Like a bully in the schoolyard, Fox News sets its sights on the anti-work movement

In 2013, the subreddit r/antiwork was born. “Unemployment for all, not just the rich!” read its tagline. America was experiencing a mood change at that time. Occupy: The Movie had just hit theaters, lodging the eponymous movement in the national consciousness; the Socialist Alternative party had just won its first ever seat on Seattle’s city council; and Senator Bernie Sanders, the longtime independent from Vermont and self-described “democratic socialist” was considering a presidential run.

Related: The Great Resignation has employers sweating. It’s time to escalate the pressure | Erika Rodriguez

Born of the moment, r/antiwork offered a space where people could envision a life free from work – or at least, too much of it. Anchored by Marxist philosophy, people used it to commiserate, share memes and trade war stories about the horrors of modern-day working in America. Then the pandemic hit, laying bare inequities long faced by lower-wage workers, particularly in the United States. The subreddit exploded. Screenshots of resignation texts to bosses went viral – “Eat. My. Ass.” read one memorable text, in response to a boss who had warned against such an “impulsive decision”. In December, users bombarded a Kellogg’s application site that had been launched to replace 1,400 striking users with fake applications. As media reported on the “Great Resignation” in the wake of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ report that 4.5 million Americans left their jobs in November 2021, an all-time high, r/antiwork inched closer to the mainstream.

By the time Doreen Ford, the subreddit’s longest-tenured moderator, flicked on her webcam last Tuesday for what would be the group’s most public exposure yet – an interview with Fox News’ Jesse Watters, whose primetime show debuted with 3.8 million viewers the previous evening – the subreddit had reached 1.7 million members, good enough for one of the most popular on Reddit but less than half of Watters’ audience.

The stage was set for some classic schoolyard bullying. On one side was r/antiwork, a community that functioned as a living, breathing – and growing – counterpoint to capitalism. On the other was Fox News, a rightwing media juggernaut with the mission of selling the working class on the sanctity of the American dream, and an institution directly threatened by movements like r/antiwork.

It took Watters three minutes, 23 seconds to paint Ford as a clumsy caricature – and send r/anti-work into an existential crisis.

“All right, so Doreen,” Watters said, kicking off the interview, “why do you like the idea of being home, not working, but still getting paid by corporate America?”

The 43-year-old Watters, a rising star on Fox who has praised QAnon and urged supporters to ambush Dr Anthony Fauci remained in split screen opposite Ford, who spoke into her fuzzy webcam from a dimly lit, messy room with an unmade bed. Ford, whose unkempt hair was matted to her forehead, later said in a Reddit comment she had trouble focusing on the camera because she’s autistic. Watters’ face became an instrument of mockery as Ford answered his questions, his eyes bulging in bemusement. When Ford, who said she worked 20-25 hours a week as a dog-walker, said she’d like to one day be a philosophy professor, Watters let the subtle smile on his lips turn into a chuckle.

“You know what, a professor’s a very similar schedule than something you are … imagining,” responded Watters. There is much debate over how many hours professors work, with schedules varying from college to college, although studies and individual professors put it somewhere between 40 to 70 hours a week.

Watters quickly noted he didn’t think the antiwork movement was the best idea, but “it’s a free country. Not everything is free, but it’s a free country.” He snuck in one final shot as he ended the segment, speaking over Ford: “Thank you so much, we’ve got to run. We’ve got to pay the bills.”

The interview sent r/antiwork into a tailspin. Not only was the subreddit overrun by bad actors from less sympathetic corners of the internet after the interview; longtime users expressed frustration and rage at the interview. Ford, who at one point during the segment referred to laziness as a “virtue”, had set the movement back, they believed, by being made to look like the worst stereotype of r/antiwork. (“I think laziness is a virtue in a society where people constantly want you to be productive, 24/7. And it’s good to have rest. That doesn’t mean you should be resting all the time, or not putting effort into things that you care about,” Ford had said, in a response to Watters asking her whether the group was encouraging people to be lazy.)

“That interview was so embarrassing,” one user wrote, “it made me go back to work.”

Others called for Ford’s demotion as a moderator, or to have her banned from the group. The subreddit went private the following night, and when it reopened the next morning Ford had been removed as a moderator. Users demanded a short-term freeze on media interviews, and not long after I requested to chat with the moderators, I received a notification that my Reddit account had been permanently suspended. Another subreddit, r/workreform, was created and by Saturday afternoon had 458,000 users.

Watters did a victory lap later in the week, updating his viewers on Ford’s removal as moderator on Thursday. “I’m sorry to see that Doreen is no longer doing that and I guess, maybe, she now has more time on her hands,” he said, shrugging. “That’s what she wanted.”

Before r/antiwork had become a target of conservative news – the New York Post published a 17 January piece on the movement, accusing the subreddit of fueling the Great Resignation – it was a place for people fed up with a system that they believe perpetuates financial inequality. They used it to trade tips and tricks for navigating unruly bosses; or to share lighthearted stories. In early January, a thread from an IT specialist who claimed to have written a script that automated most of his job read: “I’m only at my desk maybe 10 minutes a day,” it went viral, inspiring people to unbind themselves from work and earning 83,800 upvotes. The subreddit’s library offered recommended reading (The Abolition of Work, by Bob Black; In Praise of Idleness, by Bertrand Russell), music (Every Day is Exactly the Same, by Nine Inch Nails).

Related: Post-work: the radical idea of a world without jobs

But while the subredditor’s trading of inspirational quotes and canvassing support for unionization efforts was threatening enough to warrant an investigation it to its motives by a huge conglomerate like Fox, anti-work members seemed mostly to be having fun: lambasting the worst parts of work, while mostly working full-time jobs (an internal survey run through the subreddit last month found 64% of its users work full time). On a thread asking anti-workers for their favorite quotes, one posted a line from Charles Bukowski: “It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition … How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6.30am by an alarm clock … fight[ing] traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?” it read. Meanwhile, where other subreddits refer to their members as “users”, on antiwork, members are proudly labelled “idlers”.

If r/antiwork were to fold, as many users suggested to avoid further embarrassment, it would not take with it the ideas it had helped to elevate over the past near-decade. But it would mark the end of a community that, for nearly 2 million people, had provided a place to vent and map out more fulfilling lives.

By the weekend, the infighting on r/antiwork had mostly abated, with new posts taking on a familiar tone: “An Amazon warehouse in Staten Island is having a Union election! Show some support if you can!” read one post. “My boss just said ‘only mediocre people care for work life balance,’” read another. But the pinned post, Restructuring & Recent Events [Megathread], in which a new moderator attempted to lower the temperature, pointed to the uncertain future facing the subreddit “Hello chaos,” the moderator wrote. “This thread is to address the many concerns raised in [the] wake of the Fox interview … We’re all reaching for a world free of the horror of ‘work as we know it’ – let’s continue that and not tear ourselves apart because of a few misinformed actors,” it read. The post had more than 7,600 comments, including one from a user named “Smokiiz” that earned 995 upvotes. Now, they realized, many outsiders associated r/antiwork with Watters’ smirking face, Smokiiz wrote:

“My mom literally asked me if I’m on the ‘lazy movement’ that was on the news the other day,” they wrote. “I feel so ashamed.”