I agreed with what Brian Armstrong said in his blog post and thought it was admirable to publicly take that position, but now I have even more respect for his dedication.
I don't know if the severance package is good or not, but it seems generous and it gives employees who aren't aligned with the company an easy way out.
There is a lot of value in removing political activists from your company, and so it's worth paying them to leave.
Aside from the combative toxic environment they generate, they are also often the source of disgruntled rogue employees that will generally behave improperly, misrepresent coworkers, leak documents, raise alarms about operations they don't understand, and generally draw the company into litigation.
In a highly sensitive market like crypto, you don't want to gain unnecessary regulatory attention, and activists like this will be the first to testify against the company with their biased interpretation of internal operations.
They're just poison. In the best case scenario, they are just a huge distraction - and in the worst they will cost you 10x their salary in legal drama.
In my experience, the vast majority of employees don’t want their workplace to become a political battleground. Even those who occasionally discuss politics at work and are mature enough to behave like adults about it.
It’s tempting to think of this in terms of Democrats vs Republicans or right vs left, but that’s not really the domain of the most problematic employees. The most problematic employees are the ones who have given up on the notion of reasonable debate or disagreement and instead have become convinced that the other side is committing acts so terrible that fighting them at every juncture is the only acceptable thing to do. Strangely enough, the “other side” isn’t just far-right or fad-left people, it becomes centrists, or people who don’t vote, or people who don’t want to engage in politics at work.
When you’ve reached the point where a small handful of employees are fomenting outrage at their company for not putting a BLM statement on the company Twitter account, for example, the situation has arrived at a “with us or against us” false dichotomy.
Generally, the only way to win with politics at the office is to not play. However, when one side decides that not playing is equivalent to being evil, everyone is forced to play. When everyone is forced to play by a handful of disgruntled employees, everyone loses.
Paying to remove these people from a company makes a lot of sense. If you don’t do something to remove them, the people who are sick of being dragged into political debates at work will slowly diffuse out of the company. The hyper-political employees are a loud minority, but the people who just want to do their jobs and remain professional are very much more common. Don’t let the tail wag the dog.
Paying to remove these people from a company makes a lot of sense
I think most business owners would say this is not at all sensible. If someone is a troublemaker you don't normally pay them to leave. You fire them. Brian is being very generous here, almost inexplicably so except for the fact that they're based in the Bay Area. Most CEOs would tackle it in two phases:
1. Tell people they may not attempt to bring social activism into the work place.
Paying people seems easier for a well funded company. If you fire people they get upset, sue, and create additional headaches. I’m sure someone crunched the numbers and paying people to leave made more sense.
I saw this firsthand in May/June in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing. It was a pretty small company and there was one employee in particular who was very much an activist, though a number of employees of course felt very strongly about what was going on. The company genuinely tried to do their best to support them, encouraged this person to take a week off for mental health and from my perspective was making a real effort to be understanding and support this person and also to express support for the BLM movement as a whole.
There was one manager in particular who really tried to do the right thing in supporting this employee. The manager convinced the marketing folks to make a pro-BLM post on LinkedIn, but then this employee got upset that it had not gone far enough and was too weakly worded. A good friend of the employee and former coworker at this company actually called out the company in the comments of the post on LinkedIn for not taking a stronger stand. The manager also convinced the executives to have the company donate money, and this kicked off a broader giving back initiative where they wanted everyone to vote on causes that the company could support in various ways. This caused even more backlash, because it had now lost site of the BLM focus and become a broader thing.
By the end, the company was just cluelessly walking on eggshells with no idea how to not make things worse in their attempts at support. The employee was extremely frustrated, struggled to regain any level of respect for the company and stopped really performing in their job and ended up leaving a couple months later. I still very much believe nobody was in the wrong here, nobody involved was a bad person or even an insensitive person. It just proved to be very difficult to navigate this situation, there were too many ways for it to go wrong and the company didn't handle everything absolutely perfectly and so they just made things worse.
Anyway, in the end I'm very convinced that everyone, including the activist employee, would have been much happier under the model as stated by Coinbase. And even if this person left or had never joined this company to begin with because of that policy, the result would have been very similar in the end, but without the weeks of frustration and stress and lost productivity all around.
> I still very much believe nobody was in the wrong here
This just doesn't strike me as reasonable. The employee was in the wrong. Clearly. Just because the thing you support is a moral and good thing to support doesn't mean you get to foist your activism upon everyone else around you. I care about endangered species conservation - but if I did what this person did and held the organization hostage to my demands I'd be looked at sideways, and rightfully so.
It's not that there's no place for activism in the workplace, it's just that the line should be drawn at the point where it starts harming the organization as a whole.
My process of engaging at work is strictly professional. I don't even like going to happy hours. I don't want to bond with anyone on a personal level. Ok, we joke and entertain ourselves on a personal level but it is very much small talk / elevator chat.
I honestly do not understand why people socialize at work. Can someone who holds a contrary viewpoint shed some light on why this is so common place in corporate environments? My guess is that it has to do with various kinds of personalities.
I spend a lot of time working. I'm not a machine; having meaningful conversations with my coworkers makes me feel human. Especially during the pandemic, when I have even less social contact than I already did.
I also just happen to share similar interests/perspectives with my boss, and we trust each other a lot. I count him as a friend instead of just a coworker.
I only talk politics obliquely, and tend towards analysis and hearing what people have to say. I try to come off as friendly and tolerant of other perspectives, and my conservative coworkers tend to return the favor.
This very same thing happened at the non-profit where my wife works.
They released a statement. Kind of a milquetoast, bland statement, but still unambiguously supportive of BLM.
But not supportive enough for some employees, particularly those of color. Lots of complaints, and a lot of non-racial issues started boiling up to the fore as well. They've since amended and re-released the statement to be stronger, and included statements for battered women, Native Americans, and a full-on separate statement for at-risk immigrants.
It's utterly paralyzed the organization -- and is totally unrelated to their primary mission -- and will likely lead to at least one lawsuit. It sounds like a manager or two may be a rebuke or termination as well.
I ultimately agree with the parent and OP -- create a safety valve or squash the discussion, because there is no way to function as an org if you're 10 minutes from screaming at, or stabbing, or suing your coworkers
I can sort of understand that at a non-profit, but a company is a company (even if I think a world where crypto is normal would be a much better world).
If the employee was finding ways to get upset at everything, it’s not unbelievable that they’d find a way to get upset about being given a bonus with their severance. The first thing to pop in my mind is: “they’re paying me because they don’t care and want me to shut up!” Not saying that they would’ve, but I could see it happening based on how you’ve described it.
This. And like another commenter pointed out, it's not unique to one side or the other. Anyone who defines their entire existence in this left/right dichotomy is suffering from media-induced mental illness.
Pepsi and Coke only want you to think about Pepsi and Coke, because it means they only compete against 1 rival, instead of Fanta, Sprite, RC Cola, Faygo, etc.
> There is a lot of value in removing political activists from your company, and so it's worth paying them to leave.
Your company should be 100% political activists, but (at least during work hours) they should be focused on advancing the mission of your organization.
Even within activist groups you have the exact same problem that Joe is talking about, e.g. at some point in the 90s Adbusters went from lobbying against advertising to just generally supporting any leftist cause. And that's why every highway (except in Vermont, Alaska, Hawaii, and Maine) is still lined with billboards 25+ years later. The only way for an organization to accomplish its mission is to actually focus on solving the specific problem they're trying to solve, not to get distracted by trying to fix every random problem that exists in the world.
Unfortunately what often happens is orgs take on a life of their own. They won't be happy with "mission accomplished, let's disband now" Nope, they will redefine what they are supposed to do in order to keep giving the members either purpose or salaries.
For an organization wishing to preserve its specific mission, I wonder if one positive step would be clearly defining the point at which the organization would say "mission accomplished" and pack itself up. Riffing on your example, suppose an anti-ad organization said, "We want to achieve a goal of 20/50 states banning highway ads. Once we get there, our organization will be wound down [in some way.]"
There are reasons that might work badly, though. Without the org continuing to generate political pressure, public awareness, or money, the originally-achieved goal state could backslide. But ... change is inevitable. Perhaps at that point you try and get the org back together,; if you can, you can, otherwise you accept the world has moved on.
That's not an entirely accurate picture of Adbusters. They were never exclusively anti-advertising, it was always an anti-consumerism (and anti-capitalism to a large extent) organization. Advertising is just a manifestation of consumer culture.
You could reasonably extend this to your friends and neighbors as well.
Growing up, politics was private outside of the family dinner table. Any dedication to an injustice or a good cause was done through donating or volunteering. No yard signs, no shouting, no blaming.
I understand that dramatic actions bring attention, but I just hope that we can start focusing more on doing our own part and leading by example rather than preaching and focusing on how much others are doing. This goes for everyone on the modern political spectrum.
Social media is the root of the problem here. All you have to do is make a post promoting the cause, and then you get a flood of little dopamine hits with each like.
Social media is certainly an accelerant, but these issues of leading through blame rather than leading through example have been prevalent in our worst leaders for a long time.
American politics, at least, has been very partisan at times long before social media showed up. Much of 19th century was like that, even outside of the Civil War. That recent period you referenced, when politics was mostly private and considered embarrassing to bring up, is actually more abnormal than normal in that regard. IMO, it just indicates a period of time after major political issues get decisively resolved one way or the other, and a new issue hasn't come up yet (or, more likely, hasn't come to the boiling point yet).
> Growing up, politics was private outside of the family dinner table. Any dedication to an injustice or a good cause was done through donating or volunteering. No yard signs, no shouting, no blaming.
It's a nice thought, but my mother in law has original presidential campaign pins and bumper stickers from as far back as the early 60s.
I suspect your comment isn't really being offered in good faith, but can you name a specific example of a company where a coworker did one of these things:
> leak documents, raise alarms about operations they don't understand, and generally draw the company into litigation
and it was actually a case of misguided political activism rather than legitimate whistleblowing? I suppose maybe in slaughterhouses or animal testing laboratories, but definitely not with tech.
> In a highly sensitive market like crypto, you don't want to gain unnecessary regulatory attention, and activists like this will be the first to testify against the company with their biased interpretation of internal operations.
It is very difficult to not read this as "sometimes crypto companies need to break the law to make that cheddar, and you really don't want any of these radical 'companies should obey the law' activists getting in your way."
It's a very minority view on HN, but important to keep in mind that there are quite a few people who consider what Snowden did "a case of misguided political activism".
Companies that are in industries which generally attract the attention of regulators because they're doing something new, exciting and potentially disruptive won't want to create unnecessary scope for controversy that will lead to a regulator feeling the need to clamp down on them (this shouldn't happen if the controversy is unrelated to the regulated activities, but people are irrational, and it does). Conversely, an activist employee will know that they will have a far more effective platform to spread their message if they do it in an environment that has more regulatory exposure, and as a result greater potential for media coverage.
My LinkedIn right now is full of professionals writing about how Coinbase is wrong and unsupportable. That is surprising to me.
I would like to see more mission focused companies.
They can help the societies they are in with some unilateral initiatives like Netflix did with helping capitalize banks in certain communities, without discussing it or changing the focus.
It doesn't change my stance on what I would prefer companies do but it seems like a multilayered issue on the tides to pay attention to here and at the very least makes me not want to espouse my own thoughts about "Yeah! mission focused companies!" publicly.
Here are quotes from my feed:
"The path to an IPO is to purge Black and Brown people from Coinbase ... this is very unbecoming of a federal contractor"
"Over a dozen diverse crypto industry leaders [are] calling it out as racist."
"Sweden took 60 years to admit its neutrality policy was racist. How long will it take Coinbase to do the same? Being neutral is a position in support of the status quo - it always has been."
"Coinbase's CEO's recent statement of neutrality is unacceptable and complicit."
An out of context comment unfortunately adding to the gradient of the same context: "IBM's first computer sold to Hitler. Ford converted cars to tanks sold to Hitler. Why???"
The people posting are all identifying as black, in San Francisco Bay Area, and using their platform in support of black communities.
What's going on is that there is more context than Brian Armstrong's post, there is the context of what actually occurred within Coinbase amongst Coinbase's employees, something I have an incomplete picture of. And I think all of us miss that.
I like Brian Armstrong's post - in isolation. People with more context don't like it, and are galvanizing support against this very quickly. That's too bad. I hope Coinbase gets their IPO.
Normal as in average? No, that leans pretty far left. It's not particularly unusual to see though. My theory is that there is a very loud minority of people online that believe things like that (or are willing to exaggerate to that degree).
Depends on where you're from. US appears to be quite a bit more embracing of that viewpoint than people from other countries who aren't so well tuned to US societal sensitivities (which can be very difficult to navigate).
Based purely on the headline, it feels like the people who yell about it are the exact Twitter shitstorm party that tries to start a pitchfork mob everywhere, and if you just try to stay away from it, they'll form a mob against you for staying out of it.
In other words, exactly the toxic group of people that this is trying to remove from the company.
I think that is pretty clear, but I think taking that approach of excising them is going to shoot themselves in the foot.
It should be clear that this isn't "just" trying to be mission focused, that was very eloquently written and timely, but it is failing because it is a reaction to internal issues which wasn't clear to the rest of us. And as such it has stirred a hornets nest that also no longer wants to keep things inside the company.
Many of the people it has stirred are also people that have been fighting for more inclusivity and also identify as part of underrepresented groups. People that feel like their voice isn't loud enough because they are so few inside the companies. This doesn't represent everyone in underrepresented groups, only that there is a significant overlap in the goals of inclusivity and people that want the company to be more welcoming by speaking out against inherently political nationalism, which the company doesn't want to do.
I think there are two groups: One that generally tries to treat human beings well, and is open to reasonable arguments, and one that attacks everyone who doesn't agree with their specific position. It's the difference between someone who makes a proposal how to improve inclusivity and tries to convince people that this is the right thing to do, and someone who will start attacking people who don't want to implement that proposal.
The latter is the more visible one and being targeted by this, and in my opinion rightly so, because that behavior (attacking others) is toxic and helps nobody.
> "Sweden took 60 years to admit its neutrality policy was racist. How long will it take Coinbase to do the same? Being neutral is a position in support of the status quo - it always has been."
As a Swede, I... don't even know what they might be misinterpreting here!
It's rare but still surprisingly common for Americans to mix up Sweden and Switzerland. Switzerland is famous for its policy of neutrality, perhaps that's what they're thinking of? Except I don't recall Switzerland ever abandoning it, let alone deciding it was racist. So I think that person is just terminally confused.
Sweden apologized recently about their neutrality was not that neutral. They maintained favorable trade conditions with Berlin as well as granted land access for military incursions.
Seeing as how Sweden was entirely surrounded by Nazi Germany or its possessions, it's not hard to see why they would have given Berlin slightly favorable trade conditions. Especially with any potential help against military invasion being on the other side of a lot of land and sea. In fact, a closer reading of Swedish history during WWII shows that this was exactly what influenced their biases towards the Nazis' favor here and there.
Despite this, Sweden still did an impressive job of allowing in many refugees from persecution. Its diplomatic representatives were instrumental in assisting the persecuted throughout Europe during the whole war. Anyone interested should look up, for example: Raul Wallenberg and Count Folke Bernadotte.
Sweden had nothing to apologize for during the war, and especially given the much more evident racism of other states like the U.S, which explicitly forbade many refugee jews from entering U.S soil during the Nazi persecutions and expulsions of the 1930's before the war. The writing was on the wall in dripping red letters, but Roosevelt simply disregarded it to please certain voters. At one point in 1942, when presented by Polish resistence agent Jan Karski with a whole eye witness narrative of the massive German extermination program against the jews in Poland, his first question to the Home Army solider was about the Nazi treatment of horses and cattlein the occupied territory!
Er, is this a reference to world war 2? Which was 80 years ago, not 60? And don't you think their "neutrality" might have been slightly biased by other factors than, um, racism?
You're reading what you want to read. The comment said it took them 60 years, which means it could have happened 20 years ago. They also never said Sweden's circumstance was racism, the only common denominator is neutrality being harmful.
I also have no opinion on that direct quote which is in quotes. Go find and ask that other person, on LinkedIn, why they wrote it in the context they did.
The guy said they apologised "recently", that's why it's confusing. 20 years ago isn't recently. Nor did they mention World War 2 anywhere, perhaps because it would have made it more obvious that such events had nothing to do with Swedish racism (lol, Sweden, a country famous for its strongly pro-middle-eastern-migration stance, is hardly anyone's top pick for racism).
It’s generally a small but vocal group. And I wouldn’t call it politics so much as activism. A sort of religious zeal has made its way into our institutions like schools and universities. Some people have taken to it like a missionary would religion and believe it’s their duty to spread the word everywhere at all times. The Inquisition was no different in this regard.
