2022
So what happened to r/antiwork? Some of you may remember its gradual and tumultuous decline as it became far more of a centrist space for griping about the banals of the workplace, rather than its original intention as an anarcho-leftist space dedicated to the abolishment of our societal reliance on work. I had to hunt quite a bit for a firsthand account, but this article gives us a clue: “when r/antiwork mods voted to ban Bailey, they were subsequently purged from their mod status by Bailey’s friend u/TeiaRabishu, who is still the top mod. anarchist mods say that Teia has used this as an opportunity to divert anti-work theory from its anarchist foundations and co-opt it with liberal theory instead.”
While the article in question is a bit biting in its obvious bias against LB, it does contain a decent list of sources. Let’s take a look, shall we?
Right off the bat (and as previously stated), we see that Laurelai was in fact a federal informant, cited 15 times in the case against Julian Assange. So, I guess that rumor is fully put to bed at least, and it’s no wonder r/antiwork got a little stressy about LB’s involvement in the sub.
Next there are two separate accounts from the mods of r/antiwork, and boy are they extensive. To be honest, rather than reading my analysis of the material, it’s probably best if you just see for yourself (1)(2). Essentially, after the backlash that ensued as a result of the u/abolishwork interview (one of the head mods who had an unfortunate tv appearance), a tumultuous period in the sub lead to a decreased mod team which lead to the rise of one u/TeiaRabishu, henceforth known as Teia. Teia announced herself head mod, with the promise of giving up that title when someone better arose to take it, and moved all mod comms from reddit to Discord (widely considered to be a bad move). She also installed a new group of moderators “without asking the rest of the team for their opinions (and) without properly vetting these people,” a process the author later explains is critical for leftist (and really all) online spaces. One such mod was ephraelstern, which we may remember from LB’s list of aliases.
Even ES, who we now know to be LB, was not properly vetted, as the document explains: “she had made tweets (on her bimbopolitics & hypnotransgirl twitter accounts) suggesting that anyone identifying as anti-work was an ‘unserious’ person who deserved to be mocked for their views. And yet she was allowed to not only join the moderation team, but to take a position of power on the team.” ES then went on to install her own mod picks, many of which were “powermods,” or users that moderated high amounts of subreddits at a time for their own gain, rather than users that were properly aligned with the anti-work sub’s values (a description just as fitting for LB herself).
This next bit I find quite important to our story, but I think the author of the doc does a much better job at articulating it than I could: “the moderators of the Discord server, many of whom had been moderating the server for a long time and had weathered (many) storm(s)… were quickly and summarily banned from the server. ephraelstern claimed they were conspiracy theorists, infiltrators, and trolls who had fooled the community by masquerading as anarchists, but who were really working on undermining the community. any backlash against these heavy handed reactions were met with bans for ‘conspiracy thinking.’ ephraelstern took to twitter, calling anyone complaining about her methods ‘terminally online dipshits’ who needed to ‘touch grass.’ she also suggested that criticisms directed at her moderation were actually a mixture of racism and transphobia. she claimed that anyone complaining about power mods did so because they secretly wanted to be allowed to say the n-word and ‘get away with it.’ the claims of racism are particularly confusing, given ES presented herself as a white woman. once she felt the space had been adequately purged of ‘extremists,’ she went on several rants to her now-captive audience detailing the conspiracy thinking, infiltration, and failures of the old moderation team that she, and she alone, could ‘fix’. she insisted that the drama had occurred due to a lack of skills and education that she could teach the new moderation team to ensure such drama was never repeated.”
Wow! Bit of a damning testimony, and we’re only 4 pages in! Let’s keep going.
When the old mods create a new server in order to stay in touch with the friends they’d made in the community, ES sent a friend to infiltrate the server and “banned anyone who remained in both servers, claiming they were ‘conspiring against the server.’” She later stated that she would unban the members, should the folks in question “renounce their association with the former mods, stop speaking out against her moderation tactics going forward, and ask her personally for forgiveness.”
Folks naturally presented their concerns over ES’s approach to the reddit mod team (note that, outside of the initial sub takeover by Teia & ES, most of this drama has unfolded on the Discord server), who immediately voted (ending in a majority) for ES’s removal. Teia, however, elected to ignore the results of this vote, and instead ban anyone who voted to remove ES. ES of course performed a bit of cover up by stating it was due to “irreconcilable differences in opinion”, though she “could not say more without ‘humiliating’ the former moderators.”
ES continued to ban anyone who tried to bring awareness to her past on social media (users were starting to notice the breadcrumbs) or expressed concerns about her addition to the mod team, all the while “infantaliz(ing) the former moderation team” through accusations of harassment, infiltration, and being bad actors. Those who argued were met with claims that “political power must be gained through appeals to political centrists, suggesting that anarchists would never achieve their goals without… people like her (moderating their discourse).” Further pushback was labelled as accelerationism. She repeatedly referenced the political “horseshoe model,” stating that any person that progresses sufficiently leftward will circle back around to the far-right, which is a whole bunch of problematic (as explained in the document). Any revolutionary thinking was labelled as nazism or terrorism, and cited her friends at PERIL, a lab that is known for studying extremist radicalization, often suggesting that these researcher friends had been “‘sounding the alarm’ on the anti-work community for some time.”
So obviously people started connecting the dots and realizing that ES was, in fact, LB. ES went on to publically defend LB, tried to discredit anyone who brought up LB’s rape allegations (covered further in chapter 7), all the while implying that she (ES) did not personally know LB. The author of the document rightfully calls these actions into question, stating, “naturally questions arise: what incentive does ES have to go to bat for a rapist and smear the victim unless ES is close to the perpetrator in some way? or does she just happen to be a fan of rape in general (which honestly would just be equally as horrible)?”
All great questions, which ES responded to by stating that in fact she had dated LB actually. Very interesting tactic indeed.
Oh and someone now has a screenshot of another user calling ES “Laurelai” in ES’s private Discord server. So.
Anyway obviously people are not super keen about all this evidence piling up and confront Teia, the head mod. She responded by “claim(ing) this all to be nonsense, transphobia, a doxing attack and that even if she was indeed that person (reminder a known rapist and fed snitch) it wasn’t that bad.”
According to the document, u/TeiaRabishu is still the head moderator of the community, and a quick trip over to r/antiwork will confirm this. Those responsible for the downfall of the subreddit have been allowed to continue their campaign of destabilization & incapacitation largely unhampered, and have faced no meaningful consequence to this day. I highly recommend reading the full accounts from the original r/antiwork mod team, as I believe it does an excellent job at articulating the events that transpired, and in so doing prove that this is not some cabal of hateful actors, or LAnon, as LB so frequently claims, but instead an independent group of leftists who were ousted from their own space and watched the community they’d built fall to pieces.