The moment /r/antiwork died was tailor-made for infamy. Head moderator Doreen Ford went on with Fox host Jesse Watters for an interview that would demonstrate every stereotype about the group and then some: a self-identified autistic nonbinary dog walker with disheveled hair in a messy room, swiveling back and forth in her chair and looking away from the camera as she explained to a bemused Watters why laziness is a virtue. When Watters took pity on her* and pitched a softball about future plans, she opined in a monotone that she might want to teach philosophy one day. It was an unmitigated disaster that set off a chain of events that would lead to the amused attention of the internet writ large, the formation of a splinter group closing in on 500,000 users, and the unceremonious banishment of Doreen and every other moderator in her orbit from the space as it worked desperately to restore a semblance of dignity.

*(Doreen describes herself as nonbinary and preferring female pronouns, so that will be the standard in this article.)

It’s hard to overstate the fury directed towards Doreen immediately following the interview. A petition to shut the whole sub down sprang to the top almost immediately, followed by furious claims that sorry wouldn’t cut it and waves of direct messages urging her to step away if she had any self-respect left. How dare she, people asked, think she could represent the sub? What gave her the right to speak for them in front of millions? Didn’t she know they were a Movement, a growing force set on transforming the landscape of modern work? She had outlived her usefulness, and the user base, in no uncertain terms, told her to move along and quit embarrassing them.

So how did it all happen? Why was Doreen Ford, of all people, able to appoint herself as representative of a self-proclaimed movement 1.7 million strong? Why, after hagiographies from the New York Times, Vice, the Washington Post, and others, was a lazy anarchist dog walker able to irreparably shatter the image of the space in a single interview?

The start of the answer lies in the simple truth of who Doreen Ford was: the person who almost single-handedly built the space, indisputably the single most accurate representative and the one most qualified to understand it.

The users of /r/antiwork want to frame its story as one of mod hubris and righteous user revolt, one in which delusional wannabe leaders without a clue about their own movement carelessly ignored the will of the movement for their own glorification. It’s a tidy, gratifying framing.

Unfortunately, it’s also false. A broader look finds a more compelling story, one in which a subreddit grew faster and further than it was ever supposed to, and in doing so caused millions to wholly misunderstand the very movement they were joining. Users first sanewashed its ideas to suit their preferences, then gentrified the space to rid it of the rough edges left by its founding crew.

A Brief History of /r/antiwork

/r/antiwork was originally a home for lazy anarcho-communists (hereafter: anarchists) who literally wanted to abolish work. Its core user base has always understood this. It was evident from the moment it began, when founder /u/andreasw shared his vision for the abolition of money and property as he advertised it. It was evident from its sidebar and FAQ, and from every explainer they put up. And it was evident from conversation after conversation in which they made their preferences clear.

Ideological anarchism and a strict anti-work streak were not unique to the founder of the sub or to Doreen Ford, who became the second moderator of the sub back when it had some 1300 users in 2015. Each new mod who joined the team, from /u/onedayitwillbedaisy in 2018 to seven moderators in 2019, was an open, proud anarchist with similar goals (save /u/Whitepirate15, who we’ll return to later). They had their variations: some were eager about violent approaches, others were stricter about peaceful methods. But there was no confusion among them about what they wanted to do.

What exactly did they mean by abolishing work? The answer they’d most eagerly endorse was: overthrow capitalism in favor of an anarcho-communism in which nobody would labor for others’ profit. Practically speaking, they suggest that people would naturally gravitate towards what needed to be done of their own accord. From my own less sympathetic view, the image that always comes to mind is the classic thread “whats your job on the leftist commune??”, in which everyone plans to lead discussion on theory and make lattes and there’s nary a Coal Mining Enjoyer to be found. But abolishing work, not reforming or reducing it, was always the vision.

They benefited from a bit of a double meaning in this, allowing them to differentiate themselves a bit from other explicitly anarchist spaces. The name /r/antiwork invites people to frame their experience in terms of opposing productivity in general. Ultimately, their explanations for the sort of productivity they support look to fit into the pattern common to most anarchist spaces, with calls for sweeping revolution and only loose handwaving as to how what comes after will function — that is, after all, a job for after the revolution.