You just have to read what the activism says. It says everything is racist, sexist, etc and that in every situation you must try and identify not if things were problematic but how they were. And then “do better”, etc. so it’s impossible for these people to separate their beliefs from their jobs.
It’s far beyond politics and more a religion than anything. It would be as if a very Christian employee made it their goal to point out everything that isn’t within Christian morality and protesting the company to comply with the word of god.
> It’s far beyond politics and more a religion than anything.
I believe this is a result of the fact that Americans have turned away from organized religion in recent years (note: I'm not religious myself). There seems to be something deep inside of most people that requires a shared spiritual experience. Wokism has emerged to fill that need.
>Finally, our parasite will employ a strategy of politicization, insisting that everyone in a society be involved in the contest for political power. Since our memetic parasite is already bound to one or more political factions, politicization leaves no one with the option to ignore it, and simply live their lives. Neutrality is not acceptable. All those who are not actively infected, and who do not openly endorse the parasite, are by definition its enemies. And they will be crushed. The safest thing is to play along, and raise your children in the faith - even if you don't really believe, they will.
>At this point we've established, at least to my satisfaction, that
>(a) there is such a thing as Universalism;
>(b) Universalism is an educationally-transmitted tradition that works just like any theistic religion, and is best understood as a descendant of Christianity;
>Universalism, again, is a mystery cult of power. Its supreme being is the State. And all of the Universalist mysteries - humanity, democracy, equality, and so on - cluster around the philosophy of collective action. Christianity has been a state religion since Constantine, of course, but it always also included magical and metaphysical mysteries, which the advance of science has rendered superfluous at best, embarrassing at worst. So Universalism, unlike its ancestors, is not concerned with the Trinity or transubstantiation or predestination.
Obviously the solution to workplace politicization is...dissolving the federal government and appointing Eric Schmidt the CEO of a newly founded business-state?
> One day in March of this year, a Google engineer named Justine Tunney created a strange and ultimately doomed petition at the White House website. The petition proposed a three-point national referendum, as follows:
1. Retire all government employees with full pensions.
2. Transfer administrative authority to the tech industry.
3. Appoint [Google executive chairman] Eric Schmidt CEO of America.
TBH, that article doesn't really make any sense. Saying "because ideology A shares a few attributes with my favorite ideology, it's really just a subset of my ideology" doesn't really make sense. Also, I don't understand how he thinks that pacifism or communalism are unique to christianity. That's just a bizarre claim.
It's also weird how he's aware of the oversimplification involved in classifying birds and bats in the same category, and then he immediately goes off and says the equivalent of "both a birds and planes have wings and a tail, therefore planes are a subset of birds". While that statement can be true from a certain point of view for certain uses ("can this thing fly?"), in the end it's just a bad analogy and bad reasoning.
Which is all not to say that the point I think you're driving at from your selection in that article can't be correct. I would agree that post-religion, people will pick up causes to fight for and act in ways that are reminiscent of fundamentalist religions, but that doesn't mean the fundamental truth is that they're all variations of religion. The fundamental truth is some people just enjoy picking up causes that let them justify bad behavior. This used to include religion a lot more in the past, and now that humanity is moving beyond it, we're discovering new ways to justify the same old behavior that we've always had.
I came to this realization when someone at a job was waving and thumping Cracking the Coding Interview like I remember people doing with the bible when I was growing up. I was a missionary in a "past life", non-religious non-believer now, and I know religion when I see it.
There seems to be an obvious counterexample in the rest of the Western nations (ie Canada, Australia, most of western Europe) that have experienced a similar reduction in organized religion but have not seen a corresponding rise to political division. Certainly not to the degree that the USA has.
Good point. My explanation for the discrepancy is that Canada, Australia and western Europe are more homogenous racially and ethnically than the US is, which makes them less vulnerable to the excesses of an ideology or religion-substitute that revolves around race and ethnicity.
On some of the troop carriers going to Vietnam, soldiers starting fighting each other along racial lines; in response, the US military started a major initiative to promote racial tolerance in their training of soldiers and in their personnel policies. Similarly, according to my theory, the leaders of the other major institutions of the US realize that the performance of their institution depends on the different races getting along or at least not openly fighting each other, so they will exhibit a weaker tendency to push against a radical belief system that prioritizes racial tolerance than their counterparts in more homogenous countries will.
Also, starting with the Puritans of England, the western Europeans that chose to emigrate to the US were on average more religious than those who chose to remain in western Europe.
Your assumption would be wrong. Australia is highly diverse.
One in four of Australia’s 22 million people were born overseas; 46 per cent have at least one parent who was born overseas; and nearly 20 per cent of Australians speak a language other than English at home[1]
I think the key differentiator, is Australia, Canada and Britain have parliamentary democracies.
"Overseas" is kind of useless as a descriptor. When I was living in Melbourne, I knew a lot of kids with German, Italian, Macedonian, and Serbian backgrounds, most spoke their respective languages.
But on the street they were just generic white christian Aussies who were out to slam a few beers and grab a chick parm. Not generic Anglo, but still very white and very western.
> Similarly, according to my theory, the leaders of the other major institutions of the US realize that the performance of their institution depends on the different races getting along or at least not openly fighting each other, so they will exhibit a weaker tendency to push against a radical belief system that prioritizes racial tolerance than their counterparts in more homogenous countries will.
Unless said leaders have an interest in curtailing the institution's function or scope, in which case causing the institution to perform worse, or even fail in their mission entirely may be their intent.
For example, they might subscribe to an ideology that questions the legitimacy of the institution, or they may have previously been a leader in an industry the institution is supposed to regulate.
I disagree. I'm in the UK and it's every bit as bad if not worse than the US in all cultural spheres and academia. The difference is that there has been much less pushback, if someone like Trump managed to be elected - which is highly unlikely as the gatekeeping is much worse than in the US - you'd see similar.
The atmosphere during the Brexit debate is/was absolutely fierce. The remain side has fundamentally a cosmopolitan-utopian worldview and the brexit side a nationalistic one (radically so compared to the orthodoxy in London and metro areas).
In other parts of Europe they're experiencing a severe decadence in culture and media because of the creeping monoculture of wokeism. They're having existential debates about their very national ideas, people don't want to have families anymore, nobody wants to defend their country and so they outsource this work to the US, while Russia and especially Asian powers have nothing of this whatsoever. Eastern Europe is caught in-between because they don't believe any of this but they don't have the size or clout to stand up to the soft economic power of Western Europe and the real power blocs elsewhere.
Out of the so-called West, the USA strikes me as by far the least decadent, and I'm not American. This feels to me like end-of-civilisation times as described for ancient empires. America pushing back presents some hope.
Funny. As someone from "the continent" I see this quite different.
The UK presents us with a good example what happens when you spread enough fear, nationalism and protectionism. From here it seems like "end-of-civilisation times" for a once great nation that has lost its power and importance and is failing to find a new way for itself, while it tries to clinge on the status quo that is running through his hands. I think the (probable) hard Brexit will tell us quite quickly who's right on all of this.
The rest of Western Europe seems to understand that the times are changing and our cultures are getting more diverse and that this will lead to conflicts which have to be solved.
Eastern Europe, joining the EU with a strong background from its UDSSR times, wars and whatnot else, has problems adapting to "the Western Europe way". You see this especially with Poland or Hungary which have strong nationalistic, traditionalistic tendencies with "strong leader persons" at their top. But I think they'll also fail once people from the newer generations are getting more and more in charge.
edit: And the US... Well... The jokes are writing themselves.
The denial is strong in the continent. I know this very well because that's where most of my family lives and where I spent nearly half of my life.
The EU gamble is going nowhere and this is a crisis that will affect us all, regardless of Brexit. It is what it is. Europe is decrepit and best case scenario is managed decadence into a third rate bloc. Russia and EE are screwed too, of course, but not because of self-doubt. Asia and the US will shoot ahead. But that's not really a prediction, it's been happening for a while.
> They're having existential debates about their very national ideas, people don't want to have families anymore, nobody wants to defend their country and so they outsource this work to the US, while Russia and especially Asian powers have nothing of this whatsoever.
Russia's fertility rate is pretty much on par with rest of Europe if not lower.
Same goes for Eastern Europe. Not to mention many Eastern European countries are no strangers to overtly left wing leadership.
It feels like Western Europe very much did experience political divisions in that time period, looking at how various populist parties (that thrive on that) are faring now compared to, say, 30 years ago, and the kind of rhetoric they're generating.
I think it has more cult dynamics than a church per-se. Seeing people end friendships and relationships with family members. “Unlearning” things, otherwise known as reprogramming. Seminars (that are expensive) and “required reading”. Obsessive recruitment of new people to initiate. And then of course if you question things you’ll be ostracized and exiled.
I think this is painting a rather stereotyped view of people on the left. I share most of the views of the left, however don't end relationships with people over it, preach, or attend any seminars. I think you're seeing the vocal minority here, which is of course more outspoken as they care enough to talk about it. Apart from the most extreme people, I have had many productive conversations with people whose views were more left than mine and haven't been ostracised once.
You are of course right that most people aren't like this. This thread is about those few who are, and how they can end up dividing everyone else, unwillingly, into accolytes versus enemies. It's not safe to say "I am left/center/right/whatever but I don't think this is the way to go about it" around this type. It is a separate axis from left-right, and is maybe correlated with the authoritarian-libertarian axis.
One of the guys that article cites clearly has some less savory beliefs about race (that I disagree with, people are mostly the same the world over) but man did he do a good job predicting the ideological battles lines of 2020 for someone writing in 2012.
Read "Kindly Inquisitors" if you'd like a very thoughtful defense of Enlightenment ideas as it pertains to knowledge and speech. If you're impressed with someones prediction from 2012 then you'll be more amazed with someones analysis from 1995. This book is a classic and the author, Jonathan Rausch is highly respected.
It wasn't so much a prediction as an observation of an incipient trend that went dormant and re-emerged. Post-modern attacks on Enlightenment ideals such as free thought and free speech were common on campuses in the late 1980s and early 1990s, then went dormant in the mid-90s, then re-emerged in the early 2010s.
Soviet Union collapsed and China started retooling for capitalism. Foreign propaganda dropped off.
Meanwhile in the US the 90s boom was kicking off and the US was exploding into global hegemony. Why protest and fight the man when communism was collapsing and there was more to gain from getting on board the winning team.
In other words, the trend dropped off externally and internally there were a lot of reasons to assume that history was in fact ending and to jump on board with MURICA and FREEDOM.
The book Sapiens talks about this well. People have a limited number of relationships they can maintain in their head. The only way societies can form to be larger than that number is shared myth between people. University graduates are in large part taking on the role of clergy in this wokist cult.
The cynical side of me sees it as America being transformed into an economic zone instead of a country. This is just what a religion looks like when you're binding people together in one large brutalistic finance zone.
I'm curious, in the various responses to this comment people are really getting into this interesting concept of certain political ideologies replacing the church, and resembling a religious fanaticism in their application of these ideologies.
My understanding is that we have had secular societies before, eg. the Soviet Union, China, which explicitly try to reduce practicing religion. Did this same kind of "new semi-religion appears to fill the void" event occur in those societies? Is it the particular "holy sacrements" that the west has adopted that is unique? Or are we unique in even having something arise the "fills the religious void"?
Read up on the Reign of Terror during the French revolution.
They were very secular and extremely violent and even evil (making shows out of drowning believers etc).
As much as the Catholic Church has something to answer for with the witch processes around here etc, they are small guys compared to the secular/atheists of the French Revolution.
Same goes to some degree for USSR and to a large degree for Khmer Rouge.
Reign of Terror during the French revolution was neither secular nor atheistic. They have state religion 'Cult of the Supreme Being', which was deistic. Robespierre himself was deist and opposed to atheism.
Ok, I'll not argue about that even if I still think the topic is arguable.
Anyways in case you are right it probably makes GPs point even stronger: when established religions are chased away quasi-religions - and often extremely dangerous ones - take their place.
Here in Czechia power of established religions went away (~ less than 1/3 population is religious). They were partially replaced with folk esoterism (astrology and so), which is much better alternative, as folk esoterism does not have concentrated power of e.g. Catholic Church.
This might come as a shock to you, but a large majority dislike political correctness no matter what group they belong to. They just go through the motions because they are attacked if they don't.
> While 83 percent of respondents who make less than $50,000 dislike political correctness, just 70 percent of those who make more than $100,000 are skeptical about it. And while 87 percent who have never attended college think that political correctness has grown to be a problem, only 66 percent of those with a postgraduate degree share that sentiment.
Can you explain to me what constitutes "political correctness"?
From where I stand, it just means treating people equally and not being an asshole.
ETA: In considering all the worries of modern living, I have never once been concerned with using the wrong words for a group of people. Am I really the exception? It seems easy to call people by the terms they prefer. Not sure about which terms to use? Then I just ask.
Change of innocuous and unrelated terminology in source code and documentation without any technical justification. No shortage of those examples throughout the industry and open source.
So you are saying people have a problem with the term "blacklisting" ? I guess I live a sheltered life then. Nothing like this has remotely ever come up and I live in a major metro.
I've seen the discussion come up about changing these terms and whether it was worth doing. Not once have I seen it turn into an "accusation" of racism against a person, much less hate crimes, so I don't think that paints an accurate picture.
The poll didn't define it, so not all respondents necessarily understood it the same way, but in my experience it's generally used to refer to speech codes requiring people to take great care in how they speak and write to avoid accidentally giving offense. The recent controversy about the USC professor who said 那个 in class, for example, would be a typical example.
Which makes all of the claims you and the others have made as to what that data actually means basically useless. All we know is that a lot of people think some definition of political correctness is some definition of problem. That's barely information.
As far as speech codes, they seem very mild. I would not even call it an inconvenience. Are people mad that certain phrases are now considered slurs and not welcome in polite society?
Ex. it is no longer appropriate to call someone a "retard," even in jest. Is this a problem?
I'm still not understanding the meat of the objection to "PC".
Most people are against it. Around 80% for each racial group. A bit less for blacks at around 75%. It’s like the 1 thing a super majority of us agree on.
However, slice it up by income and education. Middle and especially upper-middle class people are generally for it much more than everyone “below” them but even they don’t like it.
From politics, republicans hate it a lot and democrats mainly hate. Except 1 group. Progressives love it with about 30% of them against it. They are the only group that likes it.
It is elitist and no one likes it. Except the far left. Yet we are all forced to live with it.
> It seems like everyday you wake up something has changed … Do you say Jew? Or Jewish? Is it a black guy? African-American? … You are on your toes because you never know what to say. So political correctness in that sense is scary.
I'm still struggling with the objection here, but this is ridiculous.
It's ok to say "black". Is that hard to figure out? Ask a black person and they will say it's fine. The term "african-american" seems more nonsensical than anything -- not all black people identify with Africa.
As to the rest, I don't care about popular opinion, that doesn't inform my world view. Still waiting to hear about the burden of "PC" because I have yet to hear a compelling case.
And I have never once wondered whether or not I should call someone a "jew".
Political correctness doesn't appeared to be defined. I assume if you asked people their opinions on concrete events versus a nebulous concept the results would be quite different.
Actually as far as I'm aware, the current politically correct term is "person of color" specifically so "person" is first instead of "black", and "color" instead of "black" so middle-eastern/etc aren't excluded.
No you’re totally wrong here. From Kimberle Crenshaw herself (Pioneer of critical race theory) there is a difference between a “Black person” and a “person who happens to be black”. It’s important to understand what this means and how it guides this philosophy and the activism we now see in the workplace.
This is all intentional. “People/Person of color“ is an entirely different thing. You need to understand the hierarchy here and why it’s important to concepts like intersectionality and thus social justice.
You should read the actual work and come to understand they mean what they say and the “language game” being played isn’t really a game as critical theory understands the power of language quite well and is ready, willing, and able to indoctrinate useful idiots to propagate it.
When people say they're concerned about political correctness, they're generally disputing your assessment that modern speech codes are very mild. Many people feel that modern speech codes are quite intense - that it requires significant study to identify all the terms and phrases that currently aren't welcome in polite society, and that complying with the list once you've studied it severely restricts the ideas you can express.
Retarded was invented to be a “kind word”. It’s humorous looking at records from Ellis island and seeing records describing people as “idiots” “imbecile”, and “morons” as actual terms to describe different levels of intelligence. We use these words outside that context now. But they were actual classifications. Words like “retard” came into being to cover those terms which became derisive slang that is today considered harmless. But retard isn’t.
Obviously teasing an actual mentally retarded person by calling them a “retard” or the above terms is cruel and in poor taste, and worse. I don’t believe almost anyone would though.
Sure. One example would be that many companies (including my own) are now instructing engineers to avoid any public usages of the terms "whitelist" and "blacklist". Obviously this isn't the most important thing in the world, but it requires pretty significant mental effort on my part, since the terms had no racial connotations at all until a couple months ago.
