Fear, Blame, and Deservingness: The Moral Economy of AI-Labor Anxiety on Reddit

Public concern about artificial intelligence and labor markets is documented through surveys, media analyses, and workplace research. This article examines how such concern is organized in sampled Reddit discussions through moral evaluations of fairness, responsibility, deservingness, and institutional accountability. The frozen source inventory contains 3357 downloaded rows in 22 threads across 18 subreddits and 13 occupational or institutional domains; excluding 82 deleted or removed placeholders leaves 3275 text-bearing comments. Drawing on moral economy, affective-discursive practice, and emotion-culture scholarship, the analysis identifies four overlapping configurations: dread and fatalism; anger and resentment around violated meritocratic expectations; irony and dark humor as emotional management; and conditional hope tied to contested adaptation. Blame is treated as a cross-cutting moral dimension rather than a fifth emotional pattern. Technological fear and judgments of institutional failure are intertwined: participants in the sampled threads voice fear of AI capabilities while directing responsibility toward employers, technology firms, governments, and educational institutions. The article reframes AI-labor anxiety as a platform-mediated moral discourse in which emotion and moral judgment are mutually constituted, specifies how the configurations were operationalized and bounded, and formulates institutionally relevant questions about the contested terms of workplace adaptation. As a theoretical sample, the corpus supports analytic description, not population estimates.