For the bulk of /r/antiwork’s history, it was primarily a space for text-heavy threads lambasting the very concept of work. Topics included: looking for easy jobs, lamenting how others were brainwashed into being happy working, sharing tips for slacking, and so forth. Click around a bit, and you’ll find all kinds of users lamenting the very idea of a strong work ethic. This one, criticizing his father for hard work while focusing his own energies on drugs and chats about anarchism, is one such example. Any time you care to look at it from its founding to its rise to prominence starting in 2019, the tone is consistent: conversations between Doreen Ford, her friends, and their fellow-travelers about a world without work.

Doreen Ford was present for the whole of it. She oversaw its shift from a tiny dead space with a handful of posts across years at a time (mostly from her), to the hottest spot on reddit. Select a thread more than a couple of years old at random and you’ll likely find her in it. She lived and breathed the space for years. The more you examine its history, the less ambiguity there is around the fact that if anybody could be said to represent or understand the space, it was Doreen Ford. The dog walker Jesse Watters raised to infamy was no interloper. She was /r/antiwork.

So how did /r/antiwork shift so far that the user base was shocked to find Ford representing them? Put simply, it was gentrified.

The Gentrification of /r/antiwork

You’ve come across the gentrifiers before, I’m sure. They browse the front page of reddit and the trending tab of YouTube, buy Ruth Bader Ginsberg figurines and wear Che Guevara T-shirts. They vote for Bernie in the primaries and Biden in the general, first outraged that anyone could want Biden and then outraged that anyone could not. They share articles about how the 2020 BLM protests were overwhelmingly peaceful and then hop online to cheer “ACAB” and “F — — capitalism” graffiti and pictures of burning police precincts. They shout “Defund the Police” while angrily asserting that nobody wants to abolish the police. They manage to boldly stand at once for every fashionable cause and against every unfashionable cause, embracing the aesthetics of radicalism while denying complicity or knowledge whenever that radicalism gets too real. And /r/antiwork was the perfect community for them to turn into a cause celebre.

Two groups of people are intimately familiar with, and adept at describing, this dynamic of gentrification. The first group is that of self-described anarchists. Take a look:

The other group, self-identified neoliberals, has grown weary of the trend from the opposite side. One of them coined the brilliant term sanewashing in the wake of 2020’s “Defund the Police” movement, the last major item to move up the gentrification pipeline. Neoliberals tend to be in the unenviable position of noticing and opposing trends from the far left, then having to argue against progressives who adopt these trends without really understanding them and who are eager to assert less radicalism than is actually present. The article explains:

So, now say you’re someone who exists in a left-adjacent social space, who’s taken up specific positions that have arrived to you through an “SJW” space, and now has to defend them to people who don’t exist in any of your usual social spaces. These are ideas that you don’t understand completely, because you absorbed them through social dynamics and not by detailed convincing arguments, but they’re ones you’re confident are right because you were assured, in essence, that there’s a mass consensus behind them. When people are correctly pointing out that the arguments behind the position people around your space are advancing fail, but you’re not going to give up the position because you’re certain it’s right, what are you going to do? I’m arguing you’re going to “sanewash” it. And by that I mean, what you do is go “Well, obviously the arguments that people are obviously making are insane, and not what people actually believe or mean. What you can think of it as is [more reasonable argument or position than people are actually making]”.

How exactly did it happen in /r/antiwork? Casuals found it. You know — the people who use the internet to laugh at funny memes rather than treating every post as a blow in a grand ideological struggle. People like this guy:

The shift became pronounced when text exchanges with bad bosses started going viral:

https://twitter.com/TravisShreffler/status/1449547981821206533

https://twitter.com/tadpr0le/status/1452033437389312001

The online crowd just there to have fun started noticing a new fun place popping into their feeds, one where dumb bosses said dumb things that made righteous workers rise up. They started hopping on en masse, and inevitably, some people started taking the whole thing terribly seriously.

Soon after /r/antiwork leapt into the reddit mainstream, journalists who proudly occupy that “reasonable progressive” space eagerly amplified the subreddit, breathlessly reporting each new development from a whiffed attempt to boycott Black Friday to