Antiwork Timeline (Part Two)
The history of how long it took us to realize that work sucks
Before, antiwork sentiments were associated with bohemians, hobos, people at the outskirts of society. Now an entire generation is punching out. And, like many youth trends, older people are jumping on this bandwagon as well.
When we last left off, we looked at the beatniks and delinquents of the ‘50s. Now we return to the ‘60s, with a whole generation of hippie dropout bums.
1960s
Like I said before, the spirit of the ‘60s was:
The Space Race, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the increasingly futile Vietnam War had many in the ‘60s asking questions about what mattered. With so many new lifestyle options taken up by the counterculture, it was easier to say what didn’t matter: working a 9 to 5 and chasing the American Dream. The spark that the Beatniks lit became a wildfire in the ‘60s.
One major catch: unlike the previous bohemian movements we saw here, the hippies were hooked on mass culture. To be sure, many of them stuck to their San Francisco dropout roots and stayed committed to bands like The Grateful Dead. But most hippies (many of them now daytrippers who work and get rowdy on the weekends) loved the Beatles and Bob Dylan. Nothing wrong with that of course, but many of the dropouts that were disillusioned with the American Dream now started bands and chased dreams of rock stardom (the term “rock star” is an invention of the ‘60s). The music itself was being diluted into the formula of light shows with heavy guitars.
Meanwhile, nobody in Warhol’s factory could seriously be accused of being a hard worker. New York had its own breed of dropouts to be sure, but as Warhol became obsessed with film, many of them (especially Edie Sedgwick) had dreamt of being movie stars. Unlike most of the ‘60s bohemians, Warhol was unashamedly obsessed with and hungry for stardom, inventing the word “superstar.” The military industry may have lost popularity, but the culture industry was never stronger.
Before long, the hippie dropout culture of the ‘60s morphed into the ambitious cocaine and private jet rock star dreams of the early ‘70s.
1970s
The Great Refusal of the ‘60s was over. Now everybody worked bullshit jobs and got high to cope. The culture industry markers of the hippie movement were all still there: the long hair, the loud rock, the wild sex. Drugs were getting stronger and harder. But “turning on” in the ‘70s meant turning on the TV set and watching All in the Family. Another popular show was The Mary Tyler Moore Show, about a single woman with a fulfilling career in the city.
But not all hope was lost for the bums. At least not in the UK, where punk rock perfectly expressed the rage of factory workers losing their jobs. American radio stations were suppressed by the CIA from playing punk rock because the last thing this country needed was an angry working class mob scared of punk rock and preferred new wave.
1980s
The ‘80s was the most pro-work decade since the ‘40s. More women were in the workplace than ever before. Songs like Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5,” Donna Summer’s “She Works Hard For the Money” and even Billy Joel’s “Modern Woman” praised the working woman. As did films like 9 to 5 and Working Girl. Neoliberalism was on fucking fire in the ‘80s.
Hippies became yuppies. Alex P. Keaton, the character who was meant to be the punching bag for his hippie parents on Family Ties, ended up being a yuppie icon. It was as if in the ‘80s, graying, bearded Michael Gross former hippies morphed into the younger, quippier Michael J. Fox yuppie. Big business comedies like Trading Places and The Secret of My Success were box office smashes.
All this against a backdrop of closing factories. The manufacturing sector of the economy was obsolete by the decade’s end in the US and the UK. Union factory jobs were siphoned off to overseas sweatshops factories. To be sure, this was certainly reflected in the culture. Bruce Springsteen and John Cougar Mellencamp captured the struggles of the working class in their music. Even hair metal wasn’t immune, with Bon Jovi’s “Living on a Prayer” centered on a working class couple trying to make ends meet.
But because jobs were being lost, there weren’t many antiwork songs (“Take This Job and Shove It” being a notable exception). But in America, the punk rock that the UK had dismissed in favor of postpunk, had grown angrier and meaner. More hardcore. An actual punk subculture had grown, with magazines like Maximumrockandroll gaining underground popularity. Though it wouldn’t be as big as the ‘60s hippie movement, it was similar in that the music was a lifestyle, with punks following their favorite bands and crashing on each other’s couches.
Then in 1991 punk broke.
1990s
What was remarkable about grunge was the fashion and the music. Their interplay. Grunge musicians dressed like blue collar workers with their flannels because they came from working class towns. But the lyrics rarely referenced work. If anything they reflected internal mental states of gloom and angst. Truly there was no better expression of the mindset of displaced factory workers who turned to heroin and despair.