It's telling that the only concrete example in english, though only from two of you, is the same one.
It seems like there aren't a lot of examples to choose from.
I have personally never heard of this concern, and as you mention it doesn't seem particularly taxing. I would like to understand better the consequence of misusing (or using) blacklist/whitelist. I very much doubt the fallout would be severe.
- "master"/"slave" terminology in databases and such; most recently, even the "master" branch in source trees was deemed impious, and GitHub will be renaming it by default to "main" on new repos starting tomorrow
- adding codes of conduct to all public-facing projects, most of which are taken directly from the Contributor Covenant (a safely orthodox choice); this isn't a naming thing, but is pushed for in a similar way by similar people
For the people who have not watched the movie, the hilarious thing is that RoboCop is anti-police, anti-corporate, anti-autoritarian and anti-dystopian.
But since woke people are corporate, authoritarian and dystopian, I can see why they would object to the name.
It's the most recent and thus the most salient one for a lot of people in software. There are many other examples of neutral terminology that's become politically charged: "all lives matter", "color-blind", the OK hand gesture...
I completely agree that none of these rules are individually taxing and that the consequences of breaking them are unlikely to be severe. But when taking everything in aggregate - the sum of all the rules I know about, the concern that there could be new rules I don't know about, the tiny but not unprecedented chance that I could face severe fallout - the net effect is stifling. Again, not the most important problem in the world or even the most important problem I personally face, but still a problem.
"All lives matter" is a natural English sentence expressing the idea that every person's life matters. This is not a particularly controversial idea.
I recognize that it's also a non-neutral political slogan, and that modern speech conventions require people to avoid saying things that sound like controversial political slogans. But that's precisely the problem! I have to keep up to date with all major partisan controversies, a task I generally find quite miserable and pointless, in order to know which new phrases I should avoid!
You just don’t ever know how it will interpreted against you forcing an apology or more recently a written declaration that you are sexist/racist/etc and that you will “do better”.
Do a search for USC communications professor to understand the previous example.
It's hard to defend insulting a person's intelligence, regardless of the word used. A better example would be referring to something inanimate like a company policy as "retarded". Even better is the purging of words like "master" from software. Or actors having to apologize for their Halloween costumes. It seems like every major comedian is complaining bitterly about political correctness lately, save perhaps for certain partisan ones.
That's because "political correctness" is a somewhat vague term with intensely negative connotations. It's like asking if people are in favor of "government overreach" - people may have very different ideas about what that specifically constitutes but saying you oppose it is an easy nonspecific way to connect.
It just filled the gap of religion disappearing, people want to belong in groups. Maybe broad categorization but this religious activism seems to be more of an American thing, Europe is definetly more diverse when it comes to different issues.
It's easiest just to go along with the popular opinion so you don't stick out. Given that all the most valuable companies are taking stances about social issues, I'd wager that it's profitable to do so. I think it's admirable for being honest with his apolitical stance as opposed to just going along with the flow.
Probably because the work these companies do is frequently political.
Let's be clear: What Coinbase is saying is, we the founders, who set the company's mission, and are doing so with a clear political view (rooted in libertarianism and so forth), are allowed to use the company to further our political ends.
But the staff? Sorry, you have no voice.
Maybe that's fine. The clear message to staff is: you are either onboard with our mission, or you can leave.
But let's not pretend companies and workplaces are apolitical. That's, at best, deeply naive.
Frankly, I wonder how much of what we're seeing now is due to the destruction of unionized labour, which were organizations explicitly designed to channel the political views of employees into collective action. Absent those structures, a) you get this bizarre perception that the workplace is apolitical (it's not), and b) staff no longer have a path whereby their views and values can be channeled and expressed.
You're absolutely right, and I'm disappointed that you've been voted down to negative. At the very least this is a well worded argument worth looking at.
Politics, as much as we all hate it, is engaged with everywhere in business.
Choosing to be apolitical is effectively a form of political engagement, usually resulting in a vote for the status quo and/or the pursuit of money eschewing engagement in difficult questions in society.
This can be argued about whether it is moral or not, or even if a company has much of a choice in the matter (There are many entrenched companies that do "immoral" political things that are near impossible not to engage with as a business), and this is not unique to coinbase, but it's not somehow withdrawing from judgement on morality when you say you are "apolitical", and you still should be judged on your politics and lack of engagement in society.
Let's not be naive here, any larger company, even the most "apolitical" company still has large influence, uses services, and makes decisions that are politically charged.
That said, it's not all one direction where all political activism within a company is great, but eschewing all politics is not doing so at all.
The employees have a voice: as private citizens. The workplace is not a democratic community, and the employees are not its constituency. It a place where employer-employee come together to complete a mission that both sides consent to, otherwise they separate. Of course, mission is a negotiable term just like compensation and benefits, an employee is free to ask "in addition to pay you must also dedicate the company's resources and attention to my preferred causes", and the employer is free to decline. Coinbase is simply make it clear that changing their mission is not a price they are willing to pay, so please look elsewhere.
I think this brings clarity to the work relationship, as "the power to direct the political mission of the company" had been previously an unstated, unnegotiated axis of the terms of employment. People are now learning that this need to be crystal clear upfront.
Certainly true, though to me that only reinforces my point.
Investors invest in companies based on their perception of the value of a company, and that perception is of course coloured by political views.
Heck, we have an entire financial movement called Socially Responsible Investing, something which is nakedly political and a clear acknowledgement that politics cannot be, and has never been, divorced from business.
I find it infinitely more strange to think that workplaces can be apolitical at all. Choosing to work for Palantir or Coinbase or The Gates Foundation or Amazon is (in part) a political decision. It may not be a conscious or intentional political decision, but it's a political decision nonetheless.
> Let's be clear: What Coinbase is saying is, we the founders, who set the company's mission, and are doing so with a clear political view (rooted in libertarianism and so forth), are allowed to use the company to further our political ends.
One hundred percent this. There is a reason Coinbase is one of the few companies to take a stance like this.
The company's foundational value is literally based on the notion of state-free finance. They have no incentive to do anything to allow their company to be steered into engaging with conventional politics. In fact, they benefit from taking strong stances that maintain the status quo if the status quo furthers their own mission.
So, yeah, Coinbase is indeed very mission oriented.
Reminds me of the band Fugazi who used to charge $5 admission to their shows, and if you were causing problems and asked to leave, you would be escorted out and handed an envelope with $5 in it. In other words, anyone not "comfortable with the mission" (i.e. there to cause a ruckus and not for the music) was "offered a separation opportunity" but still treated fairly and with dignity.
The severance appears respectable to me given the circumstances. It’s on par with many layoff packages and more generous than the ongoing “pay to quit” program from Zappos and Amazon. [1]
I'm not too familiar with SV culture, but wouldn't an employee exit from Coinbase for the next few months also act as a signal to future employers? Since google has already been bitten from both sides with their "bring your entire self to work" culture, you'd think they'd want to avoid ex-Coinbasers.
Honestly, I wouldn't think so. People can change / learn, too. If you've already ticked off your boss and coworkers at Coinbase with your politics, this might be an excellent time to get some severance, re-evaluate whether or not you should continue to do that in the workplace, and frame your resignation differently when applying elsewhere.
Besides, I'd expect the "true believers" to find some way to outright brag to future interviewers they parted ways with Coinbase over moral / ethical objections.
The problem with taking such a hardline position is that there is a significant switching cost borne by the employee when they leave, and so at the margin you'll have employees that don't buy in to the mission statement, don't like your new/restated position, but need the job/dislike job-hunting even more.
So now you've created/agitated a population of disgruntled employees; this will tend to cause problems. Paying a generous severance is enough to lift most of these employees over the "activation threshold" and is (in my opinion) the correct good-faith way of managing the situation; it's saying "no hard feelings if you don't agree with this direction, and we respect/value your contributions thus far."
Regardless of whether you agree with the object-level mission statement, I think that, having made the decision, this is a good example of strong leadership; it's important that everybody is bought in to the company mission, and you need to proactively filter out folks that aren't. But at the same time, you need to do so with respect; it's not necessarily a black mark for someone to no longer be a fit for the company or role, as both company and individual can change over time.
This is the same sort of idea as when you part ways with an exec after a strategy shift (e.g. pivot from B2C to B2B; replace your consumer-facing head of sales with a B2B veteran). It's not necessarily the case that they aren't doing a job, just that they aren't a fit for the role as it now stands.
There could already be a majority agitated, disgruntled employees--those agitated and disgruntled by the political discord at the company caused by the activism.
Where do I apply for a join @ Coinbase? This is exactly the kind environment I want to work in. No petty identity politics while I'm supposed to test or deploy some code, I want my colleagues to come to work... to work and nothing else.
I highly doubt that. Unrestrained political activism on either side has been shown to be a lose-lose situation for any large company. The only winning move is not to play (at work).
If someone went around the Coinbase office demanding that the company speak out against abortion, I'm pretty sure Armstrong would want to get rid of that guy too.
You're assuming ill intent. The goal is to minimize workplace hostility, not to censor anyone. Let's say someone goes around snooping into people's conversations and overhears two coworkers casually talking about attending a protest and reports this. I'm guessing that person snooping around will be the only one who will be reprimanded.
I don't agree. In all the places I've worked, even the most apolitical ones, someone would be viewed quite negatively if they walked into the break room and tried to break up a private political discussion.
So then someone who was attempting to enforce the CEO's mission would be viewed negatively? This feels self-contradictory.
You can't say "We won’t: Debate causes or political candidates internally" (quoting Armstrong) but simultaneously say that anyone who attempts to enforce that would be viewed negatively. That would imply that Armstrong would view himself negatively for enforcing his own rule.
This is going to work great for Coinbase. It's very helpful for employers to select for conformists who can be told to shut up, and not stand up for what they believe (unless they believe in the status quo and the company, which is called non-political).
Selecting for groupthink^W mission is pretty important in the business of cryptocurrencies. Reduces chances of anyone having a different moral stance that would push them to become a whistleblower. It might even be a way to prevent employees unionizing. Any disagreement about policies is political, free speech is political, so this is perfect to pre-emptively censor every criticism.
Is being apolitical really being a conformist? 20 years ago yes, but in the age of social media where every brand from banks to ice cream posted their stance on the BLM protests it would appear being political in the workplace is conformity.
If what Brian Armstrong is saying here was considered the norm, this article wouldn't even be on the front page.
I think the parent comment is just quite typical of modern political extremism. Where every actor must take a position on every issue, where failure to take the correct position is heresy, and where failure to take any position amounts to taking a position against the one of the extremist who is demanding that you take one (and is therefor also heresy).
The role of an employee is to deliver value to the employer during their working hours. The role of the employer is to provide an income to the employee. It’s insane to think that the role of the employer should be to further the political objectives of the employees. By that rationale, having any interaction with any party who’s politics are different from yours in any way is conformism.
This line of reasoning falls over with even the slightest level of scrutiny. It's just a way of bullying people into adopting the political views that you want them to, and it shouldn't be tolerated in a society that values democratic freedoms. An uncountable number of injustices take place across the world every day, and any individual person will be playing no part in, and have no influence over a vast majority of them.
This argument can't be taken as honest or sincere, because with absolute surety I can guarantee that horrific injustices took place today that you have absolutely no concern about at all.
When somebody presents this argument, they are not honestly advocating for justice. What they are actually saying is that "by not adopting _my_ political views, you are acting out evil". Part of any person's political world view is how they choose the issues that they consider to be important, knowing that they only have the span of their short life, and the means of their limited resources to address the problems in the world. You have no right to demand that somebody make the same decisions in this respect as you do. It is absurd, it is hostile to the notion of free democracy, and it is a standard that no living person could ever meet.
And all of that is before you account for the fact describing something as an injustice in the first place is quintessentially an opinion. This sort of thing reminds me a lot of the psychology of warfare, where soldiers are systemically taught to view the enemy as animals who lack humanity. It has a terribly toxic influence on society. Your ideas no longer need to compete on their merits, because the people who disagree with them are the enemy, and the enemy is less than human.
> It's just a way of bullying people into adopting the political views that you want them to, and it shouldn't be tolerated in a society that values democratic freedoms.
> You have no right to demand that somebody make the same decisions in this respect as you do. It is absurd, it is hostile to the notion of free democracy, and it is a standard that no living person could ever meet.
Well said. It's sad that activists are anti-liberty in this way. It undermines their campaigns.
I had a professor in college tell an entire class the first day - "nobody really cares about you except your family and maybe some friends". You could see the shock to a lot of the students who had been coddled and told how awesome they were their whole life. Once you accept that concept, you can learn to be more effective in communication and not expect things from others.
Most of these activists have no tact.
Neil deGrasse Tyson says in his MasterClass that his father taught him that it's not enough to be right. You must be effective.
The world would be a much better place if everyone followed that.
> describing something as an injustice in the first place is quintessentially an opinion
Unless you mean a critique of the notion of justice in general, that seems to be a bit reductive. Accusations of "injustice" in most societies typically don't stand on their own; they're accompanied by evidence, which is debated, and an ethical stance, which is also sometimes debated. But injustice isn't some Hitlerian discussion-ender; it's an idea and a value set, always selectively applied, just like "fairness", "equality", "utilitarianism", or whatever. It's not like invoking the devil in church.
I'm not GP. I've no clue whether they were being honest in their statements or not, or how they'd choose to back them up, but: at what point is an accusation of injustice not an "opinion", or a "toxic influence on society"? When one person believes it? Ten? Some percentage of society? Some magistrate? When you agree with it? There's no general answer to that question, so saying "they said it was unjust, that means that they're dehumanizing my position and making me into the enemy!" is somewhat silly.
That’s definitely the most minor detail of my parent comment.
The fact is that every person in the world gets to choose for themselves which issues they consider to be most important to them. They each get to choose which issues they devote their time/attention/money/skills/resources/etc to.
When you account for the total number of all injustices that take place everyday, any person will only ever be able to concern themselves with a minuscule portion of them. By not concerning yourself with a particular injustice, you are in not automatically supporting it. A failure to intervene does not make you responsible for the actions of every other person on the planet.
Somebody who says this is not saying “why are you not concerned about every injustice on the planet”, they’re saying “if your concerns don’t align with mine then you’re a bad person”. Unless they consider themselves a champion of injustice, any person who repeats this is necessarily a hypocrite.
I used to be baffled at the use of "SJW" as a pejorative, but comments like this reveal it's aptness to me. It's not the fighting for justice that's negative, it's the adoption of the warrior mentality. Which, ironically, is a perfect reflection of the problem with American policing - viewing the world as a battlefield and anyone not with you as against you. There are no non-combatants in the streets, just as there are none in the ideological trenches. The struggle for order and/or social justice is a totalizing endeavor that demands complete obedience, to the point where non-compliance/apolitical intransigence is treated more harshly than some forms of law-breaking/ideological deviance.
The "soldier" metaphor was unfortunate, but I think the underlying thesis is well taken.
We live in a deeply interconnected world. Most actions, even studied inaction/uninvolvedness, have repercussions on lots of other people--complex repercussions that have to do with privilege and affluence and race and gender and all those other hot-button issues that people get up in arms about. We call that "political".
Now, nobody's making you be an activist (someone who puts a ton of time towards advancing one of those causes). Nobody's making you care. You're free to do whatever you want. But choosing not to care doesn't make the repercussions of your choices any less political.
It weirds me out when people get prickly in response to that pointing out that basic reality, because it sounds very much like "I don't want to acknowledge that my actions have wide reaching consequences."
What you should/shouldn't do about that reality is a separate question: opinions range from "don't tell anyone what to do" to "sell all your belongings in service to $cause right now". But accepting that basically everything we do in an interdependent society is not just tangentially but fundamentally political (yes, even refraining from discussing political topics at work) isn't a super contentious or extreme claim.
I agree that the world is a complex system, but I don't actually agree that all or most of my actions as a private individual have wide reaching consequences. If you're below a certain critical threshold of wealth, power, social influence or some combination thereof, it really just doesn't matter what you do, it's the law of large numbers. The butterfly effect is a rare exception in complex systems, not a regularity - COVID Patient 0, for example, took actions that had wide reaching consequences, but I wouldn't consider those actions to have been "fundamentally political". Both the impact and the opportunity cost of the vast majority of my actions or inactions, on the greater world, is close to zero. People trying to convince you that "you can make a difference" in your everyday life as a private citizen by voting, recycling, showing up at the protest, boycotting the right products, etc, are in fact lying - they can, potentially, make a difference by causing a wide enough cross-section of a population to change their behaviors, but you the individual are not acting with wide reaching consequences, you are simply shuffling between indifferent behavioral cohorts which will continue to exist in the same proportions regardless of your individual choices.
At very best, the claim is pointless. In order to live up to that standard, you would have to consider the interests of all people (both living and yet to be born), every time you made any decision. Even if you narrow the scope of those interests to down to only those relating to justice, you’re still left with fundamentally impossible proposition (and even if you were omnipresent, you’re still going to need to neglect some injustices, in cases where the judicial interests of two parties are at odds).
Nobody takes that position because they’re concerned that you’re not considering the injustices some random far away people, that neither of you know about, are currently experiencing. People only take that position when they want to bully/guilt/coerce/intimidate others into caring about the same issues as they do.
If taking no action against an injustice is equivalent to supporting it, then the history of humanity has been comprised entirely of absolutely despicable people. Because for every injustice that you have taken a stand against, there is an essentially unlimited number of additional injustices that you have fully supported by virtue of never even knowing they occurred.
This is an example of conflating the two things I talked about: acknowledging that almost all actions are fundamentally political, and talking about imperatives.
The reality is that actions have political consequences. You interpreted that as a requirement to track every possible consequence of your actions. That's a deeply false dichotomy, and is commonly used by people to avoid having to confront discomfort from the more immediate political consequences of their actions: "you're saying I have to worry about everything that might possibly happen as a result of what I do?!".
Nobody's insisting on that. That's a cop-out that allows people to say they're "apolitical" when what they really mean is "apathetic to the political consequences of their actions". Which is fine, sure, but, per the original comment, it's a bad look to not acknowledge that there are consequences when what you mean is that you are not interested in them.
What the "everything is political" folks (and the social justice folks, and the BLM folks, and unions, and environmentalists, and missionaries to a lesser extent, etc.) are saying is that you should care about a given set of specific consequences of your actions.
Whether you choose to agree to learn/care about some of those specific consequences, or none of them, is up to you. Whether you choose to associate morality with action/inaction (i.e. the difference between "taking no action against an injustice is equivalent to actively supporting it" and "taking no action against an injustice is equivalent to allowing it/passively supporting it") is up to you.
Like, there are plenty of things I don't give a shit about. Maybe I should, maybe I shouldn't. But I don't for a minute pretend that the fact that I don't care about those things means my actions don't affect them in potentially extremely influential ways. Denying that is Bugblatter Beast of Traal[1] logic.
Therein lies the difference between "This is what I believe." vs "This is what I believe, and anyone who isn't actively fighting for my cause must be evil." None of us here can really know what Brian has done as a private citizen in terms of political activism. What would you think if he is privately active (maybe even for causes you agree with!) and also chooses the workplace to be politically neutral?
(Speaking of which, what have you done to fight the status quo? Why not more? Why have you not consumed all of your time/money/attention on it? What level is necessary to be considered not-complicit in the status quo?)
Just as Poe's law predicted, it needs to be clarified: my comment was sarcastic.
Coinbase is full of shit. Cryptocurrencies are a political statement themselves. The policy is just an excuse to eject employees with any moral compass, and signal that Coinbase won't out people with abhorrent anti-social views. It's not a surprise that it comes from a business that is borderline illegal, and adjacent to scams, extortions, and money laundering. They've found a way to treat employees as obedient dumb cogs, and have them feel smart about it.
So Coinbase would not have open discussion of ideas, employees would hesitate to question managerial decisions. It would be amazing for a company to succeed with that culture.
Quite the opposite. It opens up discussions without the pressure to be on only one specific side. I don’t ever talk about politics in my workplace because my views clearly do not align with those of our management.
If Coinbase are more attractive to people who are worried about being "deplatformed" for their ideology, then they are selecting for that group. You write "no matter my ideology" when you mean "despite my ideology".
Personally I find it attractive to get away from the ridiculous bullys who attack other people in the name of pc .. I'm not debating those issues .. especially not with hothead radicals who bully those with nuanced perspectives with personal attacks
Hell, I support BLM and lean quite left, but I think it’s absolutely childish and counterproductive to bring politics into the workplace.
I’d love to work at a place like this. It looks like a “get down to business, cut the bullshit” place. And I’d quite like to chat with coworkers and make friends regardless of our political viewpoints. It’d be interesting.
a conformist is someone who conforms to a norm, there is no such thing as a conformist minority by definition. Are you thinking half of the employees are activists and he wants to kick them all out?
crypto attracts a lot of misfits, so yes it seems it will be good for them. I doubt they are conformists though, i mean, being a conformist to a very minority opinion (anarcho-capitalism) is not really possible, is it?
"coinbase engineers walked off [in June] because brian wouldn't say "Black Lives Matter," he posted it so they'd get back to work, now he's having an executive "YOU AREN'T THE BOSS OF ME!" meltdown* about it"
and
"this looks a whole lot like the play certain advisors tell CEO's to run when they need to extend their runway. whether or not they backfill the people who leave will tell the tale. guess it's time to watch linkedin."
Although I think we differ in terms of our sentiment, I'm really glad to see a plausible hypothesis about the proximate motivation for Brian's decision posted.
Erica's theory that this is a way of trimming payroll while eliminating personnel Brian sees as problematic seems to fit all the facts about the pressures Brian and Coinbase are feeling right now.
While I'm not sure this will turn out to be a bad thing for the world, it's a lot clearer why now & why Coinbase with this in mind.
Seriously, I can’t believe grown adults say stuff like this. So much professionalism from the “Director of Engineering at GitHub,” saying that people who don’t share her perspective on politics in the workplace are having “meltdowns.”
I think quite the opposite. We give far, far too much cultural deference to megalomaniacal executives and petty business tyrants; it’s refreshing to see them called out on their bullshit. More refreshing would be seeing more CEOs, founders, and VCs forced to cede control to employees, but I’ll take what we can get.
The part about being pressured to post the statement about BLM may be true. Nothing wrong with pointing that out.
But then she starts to over-speculate about Armstrong's emotions without any basis and tries to frame him as an unstable person. All of this simply because Armstrong posted about his company's mission.
How would she feel if talking about her company's mission resulted in execs from other companies tweeting about her "having a meltdown", simply because she has a different political perspective?
And on, and on, and on. She tweets so much it's kind of sad. Practically none of her tweets have anything to do with actual engineering. It's all identity politics and other leftist nonsense.
I didn't find any of those tweets unprofessional. I found them to be a genuinely interesting perspective on social issues that I am interested in. I am not sure how that's unprofessional of her.
If you think its "leftist nonsense", then that's just your opinion.
She is entitled to tweet whatever she wants to from her personal twitter account. Do you think its reasonable for her to follow your idea of how a Director of Engineering should tweet?
Like it or not BLM -the organization- does have some pretty leftist ideas that not everyone is fond of (Marxism for example espoused by some of the leaders of the movement). Some of them involve completely dismantling police forces as they're traditionally formed. However BLM the concept of equality for blacks and equal treatment under the law that is something 90% of the population can get behind. I think there is a lot of nuance to this stuff and companies need to be specific and careful about such things.
Every political term has at least 3 layers of meaning.
1. The literal meaning of the term or its original definition.
2. The core ideas proposed by the group or by whoever defined the term.
3. The real actions of people who feel identified by a group or people who use the term.
Many times we have misunderstandings because we are thinking about different layers. Also, these differences in meaning are often astutely used to manipulate and tergiverse things.
Examples of terms with different effective meanings depending on the layer: blm, antifa, alt-right, feminism, neoliberalism, capitalism, communism.
There's a fourth layer of meaning you may be overlooking - the willful misinterpretation of the term used by its opponents.
One obvious example being the use of "all lives matter" and "blue lives matter" to reinforce the false interpretation of "black lives matter" as meaning "only black lives matter," when the phrase more correctly means "black lives matter as well."
Or the way that "fake news" has been re-appropriated to refer to bias within mainstream media, rather than literally fabricated stories and memes posing as news on social media and the web.
Or ask a feminist and a redpiller to agree on what "toxic masculinity" actually means.
I see the issue of compelled speech troublesome.
Maybe it's one of my character flaws, but I don't like being bullied into saying some group's mantras. Even if we agree.
Thanks for posting this. I think she makes excellent points. I've worked at companies where similar executive retaliation to principled employees has happened before, and I can relate to the changes that seem to have been instituted (pre-vetting town hall questions to execs, shutting down slack channels that allow for asking questions to execs directly).
Funnily enough, I interviewed at Coinbase not that long ago, and almost joined the company. I am glad that I did not, this would have made me quit. One of the things that one of the interviewers mentioned was the openness and transparency of the execs. I wonder if these draconian measures will make these employees think twice about working at such an institution.
It's corporate erasure (a form of violence) when people aren't able to be their authentic selves at work—something that includes, obviously, being able to speak up about basic human rights and dignities in the workplace.
Maybe we should roll back anti-discrimination laws in the workplace too? I'm sure CEOs find that to be a hassle…
Perhaps every company can offer severance packages to workers who don't want their rights taken away? Don't like the 40 hours work week? Here's a severance package. The rest of you are now required to work 60 hours. Etc. etc. etc.
This kind of behavior is a textbook example of how rights in practice are eroded.
To downvoters: in the past, the LGBT community was asked to "hide" their identity at work, literally, by pretending to be cis at work. This isn't any different.
Imagine offering a severance package to all LGBT individuals today. If that would horrify you, think again about what Coinbase is doing (and why).
"We create job opportunities for top people, including those from underrepresented backgrounds who don’t have equal access to opportunities, with things like diverse slates (Rooney rule) on senior hires, and casting a wide net to find top talent."
"Fair talent practices: We work to reduce unconscious bias in interviews, using things like structured interviews, and ensure fair practices in how we pay and promote. We have a pay for performance culture, which means that your rewards and promotions are linked to your overall contribution to the mission and company goals.
Enable belonging for everyone: We work to create an environment where everyone is welcome and can do their best work, regardless of background, sexual orientation, race, gender, age, etc."
"Of course, there are exceptions here around internal employment matters, whistleblowing, etc. And we want all employees to feel safe disagreeing on the work itself. Candor and debate are core to a healthy team, where it is safe to disagree. We consider these to be related to our mission."
"There are many unbanked and underbanked people in the world who have no ability to get a loan to buy a home, or start a business, so this kind of technology has enormous potential to improve the world over time, even if it is still early days."
"I greatly admire Apple as a company, and think they build amazing products, but their restrictions on the app store, in particular around cryptocurrency, are not defensible in my view, and they are holding back progress in the world."
The way that Coinbase puts pressure on Apple is the same as what Coinbase's politically-active employees are doing.
He was kind of very up front about being solely focused on economic freedom.
Coinbase’s mission is to create an open financial system for the world. This means we want to use cryptocurrency to bring economic freedom to people all over the world.
This is squarely in line in trying to push Apple to be more amenable on this issue.
I don't think the OP is arguing the merits of the argument. The OP is pointing out the hypocrisy in the founder using political tactics to pressure another entity into complying with his principles, while prohibiting his employees from doing the same. Disguising the latter under a "no politics at work" principle seems hypocritical when the founder himself is engaging in politics at work.
Well, it's also core to Coinbase's mission statement. Brian rightfully wants to keep Coinbase focused only on political issues that are part of the company mission.
The degree to which you are taken seriously when you announce that a thing should happen because you care that “it will make the world better” is tightly related to your credibility as a person who cares about making the world better. When you announce that the only causes you support are those that directly enrich you, you’ll find that people are more skeptical of that claim. Agree or disagree, but it’s why PR has existed for decades (centuries.)
> Two weeks the same CEO campaigned against Apple's App Store policies on Twitter, and totally made it out to be a moral issue when it benefitted him.
Yes, because he is the CEO of HIS company, with an app on IOS. Not just an employee and he never asked his staff to agree with his position and tweet about it. At coinbase right now, some people want HIM to talk about "Black Live Matters". It's like employees in IT in US don't understand the concept of subordination and think that a company is a college campus... or maybe the problem is that too many companies thought they should be like college campuses, and not a business.
It got relatively little discussion because it set off the flamewar detector (http://hnrankings.info/24610267/). Normally we'd turn that off in such a case, but we missed that one.
Also: don't miss that there are multiple pages of comments in this thread. That's what the More link at the bottom points to. Or click:
You can disagree with how it's implemented, but it's not subjective.
dang does a way better job of addressing moderation issues as they're happening than anything you'll see on Reddit (besides perhaps tiny, niche subreddits.) And at least he's not surreptitiously changing people's comments. (https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...)
I'm not just talking about the "flame-war detection", although that system alone is extremely crude an ineffective (in my opinion).
There are lots of other moderation features -- e.g. shadow bans and automatic vote penalties -- that are completely opaque but turn HN into a strong echo chamber.
I also disagree with your point about Reddit. At least on Reddit you can easily track what was removed (there are entire subreddits dedicated to tracking what's been removed by moderators) and many subreddits provide explanations of why content was removed.
> There are lots of other moderation features -- e.g. shadow bans and automatic vote penalties -- that are completely opaque but turn HN into a strong echo chamber.
Every time I click "vouch" I wonder if a counter is being incremented on my account, or if a record of things I've vouched is being kept for moderator perusal. A chilling effect which certainly exists outside of HN, of course.
>Every time I click "vouch" I wonder if a counter is being incremented on my account, or if a record of things I've vouched is being kept for moderator perusal.
There is. I've lost vouching privileges after the mods disagreed with my decisions. They don't tell you, either, you'll just notice one day that it no longer seems to work.
How is that a relevant comparison? Reddit is orders of magnitude larger (looks to be around 100 times more active users) and allows users to create public and private subreddits that can easily become echo chambers.
HN moderation is not even in the same ballpark as what Reddit deals with.
To be clear I'm not defending Reddit or even saying they do a good job; I'm just saying the comparison is not fair or useful.
Not surreptitiously (at least to my knowledge, but of course that would be an oxymoron anyways), but the moderators do have the ability to edit comments and do so on occasion.
Sorry for the meta hijacking, but now that we're here, HN developers: Please penalize comments that jump the queue by responding to the top comment. There are frequently topics with hundreds of comments, where almost all are replies to the first comment, or the first comment of that comment, ad inifinitum.
Reddit does it right by auto-folding comment trees once they reach a certain depth vs. upvotes.
We regularly detach replies to the top comment that aren't really replies to the top comment. But of course we can't do that in every thread.
> Reddit does it right by auto-folding comment trees
That doesn't address the "faux replies to top comment" problem unless you auto-fold at depth 1 (i.e. collapse away all replies to every top-level comment) – which feels like too much auto-folding to me.
The way it seems to work is that direct replies to highly rated comments need to 'do more work' to stay unfolded (i.e. it needs to gain a higher amount of upvotes-per-view). This burden is similarly increased the deeper nested comments get, and possibly the more replies already exist to the parent.
It is a deterrence to posting a direct reply to the top comment, since there is a higher chance that the reply gets folded, unless it is high quality.
I like this idea that comments have to earn their keep, in a weighted ratio to how visible a space they are trying to claim.
I believe there is an explicit goal to remove pagination once the site can handle it. There was a couple days earlier this year where pagination was turned off.
I know that this will greatly help a few who are legitimately disturbed by the recent post and feel they either can't work at, or aren't excited by, Coinbase any more.
But at the level of severance discussed in the post (4 (or 6) months, 7-year exercise window), it feels like most employees who know they could soft-land into another position would be silly not to take this offer. Some people may still enjoy working at Coinbase, but do they enjoy it enough to reject an effective 30-50% bonus?
Especially for employees who were there less than 2 years, and may not necessarily stay for 2 years, this looks like a unique opportunity to lock in that 7 year exercise window.
I've seen offers like this before, and it led to a much-higher-than-expected number of employees choosing to leave.
I would consider an offer from coinbase over FAANG now based solely on this move by their CEO. I say this as someone who has worked at Apple, and bluntly told multiple Facebook-email bearing recruiters to F off.
For sure. I'm not saying that they should do this, and I'm definitely not saying that I would be self-less enough to do it, but it would be a pretty strong gesture if those in that position were to turn around and donate their severance to an activism organization.
I’ve never worked in the Bay Area, so could just be OOL but I’m genuinely surprised that this is such a big deal, or that this blog post got so much praise.
Never discussed politics at any of the companies I’ve worked for, we were always too busy with...work!
Coming from the east coast (and maybe a little from an earlier era) I also find the attitude on this stuff a little mystifying.
"In my day" -- it was just poor form to bring up that kind of stuff at work. If you did so at all, you usually tried to avoid being "that person". You don't get to choose each person you work with, so it pays if everyone puts in a bit of extra effort to not give anyone else a hard time.
I think some of these work politics issues--in particular around the bay area-- is partially a product of extremely homogeneous work forces (at least politically), partially poor work-life balance cultures (no life outside work), partially social networking (massively increasing the visibility of your co-workers out of work activities), and <???>-- I don't feel I really have a complete understanding of what is going on.
Maybe a factor is a breakdown in our wider culture's ability to see people who disagree as being people who are still good people with reasonable points but just have different understandings or priorities (or even just to patronize them as stupid or uninformed). But instead perhaps there is a trend to rapidly decide people we disagree with are irredeemably evil just based on a soundbitized version of some insanely complicated political trade-off (or maybe even just by association)... But I'm not really sure how much that breakdown is actually happening compared to the appearance of it happening in the reporting funhouse mirror ("Reasonable people do a reasonable thing" said no headline ever).
Some of it might also be due to a transition from products to services-- people seem a lot more willing to view product sales as anonymous and totally transactional, while they seem to view a service as something more akin to a marriage.
A big downside of reactions like coinbases' might be that in what I would consider the traditional regime there was still an opportunity for employees to bring a little bit of their politics to work-- so long as they were professional and not obnoxious about it, or in places where there were genuine interactions with work ("How about lets not buy the toner cartages made from clubbed baby seals?") ... but if you can't count on people to control themselves and you're forced to set bright line policies then there is probably a lot less room for people to be reasonable.
I worked for companies on the east coast, then moved to SF and now work at a big tech company. The companies I worked for on the east coast were mostly B2B, so we were focused on making a good product for businesses so they’d pay us more money. Big tech companies recruited for a long time with the pitch that we’re changing the world. That has brought in a bunch of employees who joined bc they want their employment to make a positive change in the world. Companies are now realizing the conflict being a neutral platform poses to these people - if I have a belief that my employment should make a positive change in societal issues, how could I work somewhere that I believe contributes to making things worse?
I wonder what % of SV employees actually did move there for "making a better place blabla". It always souded as a pure marketing signal , like those old Benneton ads. I can understand that people who work for wikipedia do it, but not the big tech sector. It's particularly hard to believe it considering the cynicism of the current "total compensation"-oriented generation of tech crowd.
A large group of people, maybe even a majority, believe in the general idea that technology can help solve social problems. Then you have a company that says they make the world a better place. Of course you're going to get some people who legit want to do that, and believe the scale and scope of the operation allows this to actually happen! Then they're very upset when, for instance, their spreadsheet software is used to track how to steal refugee children from their parents and sell them to adoption services. It's going to take some adjustment to convince these people that the company that says they're making the world a better place is simply constantly lying, and only exists for profit.
When you recruit starry-eyed kids out of college telling them that they’ll change the world at your company, well, some of those kids never grow up and realize that it’s just marketing.
I've worked on the east coast for the early half of my career, and no company has ever mentioned "making a positive change in the world" as a pitch for the job. I was hired to fix bugs and connect two API layers to each other so that a set top box could ship or so we could release the next version of a display driver. There was plenty of political diversity in the office: people from all across the political spectrum. Yet, we all worked together fine, and you almost never heard an actual political argument. Occasionally it would come up as a polite conversation at lunchtime. The rare minute it got heated, someone would maturely step in and say, hey, guys, let's get back to work and put it aside, and that was that. This is in stark contrast to the stories you hear out of west coast tech companies today! How have we managed to screw this up so badly?
I also worked for an east coast company like that for several years, and I went to grad school because I couldn’t take it anymore. This wasn’t because of the politics, it was more because life should be better than plugging together two API layers so that a display driver can ship.
I yearn for the return of that attitude, polite conversation of differences and the tolerance and rational discussion of nuanced issues which makes it possible.
> if I have a belief that my employment should make a positive change in societal issues, how could I work somewhere that I believe contributes to making things worse?
Why the binary presentation, though?
You can make the world better by doing a single thing well and respecting your customers (and their all-kinds-diversity) while doing it. Even if you're not directly contributing to BigIssue by doing it, the people who are presumably need to be able to count on a reliable supply chain that gives them the tools/services/resources they need.
Unless your work has serious atypical externalities, just doing what you're doing doesn't itself make things worse -- it make fail to do the absolute maximum it could possibly to to make one specific thing better, but if that's your focus you should be working on that thing directly. In a reasonable organization there should be a lot of opportunity to put your thumb on a scale towards continually improving all sorts of things-- without inviting disruption and discord --by threading the needle and nudging all the free choices in the right direction and respecting that other reasonable people can have different priorities.
There are an neigh uncountable number of travesties and injustices in the world and finite time and resources to fight for them... but as a society we can't stand strong to face any of the big issues if the water taps aren't flowing, the power isn't on, the communications lines aren't communicating, the spread-sheets aren't spreading, the trash (literal and figurative) isn't getting collected, and whatnot. We have to prioritize, triage, and focus on what we can accomplish.
And someone-- many many someones, in fact-- has to be the shoulders we stand on as our tallest reach for the stars.
Besides, if advocacy was really what people were sold on in large numbers how can we explain the literal order of magnitude compensation differences for rank and file engineering staff at tech companies and tech roles in non-profits? :) I think that asks me to believe that there were many people who's next alternative to a google role was taking a $40k/yr 501c3 job and google was foolish enough to offer that person a mid-six-figure compensation package.
> Unless your work has serious atypical externalities, just doing what you're doing doesn't itself make things worse
Most of the big tech companies are all encompassing enough that they all have serious externalities.
- Amazon and Microsoft face protests that they enable ICE
- FB faces protests that they enable Trump to promote hate speech
- Google faced protests over a possible Pentagon contract
> how can we explain the literal order of magnitude compensation differences for rank and file engineering staff at tech companies and tech roles in non-profits
Keep in mind that a decent percentage of employees of big tech companies are non-eng. The comp is still better than outside, but not the order of magnitude you see for eng.
In general, are you surprised that people want to have their cake and eat it too? :P There is a group for whom changing a specific issue is their top priority and they'll accept below-market comp to work at a nonprofit. There's a much larger group, especially among younger generations, who want both top of market comp and to feel like they're changing the world, and the tech companies promised they could have it all.
A number of people in big tech are facing the decision of: should I keep working at a company whose values I may no longer agree with? Or should I quit (possibly taking a cut in pay, perks, scope, caliber of eng, etc), since I may not find a big tech company whose values I completely agree with? I haven't seen a trend towards leaving yet, but the fact that the stock of big tech has been going through the roof has made it sting even harder to leave now, so I'll be curious when the market run ends how this ends up.
I suspect that when the market takes a turn for the worse we'll see a lot of attrition from the big companies to startups. When the golden handcuffs become bronze, many employees will be free to seek self actualization elsewhere.
I often wonder about the other side: Why do people who work in SV seem so militant on political issues? After all they live in a very privileged space (or "bubble") which is severely disconnected from the reality of most of the Earth, and even nearby american cities. I don't know enough about the demographics of the region and what can drive this behaviour but it is full of contradictions. For example, while they all seem invested in political causes, and seem to be using donations as a way to show virtual support to causes, I notice that they rarely venture into actual politics themselves.
>After all they live in a very privileged space (or "bubble")
It's my personal view that so much of the current political vitriol is because as a society, we've run out of things to worry about. We've reached critical mass of people solving Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and therefore, we are dwelving in to other arenas where we are feeling neglected.
I have a much more benigh benign theory: The end of mass entertainment. When we no longer listen to the same music/watch the same movies/ same tv, it's hard for people to come up common themes in discussions. Politics doesnt fit in that because usually countries have one government, and everyone has an opinion on politics, it's too easy
> 22. If our society had no social problems at all, the leftists would have to INVENT problems in order to provide themselves with an excuse for making a fuss.
because they are over educated and wealthy and it lends itself to the thought of "if i'm this smart and this successful how could i be wrong and why don't you want this life?"
>Never discussed politics at any of the companies I’ve worked for, we were always too busy with...work!
Same, and that's the conundrum.
"Activist" employees put others on the spot by querying coworkers' political views and expecting discussion. And for those who have had their head in the sand for the past few years, things like "being a Joe Rogan fan" are now considered unacceptable politics.
My take: he’s generally opposed to this kind of laborious activism and tedious “political correctness” (broadly defined). He’s had some folks on his podcast who are very outspoken on certain things (trans issues, politics, etc) that people find offensive, and they claim he’s a “gateway to the alt right” as a result. Despite Rogan self-identifying as a progressive, the label has pretty much stuck and even though he has an extremely wide variety of guests - from cutting edge technologists to comedians to Snowden - on the show, he’s forever tainted by not aligning to the activists’ goals.
My personal opinion is that they don’t like him because his platform is massive and threatens other traditional means of informing people about what to think on certain topics.
> liberals care far more about proper culture signaling than they do about the much harder and more consequential work of actual politics.
I'd argue this is more about the political climate in the US (and many other places) than about liberals specifically. Arguably for "true liberals" this shouldn't be a consideration at all but might be for conservatives.
Virtually every meaningful task humans have accomplished has been a result of groups of us putting aside our differences to unite and focus on solving the problem at hand.
??? Nice way to rewrite history. Would you say the civil rights movement was successful because it wanted to put aside differences? Or because they fought for their rights, their difference, and the privileged majority had to make concessions?
Yes very much so. They found the moral high ground and were able to persuade people on our shared humanity. No one “had” to do anything. People were compelled to as they were persuaded that we had immoral systems in terms of individuals civil rights.
A universal appeal to shared humanity is an approach that works. Shaming people into a type of morality will only invite pushback.
For some historical context, contemporaneously, the Civil Rights movement was highly controversial and, among white Americans, fairly unpopular; it's exactly the kind of thing that would have been described as politics best left out of the workplace.
"In 1964, in a poll taken nine months after the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, 74 percent of Americans said such mass demonstrations were more likely to harm than to help the movement for racial equality. In 1965, after marchers in Selma, Alabama, were beaten by state troopers, less than half of Americans said they supported the marchers."
I think we're conflating certain actions with certain messages. The words of that speech struck a nerve with people because of its universal appeal to humanity. It's oft quoted line of "...judged by content of their character, not the color of their skin" is still universally praised because of that.
Compare this to today's thoughtless and abrasive slogans or the writings of today's favored thought leaders on this and how divisive now only are the ideas but the tactics being used to coerce people into compliance.
So yeah, people at the time may have had a distaste for some of the tactics but the messaging was very popular. The riots that took place later on in the decade were a disaster and led to a new, mainstream form of conservatism led by Nixon.
I don't know if I understand your point. Are you saying that the 74% unfavorable view of civil rights demonstrations suggests that Americans disfavored demonstrations but nonetheless were strongly supportive of MLK's speech at such a demonstration?
That strikes me as a level of nuance that is frankly unlikely.
Within a year of that speech the 24th Amendment was ratified to the constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. He won the Noble Prize a little over a year later. I'd say people agreed with the message above all else because he truly appealed to a shared, universal humanity. This couldn't be done, especially in that era, without a large amount of people supporting this. An Amendment - think about that and what it takes! It almost has to be universal for that to happen. People supported these ideas. It is a myth they didn't and the evidence is the product of them.
I don't think these landmark legal events occurred because people demonstrated so much what the man and his supporters were saying. I believe people miss the forest for the trees and think if they just get a group of people together they're somehow right or will get their way. But it's about what you have to say and how you say it that matters. Peacefully organizing is a great vehicle for that but you still need the goods.
The violence that happened in the later 1960's set so much of it back IMO.
Hmm, to your first part: maybe. Adam Serwer (in that same article) argues that exposure to tales of southern violence, after the Civil War, was instrumental in changing northern Republicans' willingness to push civil rights legislation. So, similarly, in the 1960s.
Yet your conclusion is far too final: it's not a "myth" that people didn't support these changes; some people did and some didn't, as with anything. At one point in the end of 1964, a majority of people oppose the protests that led to these changes.
And in fact, the 24th Amendment faced substantial opposition from southern states; I'm not able to find contemporaneous opinion polls (and I'd be interested if you have any), but it's far from the case that it was without controversy!
I strongly disagree with your last line, however—not because violence is acceptable or productive, necessarily, but because your interpretation exculpates reactionaries who regrouped and pushed back against such changes, which I think is a highly relevant lesson for the Trump era:
Race is such a good predictor of a vote for Trump. The simplest explanation for Trump's rise is that he is a counterreaction to the election of the first Black President.
So too with the success of a cynical Southern Strategy following on the heels of the Civil Rights Era.
Why? If you asked the same question today about BLM you would also see a divergence between the two. Almost certainly not to the degree to which a strong majority favor the notion but disapprove of the demonstrations, but there's going to be a difference.
I don't know offhand of any high quality opinion surveys asking about approval of _demonstrations_ vs _BLM_ in general, so I don't know if your hypothesis is born out.
I don't see how your statement "the Civil Rights movement was highly controversial and, among white Americans, fairly unpopular" has anything to do with your reference.
You could still support the Civil Rights movement, but believe that mass demonstrations harm it.
That’s not true. The CRM was deeply unpopular to the general population. King was seen as a rowdy agitator. The CRA was passed despite public opinion, not because the activists managed to convince the population that they were human beings. The CRA was so deeply unpopular that it caused a fundamental change in the structure of our political boundaries that has lasted for 60 years. King himself explicitly shamed the “white moderate” rather than courting them.
It's actually a perfect example. It's hard to imagine everyone fighting for civil rights was previously aligned on all fronts or agreed with everything that was done along the way.
In MLK's book "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community" he talks about some of the internal battles within the civil rights community and how they explicitly tried to forge alliances with other groups. That's when I learned just how brilliant MLK was in this political / social sense.
"Structural racism" is a coded term. We have laws against discrimination and HR departments across the country bending over backwards to avoid lawsuits... but you're not asking about the problems those are intended to solve.
When you ask a question like that, what you're really asking is, "why don't workplaces have the outcomes I expect along racial lines when it comes to hiring, compensation, promotion, and more?" And implicitly, "why can't workplaces be forced (or force themselves) toward meeting the outcomes I expect?"
Those are different questions, but they're encoded in yours. And they don't really apply to the topic at hand.
Avoiding lawsuits is not at all the same as attempting to deal with the issue honestly as opposed to framing it in the same light as some new kind of competitive marketplace.
I think that's one side effect of having these gargantuan, hugely profitable tech companies. They can essentially have a huge portion of their workforce be unproductive if the essential "money machine" at each company (e.g. AdWords at Google) is running smoothly.
Other, smaller companies can't afford to have as much fat in their workforce, so their workers need to be actually focused on, you know, work, and if they're not, their lack of productivity is much more visible.
SV companies sell candidates on changing the world and disrupting the status quo. They literally target and recruit the type of people who would want to discuss politics at work.
I see this as strategically genius whether you agree with it or not. He's totally neutered the ability of employees to take strong political stances within the company going forward and he's made it clear where the company stands in away that makes it very hard for people to come back later and defend staying if they were interested in these kinds of politics.
If you want to stay focused on building a company and not on debating the subjective merits of sociopolitical systems, this is a winning move.
I agree. Further, I think this is a giant signal to what I suspect is a majority of the industry who are really exhausted about the politicization of everything, and simply want to work toward a goal they find interesting. Those of us who want to focus on actual work and not solving the totality of global problems (or at least those problems visible to wealthy, highly-educated knowledge workers concentrated in a handful of American metro areas) will have a strong incentive to look at companies like Coinbase.
I'm curious to see if Spotify management might copy this.
Whether it is a strategically genius move or not will depend on the eventual outcome. No tech company, especially one in the bitcoin/fintech sector, can pretend to be completely apolitical. So putting out public blog posts and setting strict policies that apply to employees may not fly well when the company or its leadership/executives themselves don't follow them down the line.
So it looks like those PACs reported contributions twice, once naming the actual contributor, and once naming Coinbase. I'm not sure why they'd do that - perhaps to head off FEC questions about deposits from Coinbase?
Regardless, those don't seem to be contributions directly from Coinbase, but rather artifacts of campaign finance reporting.
On an aside, there are some transactions that jump out e.g. line B of [1] where the PAC appears to have netted $5665 for 7.49 BTC in the closing days of 2017(!).
Looking further, it seems like their reporting occasionally exchanged BTC for ETH, and the contribution reported makes sense for latter. Still, for a moment it was fun to imagine that someone got a screaming deal on a heap of BTC the day after Christmas 2017
That's most likely from donations in Bitcoin. The PACs actually want real-world dollars, so sell any cryptocurrency recieved immediately. i that case, there's an entry for the "x.yyyzzz bitcoins were donated" part, and then one for "we sold x.yyyzzz via Coinbase for $n dollars". Overall, that translates to "we received $n dollars from $blah in the form of x.yyyzzz bitcoins", which presumably keeps the regulators happy.
Of course only time will tell. I'm simply predicting that it was a wise move.
Also the company is not claiming to be apolitical. They are saying they don't want employees individually engaging in politics while acting on behalf of the company.
I'm sure coinbase has plenty of political objectives. On some level business is politics. Especially a crypto company, which makes it even more important not to have your employees politically organizing in a way that could appear represents your companies politics with out any executive oversight.
The company just extended a massive bonus and exercise extension to any employee that thinks they can get a better job. This is basically an invitation for the most talented people to exit the building ASAP even if they agree strongly with the Founders’ politics. This isn’t genius: it’s a mass layoff.
Meh it's not strategically genius. The crypto community is hugely political and right-libertarian leaning. He's just signalling that he's not going against that trend.
> He's totally neutered the ability of employees to take strong political stances
He absolutely has not. I'm sure they will continue to take hard right-libertarian stances that are common in the cryptocurrency world.
"There are many unbanked and underbanked people in the world who have no ability to get a loan to buy a home, or start a business, so this kind of technology has enormous potential to improve the world over time, even if it is still early days."
- Brian Armstrong, 2 weeks ago
Seems to me that's not at all a hard right-libertarian stance.
You're projecting an exclusiveness that is just not there in the quote. Nowhere does it argue that this corporation should be the only one helping.
If anything, "this kind of technology" means the opposite of exclusivity, namely that Coinbase is part of a larger system than themselves, made of multiple corporations and other entities, and the people themselves, using this kind of technology, which it is claimed together help the underserved.
Or are you trying to argue that this for-profit corporation, or all for-profit corporations, should not be aiming to help underserved people?
I agree it's not incongruous, but it can be seen through different lenses.
Just because something doesn't contradict your idea of a hard right-libertarian, doesn't mean that it is a hard right-libertarian view.
You may read it as "identifying an underserved market", but you have start from seeing the underserved as being a market to think that way.
Another reading is to think there are people currently deprived of basic rights to low levels of personal property and interactions that most folk already have and enjoy, and the corporation says it exists to make those rights available to more people in a more egalitarian fashion than the currently broken system permits. That would make it left-libertarian, albeit the market-oriented variety.
Good reminder that non-profits, rather than, say, pharmaceutical companies, auto manufacturers, agro-chemical companies, logistics companies, etc. etc. have been the source of the leaps and bounds improvement in human welfare over the past two centuries.
There's nothing about this statement that's incompatible with right libertarianism. Right libertarians themselves do believe that their ideas would improve the world over time, as do adherents of most political ideologies in general.
With cryptocurrencies specifically, the premise is that most poor people are poor because of government over-regulation (which is also deemed responsible for monopolies) and over-taxation, and so providing the ability to circumvent both is beneficial. It's definitely a libertarian stance, although it could be either left or right libertarian by itself. But given that most cryptocurrency adepts also have a problem with fiat money, and generally try to implement an intrinsically limited money supply, it ends up aligning more with right libertarian economic prescriptions.
> But given that most cryptocurrency adepts also have a problem with fiat money, and generally try to implement an intrinsically limited money supply, it ends up aligning more with right libertarian economic prescriptions.
Perhaps so.
But this isn't about cryptocurrency adepts in general. Is there other context that shows Coinbase and/or Brian Armstrong have a problem with fiat money, and/or that they advocate for a limited money supply, or even that they advocate to reduce or avoid taxation?
Seems to me the corporation's activity is literally integrating fiat systems with cryptocurrency, including tax reporting, so it's not clear if Coinbase's longer term direction is towards cryptocurrency being its own separate system of ordinary transactions in the end, or towards it being just another option alongside and integrated with fiat for more options in ordinary life. Regardless of what cryptocurrency adepts out in the world would like it to be.
I don't think you are quite following this. The company isnt aiming to limit its own ability to achieve its political goals, it's limiting the ability of employees to promote political views while acting officially as employees.
Also I have never in my lifetime of working with many libertarian programmers heard anyone aggressively push their libertarian views in a way aimed at changing a companies internal politics. Also never heard a conservative or even really a traditional Democrat do this.
Really? I'd say it would be more diverse since people wouldn't feel like their opinions were verboten or that they had to "play along" in order to get along.
I'm not sure if you're deliberately being obtuse. But if you're not: the currently accepted meaning of diversity in the workplace is :
> Cultural diversity means that a group contains people of different races, religions, ages, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, socioeconomic statuses, nationalities, and more.
Their agreements or disagreements on political viewpoints are not what makes a pool of employees culturally diverse.
A few comments have asserted that if an existing company chooses to be apolitical, that may itself be a political act. This sounds clever, but it's not correct.
At the highest level, a company is a group of people who get together to 1) set an impactful goal, and then 2) work very hard to achieve it. The first part — the setting of the goal — is the political act. Disagreements at this level are good, and broadly healthy.
But the second part — the achieving of the goal — is purely a practical act. Here, your guiding principle is to take those actions, and only those actions, which you believe will give you the highest chance of achieving your goal.
Politicizing a company contradicts this principle: to the extent that you make the act of achievement more political, you are also making it less practical. To the extent that you allocate more budget, focus, and optimization power to X, you are also taking it away from Y.
If you make the act of achievement less practical, someone else may beat you to your goal. Your company will be less impactful than it could have been, and may even die as a result.
What Brian is saying here is: we set our goal in 2012 when we started Coinbase. We are now engaged in the practical act of achieving it. If you have a goal that's different from the one we set, no problem. Here is some money: you may use it, if you choose, to find an organization whose goals you support.
Political vs apolitical is just semantics. Will companies deciding not to be socially active have a political impact? Yes. Does not engaging in political activities support the status quo? Yes. Is a particular political group more affected by a ban on activism? Yes.
And I agree focus on their goal is a great, abstract guiding principle for a company. But the better question is does a socially active company have a more positive impact on the world?
Brian believes social activism has "the potential to destroy a lot of value at most companies, both by being a distraction, and by creating internal division." That might be true, but in many cases, I doubt the cost of employee annoyance and loss of focus is more than the benefit of enacting minor policy changes and fund diversion that could positively impact millions.
I disagree that political vs apolitical is purely semantics. Given an initial goal, there exists a policy to accomplish it that is truly apolitical. But I do broadly agree with your points on the status quo and dispersion of effect across political groups.
> But the better question is does a socially active company have a more positive impact on the world?
Your total impact tends to be greatest when all your effort is concentrated on a small surface area. An organization that optimizes for two things almost always has less total impact than it would if it optimized for either one alone. To maximize impact, you'd be better served starting a company that's 100% focused on solving the problem you wanted to solve in the first place.
> I doubt the cost of employee annoyance and loss of focus is more than the benefit of enacting minor policy and fund diversion that could positively impact millions.
Generally if you want to impact millions in a real and lasting way, it will cost you more than some minor annoyances and fund diversions — even at a company as big and successful as Coinbase. The tradeoffs here are real, and I strongly suspect Brian is speaking empirically when he talks about destruction of value.
So since global warming is more or less a political statement these days, would advocating for climate change mitigating philosophy being built into the company's DNA be political to you and therefore not allowed? Say it's a company that makes widgets that are completely orthogonal to climate change.
Yes, I would say so. eg many companies have rules against internal dating, not because they are against dating, but the possibility of problem it could cause. You can ban discussion on climate change, just because of the bitterness it could cause, not because you are taking a stand in climate change.
I wonder if this is a way for Coinbase to push politically engaged employees out of the company in order to reduce the possibility of anyone pushing for internal change like people who want worker's rights groups or unionization. Operating with a workforce who only want to turn up and write code and never discuss anything that affects them as a group puts Coinbase in a very strong negotiating position because there's almost complete information asymmetry in their favor.
The activism displayed in U.S tech is damaging both from a organizational point of view, but also its a competetitive disadvantage.
Imagine having employees who refuses to do work because 'they feel they shouldn't'. Or organizes walkouts, protests and are actively lobbying for changes in company policy to reflect their own personal values. Or protests against certain customers of the company, because they are evil in some perceived way or form.
It's smart to do what one can to get rid of these types of employees basically because they are only trouble, they add nothing with their activism in the workplace.
Now what you do on your own time on the other hand is totally up to you.
> Or protests against certain customers of the company, because they are evil in some perceived way or form.
Or protests against other employees because <reasons>.
I'm the bloke who got my boss to hire the Polish girl who cleaned our offices after I realized she had a relevant degree.
The Indian girl I worked with at the helpdesk at the start of my career approached me at a wedding for common friends and said thanks for how much I had helped and encouraged her to pick up the local language.
I'm often the bloke people talk to about this or that because I listen and neither judge nor leak (unless clearly agreed).
I'm the bloke who was happy to be let go so that another guy with less experience could keep his as the bottom fell out of the market. (Also I really didn't like that job, but it made me genuinely happy that he could stay there as he had small kids and needed a job for different reasons. Also: I got a 40% increase in my base salary when I got a new job : )
It goes without saying I strongly believe all people have the same worth.
But at Google I would not feel safe at all, because I have studied enough biology and psychology to know that men and women are different and I refuse to pretend otherwise if confronted although I am wise enough not to bring the topic up.
"Spotify shares dropped 8.8% Wednesday (Sep. 2) morning, shaving as much as $4.81 billion of its value, following a report Joe Rogan's back catalog debuted on the platform Tuesday without episodes by right-wing personalities"
I hate to be the one triggering Godwin's Law at this depth in the discussion, but oh well.
> Imagine having employees who refuses to do work because 'they feel they shouldn't'. Or organizes walkouts, protests and are actively lobbying for changes in company policy to reflect their own personal values. Or protests against certain customers of the company, because they are evil in some perceived way or form. It's smart to do what one can to get rid of these types of employees basically because they are only trouble, they add nothing with their activism in the workplace.
I think the world would have been collectively grateful if engineers at IBM and Dehomag would have refused to do some work because they felt they shouldn't [1].
Remember, politics is out there in the world. If a large enough number of people at your company are being affected by it, there's likely something wrong that's much greater than your company. History can teach us some lessons about this.
> They always have the choice to not do the work. You just don't show up and that's it. Not doing something is the easiest thing to do.
In a country where your employer controls your access to healthcare and retirement, as well as indirectly controls your access to these things for the rest of your life via references (future employers will shy away from hiring a lone person who refused to do as they were told and was fired for that reason), I would say this is not easy at all.
IMO, modern companies in America are turning into a sort of benevolent government; and that's why you have all these protests. Cut employers out of things fundamental to life like healthcare and retirement, and turn it into a true monetary exchange. Then you will have far fewer of these protests; and people might feel more comfortable quitting en masse instead.
Sorry but employees making top 5% of salaries in the country are not bound by economic necessity to their employer. That argument might have a point in amazon warehouse workers, but not on people that have plenty of job opportunities at other employers as well as self employed.
For what it's worth, Coinbase must "allow" those discussions by law in the US. In my mind, that's the kind of thing you say in a staement like this to protect yourself from a lawsuit.
I doubt Coinbase thinks employees advocating around pay/conditions are desirable for the company.
Another way to put it - you’re welcome if you’re comfortable with the status quo. In other words, young white college educated and male. All others who don’t fit in that category are more likely to not be comfortable with how society is treating them, and start that pesky trying to make things better stuff which gets in the way of business.
This must feel harsh for those on the receiving end, but is the right thing to do. It is not effective to try and turn every company into a rights activism group just because it is a group of people.
This may be a sign that it’s become increasingly hard to organize or take part in such activism outside of work. What happened?
> An alternative take on the importance of companies taking a stand on critical social issues that impact our employees and communities: when there's a vacuum of leadership from the government in dealing with these topics, businesses often need to lead more than ever.
When we have had presidents who were willing to condemn white supremacy, we tended not to call on CEOs to.
Closely related, but in the opposite direction: the Waltons (of Wal-Mart), Koch brothers (industrial conglomerate including such banal brands as Molex), and Green family (of Hobby Lobby) all got involved because they thought that they needed to take a critical stand on issues where they thought a leadership vacuum existed. They felt that the government wasn't doing enough to support their notion of an ideal way of life.
The country is tearing itself apart right now because we really do have two camps with opposite beliefs that each feel they are fighting for the survival of the nation itself. Read what the other side says about themselves, and not just what your side says about them.
Note that “corporate power” here actually refers to primarily to labor unions which operated in coordination with capital of the Catholic corporatist social doctrine, which was a major ideology of the late 19th and early-to-mid-20th century, competing against both capitalist opposition to labor organization and socialist approaches to labor organization.
Last night he was given the chance to unequivocally condemn the Proud Boys and instead told them to "stand back and stand by", which the group themselves has taken as a rally cry. Just like how after Charlottesville, white supremacists took his ambiguous response as a sign of approval.
He doesn't condemn, he validates with just enough deniability that people can make lists like the one you posted, while everyone who is following along sees exactly what is happening.
>Last night he was given the chance to unequivocally condemn the Proud Boys and instead told them to "stand back and stand by
Let's be honest here: if Trump had "unequivocally" said "I condemn White Supremacy", what would have happened, practically? Do you think for a second that the media would have suddenly "let him off the hook"? Problem solved? No more white supremacy talk?
There is footage of him disavowing the KKK, and David Duke, going back 20 years, believe it or not. Has it made a difference?
The fact that question was even asked demonstrates just how far the US political system has fallen. Kind of embarrassing. The fact that Trump doesn't simply repeat the condemnation -- for whatever that's worth -- is sad and polarizing. But let's not pretend it changes anyone's opinion on anything.
>He doesn't condemn, he validates with just enough deniability
Much like many Democrats did with regards to the looting and burning of cities.
I did, unfortunately. I haven't really followed the media's portrayal of it, but I do know that the Proud Boys' website now says "stand back and stand by" prominently on their home page above a call for recruits.
English is not my first language but I think it was the host who introduced that term?
Also he was pushed really hard and seemed willing to denounce violent far right, not just in sweeping terms.
Also: Contrast this to Biden (who could easily be my favorite except for his candidate for vice president) who AFAIK refuse to denounce ANTIFA at all.
I dislike Trump and I am scared by how many seems to be close to worshipping him as a family values guy despite his two broken marriages and other problems.
That said, I think he will easily win again this year. Why?
- underdog sympathy: media tackles him harder and it seems easy to see as an unbiased observer (Again: not a native speaker, but at least I don't want either of them, although in Bidens case that is more because of his choice of vice president candidate.)
- BLM is out everyday to remind people to vote for a law-and-order president
- the Left still underestimating the discontent in the working class
- Trump simultaneously bringing home troops and strengthening the armed forces so people won't lose their lives or their jobs (for now).
- His support for law enforcement (unlike HN-ers many people seems to support the police)
- He is actually wildly successful in certain areas. He has actually managed to get more peace in the Middle East than a number of other presidents, including Obama who got the Nobel peace price.
That said: I don't like him.
I'd rather have any decent engineer or business(wo)man or teacher who knows a bit about politics, can keep their mouth shut at times etc.
> English is not my first language but I think it was the host who introduced that term?
It was not.
Relevant portion of the transcript:
WALLACE: “Are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacists and militia groups…”
TRUMP: “Sure…”
WALLACE: “And to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities as we saw in Kenosha, and as we’ve seen in Portland”
TRUMP: “Sure, I’m prepared to do it, but I would say almost everything I see is from the left-wing not from the right-wing. I’m willing to do anything, I want to see peace…”
WALLACE: “Then do it, sir.”
BIDEN: “Do it, say it.”
TRUMP: “What do you want to call them? Give me a name.”
WALLACE: “White supremacists and right-wing militias”
BIDEN: “Proud Boys”
Trump: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. But I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about Antifa and the left.”
WALLACE: “And to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities as we saw in Kenosha, and as we’ve seen in Portland”
[...]
Trump: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.
Trump parroted the language in the request by Chris Wallace and the named individuals from Biden. It was a gotcha request.
> Trump parroted the language in the request by Chris Wallace
No, he didn't. And while he does have trouble focussing long enough to string together a full coherent sentence, he's not so incompetent with words and shirt phrases to not understand the difference with, or to a
inadvertently swap, the terms with very different meaning “stand back”, and particularly “stand by” when intending to repeat “stand down”.
“stand down” means to demobilize.
“stand back” means to pause, usually for planning or emotional reflection.
“stand by” means to be ready for action or orders.
Trump speaks in code, so it's hard to take any of his words at face value. This could be interpreted as "nuance" or, in context with a pattern of behavior, it can be seen as an sly sort of encouragement -- which is how the Proud Boys are taking his comment.
If the way the comment was received is incorrect, then it is up to Trump to correct it. Obviously, he will not be doing so.
This is what I hear: he says white supremacists should be “totally condemned” which is as harsh as an indictment from a 6 year old. And then proceeds to say that the media treated them unfairly, and the “other side” was worse because they dressed in black and used riot gear.
If you say a group should be condemned but then proceed to justify their actions it’s barely a slap on the wrist, and coming from the president the lack of a strong response is actually a form of encouragement.
> This may be a sign that it’s become increasingly hard to organize or take part in such activism outside of work. What happened?
I might be over-simplifying but the vast majority of people most affected by political decisions no longer have the incomes and free time to partake in such activism.
For example if you cared about something like workers' unions (let's assume the relatively well-run, non-corrupt version), the people in the best place to perform the activism do not feel they need the unions because they have the spare income and time (ex. tech workers at TechCompanyX). Those who would be most helped by the activism (ex. workers in TechCompanyX's factories/warehouses/wherever) have grueling work schedules and lower pay.
It could also be a sign that people feel more empowered to express themselves in work and feel that a workplace that values their ideals is preferable to one that doesn't. Particularly in tech where we're all quite comfortably off we can worry about these things higher up the hierarchy of needs.
It will be interesting to see where this takes the culture of Coinbase.
If you're going to talk zeitgeists, it could also be millenarianism, as the belief that the old order is dwindling and about to blow away and must be replaced with something better, the belief in a reckoning, is far from exclusive to either side of the political spectrum but instead is present everywhere.
Or that it's becoming easier to perform activism within work contexts? Especially with left-leaning causes that always sound good, justified and fair in principle, so they are easy for public/PR-sensitive companies to adopt without rocking the boat.
Essentially that means that for the company, it ends up being a win-win situation. They satisfy their employees' urges to perform activism and they get brownie points from the public for promoting a "noble" sounding cause with minimal effort, all the while not having to rock the boat by having to defend their opinion because it's defacto assumed to be good and justified. E.g. have a look at the whole Goya Foods incident to find out what happens if a company happens to support a non activist-approved point of view.
Assuming there's enough non-activists in the company to actually get some real work done while the primadonnas are blowing hot air and ganging up on the the next victim
If one were to engage with the works of leftist thinkers, one would recognize that the workplace is actually the central point for activism as it is where one seizes the means of production.
From some point of view, this might be viewed as management taking a harsh line against employees who make demands on their employers to do something other than maximize shareholder returns.
One of the longstanding contradictions of Silicon Valley ethos is that we will simultaneously talk about "mission" and "impact"—and, implicitly, the social impact of our work—while applauding management efforts to stamp out employee activism as a principled stance.
At the same time, as American politics in particular become increasingly polarized, many of us may be forced to decide between being professionals—and the apoliticism that implies—and being engaged citizens.
Edit: Reading some other posts here, I'm struck by some other trends at play:
- The shifting of—or, more pointedly, fragmentation of the "Overton Window" of acceptable behavior.
- The longstanding tendency in tech companies to have porous boundaries between "work" and "social" spheres.
- The above-mentioned rhetoric in tech companies to promote an idea of "mission" that goes beyond mere profit.
Along with increasing political polarization and (worse) delegitimization, these are all trends that make it harder to keep politics out of the workplace, and harder to balance "activism" with "professional" conduct.
I don't think Coinbase's approach will prove to be a lasting one.
Being proffeshional does not neccessarily imply neutrality when government policy contradicts science or even basic common sence.
Proffeshional without stones to stand up to authority/management is what gave us Chernobyl and Challanger disasters, Boeing 737, massive famine in China, and, debatably, 2008.
Agreed. My point was more that there seems to be broad and increasing disagreement on what professionalism entails—both in terms of an obligation to speak up, as you say, and in terms of politely avoiding certain topics in the workplace.
I'd argue that a lot of engineering disasters could/should have been avoided by adhering to standard safety practices and engineering ethics. This is very germane to the work/mission of the business and has little to do with the sorts of external political activism that Coinbase is trying to eschew.
How does policy "contradict" science? Science doesn't tell us what we _should_ do, it tells us what is and what may be the consequences of decisions we make. The policy you say "contradicts science" is just promoting values and ignoring consequences that you disagree with.
All three had known issues (in the case of Chernobyl, for decades), but averting disaster gave people, specifically the engineers, confidence to continue.
Counbase's approach here is fairly on-the-nose. That's unlikely to be the lasting/widespread one.
OTOH, if the trend continues towards employees and/or management demanding more political positioning from their companies... some sort of "on board or out" dynamic is inevitable. Maybe "on board or shut up," in reality.
No position, including neutrality, will be comfortable for everyone and no company wants political factioning in their ranks.
Ultimately though, I think employee opinions are less operative than some of these reports would have us think.
The problem with recent political activism in companies has been that it isn't fair. It has been acceptable to advocate for liberal causes (for example for affirmative action), but not for conservative ones (against affirmative action).
It might be ok if both were allowed equally. But if only one viewpoint is allowed, that's not really democracy.
Presumably these companies are acting in a way that they believe will maximize their profits. That is what we expect them to do. Corporations are not democracies. Labor unions exist to give workers more of a say in how they are treated by their employers. If they want democracy in the workplace, these workers should organize to advocate for fairer treatment.
If you spout liberal ideas at a conservative company, you will find disagreement. If you spout conservative ideas at a liberal company (most of SF tech), you will find yourself out of a job.
Oh? Do you thinj companies like fox media corp or Raytheon are places where you can push for liberal political activism? Because I can tell you you would be incorrect. Those companies have a clear opinion on those matters and will not be kind to liberal activism.
Haven't we seen a ton of criticism towards police last spring and summer? I remember myself walking past a few "defund NYPD" demonstrations, watched over by police officers keeping their cool.
I may want to apply to coinbase. I am really fed up with 'activist' employees and the toxic environment they bring. All I want is to just focus on engineering and ship features/improvements. Bringing politics to the office(thanks Google!) has been one of the worst things to happen in the 21st century for tech companies. Interestingly enough google has been going through absolute hell with these cancerous employees and other companies will have the same issues by embracing their failed strategy. Lets leave politics at home or outside the office where it belongs.
>All I want is to just focus on engineering and ship features/improvements.
Yeah if there wasn't the pesky world around all the engineering and we could all just stare at our stock options while we sit in our gentrified neighbourhoods and pretend the world doesn't exist.
You can ignore politics but politics doesn't ignore you. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil is an unworthy attitude for a democratic citizen. The etymology for the word 'idiot' comes from 'idios', meaning 'one's own', in ancient Greece signifying a person who is only concerned with their private interest, rather than living an active life and participating in civic affairs. To be an idiot was to be withdrawn, isolated and selfish, to not participate in the public, political life of the state.
Given how much people nowadays love to invoke the Greeks and our ancient Western traditions, maybe it's time to remind everyone of the meaning of that word again.
The comment author does not advocate ignoring the world, he wants to separate his engineering work from politics and thus wants to look for employers who do not push a particular political program on him. Which seems a perfectly valid (and attractive to me) view.
You cannot ignore your dreams, your health, your family, social ills, the air quality, politics and a myriad of other things in the world around you. But if you focus on all of those all the time you will achieve nothing. Imagine a great inventor, scientist, engineer or artist working on his next idea. Do you really want to make him jump and go demonstrate for/against your list of hot button topics?
Wanting to separate engineering work from reality is precisely what Barrin92 is saying should not and can not be done. Engineering work isn't just some insulated game that gives you tokens to buy things you need in the real world. The engineering work is itself part of the real world.
Separation of church and state is nothing more than a limitation on the government, prohibiting it from establishing a national religion or inhibiting religious practice. It is not a claim that religion can never be discussed in government, or that government can never be discussed in religious practice.
I think this is all contextual to our times. We just have so much disagreement on what we are sure is moral/immoral.
If the different political sides had more balance, I think it'd make sense to permit a modest bit in the workplace.
But today the left is so sure of its position to the point where they think they are in the black & white moral right _and_ they are increasingly dominant and loud in our cultural institutions and many corporate institutions that it is substantially interfering with basic ability to think.
Everything is part of the real world. Would you go to a mattress company and demand that they make it harder for your political opponents to get a good night's sleep?
No, I wouldn't, but I don't know how that is relevant. If a mattress company refused to sell mattresses to gay people, I wouldn't do business with that mattress company, and I would also approve of employees of that mattress company taking part in political activism to oppose that practice.
I guess I don't see how the response is relevant. If Coinbase refused to sell cryptocurrency to gay people, I'd be all in favor of employees and external political activists saying they should - and Coinbase agrees, they don't expect to be apolitical with respect to the actual work that they do.
To some degree. It's very possible for employees to have polite discussions over the lunch table about political topics, and to the extent Coinbase is trying to prohibit those discussions I'm against it.
Is there a way to have employees say e.g. "the company needs to endorse suchandsuch political slogan" or "the company needs to oppose suchandsuch candidate" without yelling? I don't think so.
This is impossible. When the very technology you work on is employed in entirely political ways (i.e. dragonfly), you cannot separate work from the world.
Cash is a technology that is one of the biggest enablers of drug trafficking and child prostitution. Does this serve as an argument for employees of the Treasury Department (which prints and mints said cash) to engage in politics in the workplace?
Much of technology is agnostic to politics, and enables much evil and good alike. This does not, in my mind, serve as justification for technology creators to intertwine politics with the creation of said technology.
Which is a good and laudable thing! But you're talking about the place the Treasure Department has in advocating for political positions that are inline with it's mission. I'm talking about whether Bob the coin stamp machine operator holds responsibility for building a technology that is, in some cases, used for nefarious purposes.
Bob doesn't want to be accosted by Richard from accounting because he doesn't do enough to advocate for anti-money laundering political causes or senatorial candidates. Bob just wants to show up and do his job.
Hey, I've been writing on planning an article discussing some components of open-source and ethics, and I would really love to use a (variation) of your sentence. Would you mind if I did that, and if so, would you like me to include some form of direct attribution to you? You can find my email in my profile.
While it isn't possible to separate engineering from politics in general, the sentiment is doubly hilarious when your goal is to enable a new global monetary system.
The Coinbase blog post is directly self-contradictory. First it lists some things that they focus on in order to accomplish their mission. One of those is this:
> Enable belonging for everyone: We work to create an environment where everyone is welcome and can do their best work, regardless of background, sexual orientation, race, gender, age, etc.
Then, just a few short paragraphs later, they list things that they focus minimally on, because they are "not directly related to the mission." One of those things is this:
> Broader societal issues: We don’t engage here when issues are unrelated to our core mission, because we believe impact only comes with focus.
It doesn't get more blatantly contradictory than that.
I think what they're saying is that will work to make the environment within the company as welcoming as possible. However, they will not try and solve that problem for society at large. Although you may disagree with the approach, it doesn't seem contradictory to me.
And again, it's a false notion to think that those are two separate things. You can't, to use example that I hope is obvious, support making your work environment welcoming to everyone regardless of sexual orientation, while also refusing to oppose or even discuss a political movement or politician who would throw people in jail for having a certain sexual orientation.
While I would find that political position abhorrent, I wouldn't expect and certainly not demand that my company issue a specific public statement denouncing it.
You don’t need to expect or demand that, although I certainly would. The problem is when a company claims they care about that issue as part of their mission, but then prohibits employees from taking a stand on that issue or even discussing that issue.
People can care about an issue without taking a stand or even discussing the issue.
This "with us or against us" attitude is precisely what makes it difficult to get along with activists.
The only reason it is "a problem" is that it doesn't conform to the long term goals of the activists. The company needs to have goals that are separate from those of the activists in order to survive.
My wager is they de facto won't prohibit any discussion between consenting and mutually interested coworkers that doesn't negatively impact their work output, which seems "fair enough" to me.
Are there no lines the op, or you, would not cross in the pursuit of your engineering work? Perhaps you're okay with Coinbase's mission specifically, but are you saying that you're okay with _literally anything_ in the pursuit of good engineering?
Perhaps you and the OP would be quite happy, say, writing code for a lab that makes novel fentanyl analogues for the express purpose of including them in black-market knockoff heroin powder, which in turn leads to a number of deaths (accurately cutting in your microgram-potent meds is hard, and sometimes your downstream supply chain makes a hit that's got too high a fentanyl analogue/cut material ratio, go figure!), or an industrial system that captures unsuspecting babies to then drown them, strip their flesh, and harvest their valuable bones (not really that realistic in our normal reality, but per http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=25967.0 it works great in Dwarf Fortress! or it did, anyway, until that got patched out because of said bone harvester), or hell, let's just Godwin on it and say you'd be perfectly happy writing automation tooling to make Treblinka 10% more efficient.
The respondent, whom you so readily chastise, has a quite valid point that we can't separate our engineering work from "politics" (ethics, really, but there does seem to be a side in this debate that prefers to say "politics", since that evokes more the admittedly annoying horse race electoraliasm and doublespeak-driven world of actual politics and takes away from the thrust of the issue, which is ethics, which happen to often overlap with politics but are very much their own thing) ever. That's an important thing to recognize, especially in an industry that has persistent issues with laying ethics aside in pursuit of "great inventions" (let's be pragmatic, it's mostly in pursuit of profit, with some good inventions as an occasional byproduct).
What I think the respondent may be getting at is that there is a significant population in the industry that probably does have some lines they won't cross, but is privileged and willing to cross a great many lines that won't affect them personally. You perhaps think that's a laudable stance, and you can hold that opinion if you wish, but you should do so with the recognition that there are a number of people that will see that less as a commitment to honorable professional detachment and more as a willingness to trod over the rights and wellbeing of the less fortunate so long as it doesn't injure you immediately. I'd argue that it's important thing to at least consider in an industry that often speaks of changing the world for the better--perhaps that was more it drinking the consultant kool-aid about what millenials value in their work and deciding it needed to work that into messaging, if not action, but hey, if it wants to say that, it ought to put its money where its mouth is.
This response is mis-characterization and is acting in bad faith, no one in this thread is asking for forced demonstrating. That's not actually a thing that's happening.
> The comment author does not advocate ignoring the world, he wants to separate his engineering work from politics and thus wants to look for employers who do not push a particular political program on him. Which seems a perfectly valid (and attractive to me) view.
A lot of engineering work is inherently political. For instance, an engineer designed the gas chambers at Auschwitz and by doing his engineering work he supported the politics of the holocaust since his work and those politics are inseparable. In most cases, the connection is not so obvious and clear cut, but it's still there.
> he wants to separate his engineering work from politics
So did Wernher von Braun. I've intentionally selected the most extreme example that came to mind readily to illustrate the point: designing rockets for the Nazis to be built by slaves and used to carry bombs to kill civilians has moral and political implications. It's reasonable to judge von Braun for knowingly participating in atrocities even if his only interest was in rocket science. It's not possible to separate the engineering from the politics.
Cryptocurrency has political consequences, though they're not as obvious as those of ballistic missiles. For a company to work on cryptocurrency trading and pretend to be apolitical is disingenuous because if the company is successful, its actions will have a political impact. I'm inclined to think that anyone engaging in acts with political consequences should be proactive about what those consequences will be. Most technological change comes with the potential for political consequences.
Of course, there's engineering work that's less political. Making incremental improvements to the efficiency of widely-used infrastructure is usually fairly neutral; it's good for everyone, but doesn't really change the balance of power.
>Do you really want to make him jump and go demonstrate for/against your list of hot button topics?
Yes I do and countless of scientists and artists do exactly that, which is why a lot of them ended up being subject to McCarthyism paranoia at one point or the other. Brilliant scientists, more than anyone else maybe, need to engage the political world to understand what influence what they built has on it. Technologists being painfully unaware of the political ramifications of their work, if anything, got us to where we are right now.
It's no coincidence that the politically detached scientist is the archetypical citizen of autocratic countries. The technologist who does not care for politics is today, the most sought after person in China.
Your strawman argument is invalid to what I said. I spend an inordinate amount of time researching each candidates views and each propositions pros and cons. Before election day I usually set aside a day or two to deep dive into every choice I make. I take voting very seriously as people have died to give me the luxury to vote. These actions all occur outside of the office where they belong. That being said leave politics out of the office.
Voting is literally an infinitesimal part of politics. Voting is an instantaneous act, and then it's done. That is not politics.
All labor is "activism" performed in service of a specific outcome, because every action is inherently ideological. Only tools are morally neutral -- not the actions performed with them.
What you spend your time doing, introduces an influence that drives nature and society in one direction over another. If you make tools for microlending, you are contributing to the economic activity of disconnected portions of the world population. If you make tools for surveilling undocumented immigrants, you are contributing to the apparatus which continues to strip and violate the human rights of large groups of people.
Different degrees of separation warrant different levels of attribution. But no one is completely inculpable.
This may sound like a troll, but how do we delineate what politics belong in the office and what do not?
As I noted elsewhere in this thread, I think it's more ambiguous these days, not less.
As a few concrete examples:
* Say I refuse to buy Chinese-made goods because I oppose the treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. What do I do if my employer considers doing business in China? Should I not mention this, because it's "political"?
* What if it's 1933, and my employer is IBM, and the customer is Nazi Germany?
* Say I oppose H1B visas because they take jobs away from American citizens, and my employer considers expanding the H1B workforce. Should I speak out against it, or hold my tongue because my motives are "political"?
* Say I believe in equal rights for gay couples, and my employer is considering expanding health coverage to same-sex partners. Should I speak out in favor of it?
In each of these examples, it seems to me there's a spectrum of options, ranging from:
A. No constraints on in-office behavior; I speak out about anything.
B. In the office, I am purely a shareholder-profit-maximizing robot.
I don't think either of those extremes is very satisfying—I expect many of us would say it is noble to oppose selling adding machines to Nazi Germany, but that we'd have many more questions when it comes to some of the other examples.
Unfortunately, I think that means that there's no simple answer here. "No politics in the workplace" can result in ghastly, amoral outcomes (selling adding machines to the Nazis).
But "every culture war, all the time" is a great way to be a dick.
I think my personal code here is, "try not to be a dick." Past that point, I don't think there are easy answers.
Their sacrifice wasn’t any less important or necessary to the expansion of the democracy in the United States. In fact, it was this “bringing politics to the work” that provided the means for workers having real representation for them in government in the first place.
>Yeah if there wasn't the pesky world around all the engineering and we could all just stare at our stock options while we sit in our gentrified neighbourhoods and pretend the world doesn't exist.
The issue with "activist" employees isn't so much that they want to bring politics to work (which I can see arguments for and against). It's that the new "activist" employees insist everyone's politics be the same, else you become a target.
I think "no politics" offices will crush it in the future, if by nothing more than being able to focus on the product.
Your logic is sound: politics are a distraction, so offices where politics are put aside will be more productive. But I know a lot of VERY smart people who wouldn’t sign up for that workplace. Especially if there are social and political ramifications to the product being built or the customers being served (there almost always are - hence the cliche “making the world a better place” goal of any startup).
>But I know a lot of VERY smart people who wouldn’t sign up for that workplace.
Sure, that's the trade-off.
In a vacuum we all want to "make the world a better place". Does cancelling academics who appear on Joe Rogan's podcast "make the world a better place"? Does having a coworker cancelled or fired because of a stupid joke "make the world a better place"? I don't know; I don't think so.
On the other hand, I think there should be internal political discussion regarding policy at a place like Facebook.
What are the politics relevant to your job? It's not easy to answer.
Are there really that many? A lot of very smart people tend to end up at Google, FB or Amazon, their ethics don't seem to be the deciding factor in the choice of employer.
GP never said to ignore politics. You are the one that brought that up. They said to leave them out of the office. There is plenty of time for politics before and after work. Bringing your politics in to work just makes for an uncomfortable work environment for you co-workers.
Brian Armstrong pretty clearly stated that position:
> Policy decisions: If there is a bill introduced around crypto, we may engage here, but we normally wouldn’t engage in policy decisions around healthcare or education for example.
Are there other "political consequences" around crypto that you'd have Coinbase engage in?
'the office' or the firm today, is for better or worse our primary means by which we can exercise influence. That is why tech workers are bringing politics into the firm in the first place, because they realise, rightly, that it is one of the most potent channels to actually exercise change, and that's why so many people want to keep politics out of it. The workplace is the one space where your political opponent can't simply escape from politics, and has to be confronted with your views, which is after all the actual point of political life.
People realise that rather than the local town hall, the large internet platforms, their workplace, and their social media feed have become the public space of ideas. That's why the free speech debate focuses so much on internet platforms, and why 'it's privately owned' has long lost meaning to anyone in the debate.
Keeping politics 'out of the workplace', at least in our environment today, is basically to say to keep politics out, period. It's not the apolitical position, it is the 'idiotic' position because it intents to keep politics out of the one place that actually matters the most in this day and age.
You haven't really provided any arguments for why converting companies (entities providing goods and services) into mini political parties is a good idea. Anyone can yell about "status quo" and "change". In reality, "status quo" is frequently an ill defined concept and the benefits of change depend entirely on what kind of change it is.
When I work for a company, I provide my labor in exchange for payment. I am then free to use my money to support an activist organization or a cause. So are all other employees.
Corporate activism, on the other hand, is inherently degenerate. It means your employer withholds resources from improving the business or paying higher salaries. They instead apply those resources to some causes of their choosing. Any employee who doesn't agree with the cause is effectively coerced into supporting it unless they quit. So is every customer. The goods and services become inherently tangled with an ideology of some sort.
Why should a model where everyone is free to pursue their personal activism be replaced with a model where people are coerced to pursue activism "approved" by corporate execs?
The post doesn't argue for converting companies into political parties, merely that it's natural for workers to be politically active at work, given the continued atomization of modern society making the workplace a default place for political activity, especially since so much of day to day life and social activity takes place there.
It's also a straw man to talk about corporate execs leading the activism, the post was talking about the workers themselves.
> The workplace is the one space where your political opponent can't simply escape from politics, and has to be confronted with your views
It is for this exact reason that many people object to politics being overtly brought into the workplace against people's will.
If someone wants to discuss politics (or religion or sexuality or anything else that makes us all human) with you, have at it. If they don't want to, you need to stop.
No means no here as well. The fact that they can't leave imposes a higher burden on consent, not a lower one, IMO.
It’s always been this way in the west, post industrialization. People treating it as some novel development are just ignorant of history. Why do you think so many democracies have “labor” or “workers” parties? Myriad progressive movements and political parties were born out of and materially supported by workers organizing their workplaces.
If people don't want to bring the political battlefield into every venue, that's not only valid, but wise.
You are not going to innovate or create anything if you're fighting all day, every day. Constantly distracted. The purpose of a company is to bring people together to CREATE something of value. To solve problems. Hopefully to improve lives on some vector. And you do that most effectively by rowing in the same direction, focused.
People spending their day on Twitter or Slack or in the office halls arguing about the war is not productive. It's mostly just destructive. They're certainly not inventing anything, or curing a disease, or improving energy efficiency, or creating tools, or educating, or entertaining, or inspiring, or anything else additive.
You've misrepresented the quote, and in the process invalidated your whole point.
The original quote is diplomacy is war by other means. And it had very specific connotations to explicitly adversarial political relationships. Politics is much larger than diplomacy, and indeed as Aristotle concluded there is nothing in a society that is not politics.
It's perfectly reasonable to separate the workplace and the rest of the world. No need to ignore everything to limit your discussion at work.
You can also still take action - by leaving. That's exactly what this policy is encouraging with a generous exit package. Why is that not acceptable? Why does the corporation have to follow what you decide?
I also believe that every citizen has certain roles and responsibilities in a democracy(voting for instance). However, the workplace is not exactly a democracy. The only thing that I will definitely participate is in the work that I am getting paid for. All other endeavors of the company should be voluntary. If the company is directly or indirectly forcing these on me, then I will consider it as a breach of my agreement with the company.
As a member of several different marginalized groups, I want to be able to go to work and do my job without having to hear my coworkers argue about whether I get to exist. I’m well aware that politics doesn’t ignore me, but for my own sanity I don’t want to think about it any more than necessary, either.
Great. Go work at a firm that reserves time for activism under a common cause. Plenty of us don’t want to do that at work, and will look for firms that let us focus on engineering for our time at work, so we can reserve our free time to do as we please.
A lot of harm has been done by humans “just doing their job.” The world needs people who are willing to stand against those who take no interest in weighing the morality of their work.
For example, AGI will be built either by accident or intentionally by sociopaths at Google, etc. All decisions at a certain scale are inevitably political, and choosing to ignore the politics in those contexts is in itself a political position.
There is a difference between being aware of the negative externalities of your work, and using your position in your company as a platform to accomplish your own partisan political goals. The former should be encouraged and the latter discouraged.
Much of the discussion here today is confused by the intermingling of so many concepts under the singular term "politics".
I feel that this is the same argument as the kneeling football players argument. People should be allowed to use their position of power - however limited or not it may be - as their platform for protest. If it becomes so burdensome that you have to put rules in place to prevent it, that's a very clear indication of an underlying problem with society. Creating policy to ignore the problems of society that impact your own workforce is going to leave you with a workplace filled with people who are largely unimpacted.
I think we probably agree in this. The extent to which you use your position of power as a platform for espousing your political views is the key. In my mind, a football player kneeling is akin to a colleague wearing a BLM pin in a prominent place on their clothing at regular company meetings. This kind of "activism" is acceptable in my mind; it doesn't interfere with the activities or purpose of the setting.
But if the football player interrupts the game and starts running around with a BLM flag in the middle of a play, that's inappropriate. Or if my manager decides to use the first 5 minutes of every standup to have a group discussion about libertarian ethics.
There's no bright line between which speech is appropriate and which in inappropriate and it's all subjective; and I would certainly oppose any sort of legislation that impinges on the expression of free speech in this area. Society can negotiate these rules in the course of social etiquette, not in the court of law.
But c'mon, when we're at work we're here to get shit done, just let us focus on that. If a group of coworkers wants to organize around common political goals, do it amongst yourselves. Go ahead and use a conference room and work laptops even, if it's after hours and not disrupting business.
Yes, humans have created harm "just doing their job", such as purposefully making addictive apps like youtube or social media sites like Facebook that make people depressed, or gathering vast amounts of personal data for targeted advertising.
Except this has nothing to do with that. It has do with a group of people that insist that everyone get behind their pet cause and use their job to promote whatever activist belief they have - and negatively affect everyone else who may not agree with them.
I'd stand behind anyone who wants to protest their companies business model - like the executive at Amazon who protested the treatment of a union organizer (which was racist and absolutely disgusting). I'm not going to get behind the culture of activism which has nothing to do with civil disobedience.
> A lot of harm has been done by humans “just doing their job.”
I'd say most harm was done by humans who did not just do their job, but thought they knew how everyone else has to do their job, live their lives etc, by political activists.
You might think of activism only as what those do that you're politically aligned with. What are those on the opposite side who work just as hard to bring about their ideas of society?
What serves the public better, a utility company that "just does its job", or a utility company that snoops around people's garbage, identifies dissenters and then stops supplying water to them (because otherwise you'd be aiding the enemy)?
The argument of ethics always exists. As far as I understand the parent comment, they are talking about scenarios where a political position does not necessarily align with the ethics. For example, ending racial discrimination is a right thing to do. But ending racial discrimination by running a campaign on Social Media isn't something that everyone will agree with.
I think each side needs to have sympathy for each other. I totally understand not wanting to hear about politics. I'd love for the world to be boring enough that work could stay work. But on the flip side, a lot of people have skin in the game, so to speak, and can't disentangle politics from their life. Being able to ignore politics right now is a very privileged, very lucky position. I have no doubt that if you surveyed various politically active employees, they'd love it if they didn't have to think about politics. Unfortunately that's not their decision.
People can be as politically active as they want, on their own time and on their own dime.
Ironically, the people preaching activism in the workplace would be livid if a religious believer proselytized their faith at the workplace, despite the believer having as strong a belief in their ideas as the activists do in theirs. Quite the double standard.
This comparison resonated with me especially once I've learned how "deep" political views are, similar to religious views. Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" is about this. Preaching politics in the workplace will scratch the same nerves that preaching religion will - deeply held beliefs that can cause strong reactions to people who agree or disagree with them.
Perhaps religious believers should be free to proselytize their faith at work. It might not be the most effective venue to do it at, but why should they be forbidden from following their conscience?
Well, in fairness, if someone's religion had reliable, study backed evidence that the world was going to face a catastrophic climate based future, I'd probably be fine with them proselytizing in the workplace.
I don't begrudge the dislike of workplace politics—again, I'd love to not talk about this. But for some groups, i.e. black Americans, it may not seem like a choice of whether they can be political. Indeed I'm a little surprised more Asians in tech aren't concerned at the president's rhetoric about the "China virus". Remember, it's within living memory that the US government rounded up Asian Americans and put them into internment camps.
> "Well, in fairness, if someone's religion had reliable, study backed evidence that the world was going to face a catastrophic climate based future, I'd probably be fine with them proselytizing in the workplace."
While I agree on the need to address climate change urgently itself, I must point out that progressives would be infuriated if the same level of evidence were demanded for the scientific validity of beliefs regarding various identity groups they support. Again, a very clear double standard.
> "Indeed I'm a little surprised more Asians in tech aren't concerned at the president's rhetoric about the "China virus"."
You shouldn't be. News stories like the Harvard Asian-American admissions lawsuit and California's Proposition 209 repeal and many, many others have made it amply clear that progressives are no friends of Asians either, but at a much deeper level.
“Do people like me get to exist in public life” is often a hot topic of political discussion, but it’s not a discussion I’m interested in having or even hearing about at work. Not sure I’d consider this “privilege”.
"Activist" is being used to describe an extremely broad range of employees.
It's one thing for an employee to be activist within the company about new (or even existing) features/products/etc, because that is part of the company's mission and business ops and its the kind of feedback a company should get before it introduces a potentially controversial product/feature to the market, or about problematic products/features that should be retired. Otherwise you end up with companies like Palantir, or unethical business models based on loot boxes and youth gambling.
It's another thing for an employee to take external politics that aren't directly or indirectly related to the company's business, and try to make the company and other employees take a stand on those political issues. Generally, the only time this is appropriate is if, for example, those political issues directly affect a large segment of the customer base and taking a position is also a deliberate act of marketing. (See, e.g., Patagonia, Nike and even Hobby Lobby, but contrast with Chikfila.) Otherwise, you just end up alienating a large portion of your employees and customers to the overall detriment of the business.
See how toxic the politically active (in the workplace) employees are: i am getting downvoted simply for saying that I would choose an apolitical company if I was looking for a job...
Assuming young white males think the same thing. They had to bring age, race, and sex in to decide what they assume the political beliefs are of the majority of the site.
When someone tells us what they think, and we dismiss it by saying that's exactly what someone of their race would be expected to think, that's racism in one of its worst manifestations.
I think the original blog post made a very important point: We may all agree that there are issues, but there is a lot of disagreement in how problems should be solved. For example, some think that you should solve problems with the system, through elections, bills, etc., while others think a violent revolution and communism is the only way forward.
Your position regarding thinking everyone who isn't political at work is naive or evil is not helping the problem. This is only alienating people who already find such aggressive and exaggerated statements wrong.
I don't disagree with your underlying feeling here, that is to say I'm on your side of the fence. But don't you think it's a bit extreme to label people sociopaths, insane, evil, incompetent, for expressing their desire to work in a place where they can focus on their craft? Your last sentence is actually really threatening as well.
I can think of many reasons people might find this appealing. They may be incredibly politically engaged in their personal life and want work to be a place of focus. They might disagree with the political solutions that their coworkers favour, which is totally okay! But it would be extremely draining for that person.
Please, start with the best interpretation of people rather than labelling broad swaths of people as wicked and mentally ill. This is a great opportunity for discussion!
> But don't you think it's a bit extreme to label people sociopaths, insane, evil, incompetent, for expressing their desire to work in a place where they can focus on their craft?
I don't think you can ever fully just 'work on your craft' without considering the consequences of what you are doing.
Do you think it would be ok to 'just focus on your craft' if you were hired to design computerized controllers for suicide bombers?
Obviously that is a ridiculous example, but it is a good demonstration of why you can't fully ignore what your work is being used for.
You don't need to care if your work is some great helper of humanity, but you do have a responsibility to make sure your work isn't evil.
> I'm sure there will be many applicants, but they'll all be sociopaths.
This is the exact kind of tone Coinbase is ejecting from their company. You thinking this is the wrong move is exactly the point. People don't want to work around people who call them "sociopaths" over not wanting to debate at work.
I find it hard to take someone seriously when they define themselves by what they are not. Its defining themselves by their opponent. If there was no opponent who would they be?
Stamp collectors push their stamp collecting ideologies onto all the non-stamp collectors who just want to do engineering. Stamp collectors set up meetings and socially shame/outcast non stamp collectors who don't attend. Non stamp collectors get tired of this and say they are going to make a job board where they don't have to worry about stamp collectors if they take a job at a place.
The answer is that there is nothing that unites these people except not being stamp collectors. If stamp collectors didn't exist, then no one would identify as non-stamp collectors.
Huawei and the Turkish government very much require their employees to endorse specific political expressions. It's my understanding that Raytheon does not and I think they're an entirely reasonable company for a SWE to consider.
Just wanted to add my voice and say that I agree with you fully: people walking around with the "everything is politics and politics is everything" chip on their shoulder are exhausting to have to be around. They typically come across as insufferably holier than thou and generally just make me not want to have to interact with them. Case in point the number of times I have had to listen to "you are on the wrong side of history" condescendingly being made as rebuke to something I have said dulls my interest in any further interaction.
Besides, engineering problems and the solutions to those problems bring enough variety of opinion that you would think people would be able to fulfill whatever need this new religion of politics brings. