor Movement

The Future of Work Seminar Series, organised by Dr's Vassilis Galanos and Sona Gachayeva (Stirling Business School) is delighted to invite you to our next event, focusing on communities supporting the Antiwork movement on Reddit, with our special guest Ari Stillman (University of Edinburgh).

The event will be hybrid - in room 4B96 Cottrell Building and online (click below to join)

Join: https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/31858742279188?p=lpIfmy2d5UXQYHSa8q

Meeting ID: 318 587 422 791 88

Passcode: v5da9eP6

Title The Gospel According to Sisyphus: r/Antiwork as a Neoliberal Labor Movement

Abstract

The labor movement in the United States has long languished with the intensification of neoliberal logics since the 1980s. Far from merely producing good neoliberal subjects of a one-dimensional society, however, malcontent with capitalism has festered and come to a head with the Covid-19 pandemic.

With workers socially isolated, existentially alienated, and institutionally abandoned, millions found solidarity in the anonymous online Reddit community r/Antiwork. Founded by anarchists in 2013 as a space to discuss labor conditions under capitalism, by 2020 it grew meteorically in membership and in political density to include a critical mass of reformists rather than radicals. By 2021, r/Antiwork was heralded as a hopeful movement in the struggle against capitalist exploitation yet by 2022 it had all but floundered into an impotent echo chamber.This talk presents a post-mortem analysis of r/Antiwork by critically examining manifest and latent tensions within the community. As a space rife with contradictions, I frame this research through the sociology of the absurd to reconcile r/Antiwork not simply as a labor movement responding to neoliberal conditions but as producing a novel assemblage that constitutes a neoliberal labor movement in its own right. This framing emerged from adapting the late Michael Burawoy's extended case method (1998, 2009), which extends theory to fit the aberrant case, to the affordances of the digital era. Drawing from three years of digital ethnography and interviews with both members and community moderators, I analyze the fraught dynamism of r/Antiwork along three pivotal tensions. First, to establish its remit as a nexus for workplace resistance, I map the dimensions of alienation expressed within the community and the accompanying discourse of workplace resistance, finding a preponderance of individual action frames in contradistinction to collective action frames typical of labor movements. Given the lack of union access and poor labor protections in the United States, I theorize this in terms of James Scott's concept of infrapolitics (1985, 1990) albeit adapted to digital forms and communities of scale. Second, I scrutinize how organizing without organization — that is, mobilizing through horizontalist logics — function on a platform that structurally requires hierarchy. In accounting for pressures of scale, membership heterogeneity, and platform governance, I introduce the concept 'cloud roots' to describe a distinct mode of online mobilization that is neither grassroots nor ephemerally viral but functions like a Social Movement Organization without sustained organizational infrastructure. Third, I explore the complexities of class location and identity in liquid modernity through the lens of occupational managers. Far from reifying a traditional Marxian binary between workers and management, I consider how Reddit's platform affordances enable discursive reconciliation without resolving structural class antagonisms through what I call 'synthetic solidarity'.

This research contributes to the disciplines of social and labor movements, organizational ecology, and critical management, among others. But in terms of the future of work, as much as that phrase is bandied about, its most significant contribution is recalibrating that discourse in terms of the future of antiwork.

More information on Ari's work: https://www.sps.ed.ac.uk/staff/ari-stillman

Image credit: Leo Lau & Digit / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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