An interesting soundtrack to have after the Cold War was over. In this sense, Gen X slackers were a sort of mash-up of the ‘20s Lost Generation, who were too disillusioned to adopt any agenda, and the ‘50s beatniks, who were skeptical of their country’s newfound material wealth and prosperity. Many films of the era, like Office Space, Fight Club and The Matrix, reflected this jaded skepticism of Clinton and Blair-era affluence. While slackers did not quit their jobs like many in the ‘60s did, they were the first quiet quitters, hardly doing what was in their job description, let alone what was not. As the service economy replaced the manufacturing economy, even many college graduates where forced to work McJobs, with more higher paying jobs now requiring postgraduate degrees, leading to the student debt crisis. Movies like Clerks 1 had convenience store burnouts bullshitting about Star Wars and Pringles cans.
By the time the time the Internet was being publicly introduced in the mid ‘90s, slackers couldn’t do much with it except goof off at their mind-numbing office jobs. Quiet quitting got even quieter. Now the Star Wars conversations were moving online.
In the early ‘90s, gangsta rap added another dimension to antiwork culture, reviving the movie gangster fantasies of the ‘30s, while also bottling up the rage of the inner city. By the late ‘90s though, Puff Daddy and Jay Z focused more on the flash and glitz than on the blood and rage and hip hop anthems would become the precursors of hustle culture.
2000s
In some ways, the ‘00s is the most difficult decade to parse for our purposes here. Hipsters brought their creativity online, hoping to turn their blog into a book deal or even hoping that their indie band that got mentioned on a music blog would get featured in a national ad campaign for an online university.
So when the 2008 recession happened, there was a lot of rage in America at presiding President George W. Bush. But that November, Obama won and a new era of optimism and excitement was ushered in.
We could even look at much of the late ‘00s to early ‘10s as an extended remix of Kennedy-era optimism, a cocktail of high minded idealism and optimism topped off with a dash of faith in the American president.
2010s
The 2010s was a truly fractured decade. Lets pick up the shards and see what we got here. In the early 2010s, there was the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street. The Black Lives Matter movement took over the streets. An unfortunate side effect: the mass media swung the spotlight towards identity politics in the BLM era and away from labor issues. In this vacuum, hustle culture grew. What didn’t grow was bohemia. As hipsters declined in popularity, indie twerps (d)evolved into creative entrepreneurs. With the mania of poptimism in the air, this was a truly paradoxical time: a protest movement that was not a counterculture, nor was it rooted in bohemia. The clarion call was for greater representation of blacks, lgbts, etc. in pop culture. Or, more to the point, greater representation in warmed over reboots of tired franchises.
In 2016, there was a schism in the left. The DNCs blatant suppression of Bernie Sanders led to an embittered new breed of socialists. Trump tapped into the dormant populism in the red states.
This was the breeding ground for the antiwork movement.
NOW
Soon enough, we would live, work, learn, and play anywhere and have whatever we desired brought to our door with the flick of a finger. In the future, conversations would not be bound by space, instantly fostering a community of global empathy and understanding that would rapidly end conflict and divisions across borders, faiths, creeds, and colors. This future, made possible by artificial intelligence, big data, mobile computing, the internet, electric cars, smart scooters, virtual reality, and blockchain, would make us happier, healthier, smarter, richer, and just better-off. And then one day, just like that, our digital future arrived.
David Sax, The Future is Analog
The antiwork movement is too big to fit under one umbrella. Even the roads that led to it are diverse. Many work-from-home employees realized they did not want to work at all. They preferred to binge watch Ozark and play Animal Crossing. Essential workers were even more disillusioned with work and a subreddit was founded for the jaded and angry to voice their opinions.
From there grew the unionization, quiet quitting, etc. But what many of the antiwork people don’t seem to acknowledge is how much of the Internet is based off their free labor. All those posts, all those tweets, etc. They may not be Shakespeare, but they are labor that is exploited by Big Tech with only the promise of a potential big payday. TikTok does not even promise that.
With an increasing amount of content being created by AI, that dream seems to be fading. It is one thing for the manufacturing sector to disappear. Or for any economic sector for that matter. But to make a generation’s dreams obsolete, this is like pouring gasoline and matches on the antiwork movement.
This concludes the antiwork timeline. Next week, we look at The Postfame Era.
One could argue that, much like film directors were the rock stars of the ‘90s, films were the rock albums of the ‘90s, with films like Clerks and Pulp Fiction carrying the same kind of charge for Gen Xers as albums like Blonde on Blonde and Electric Ladyland did for hippies
I’m not even supposed to be here today!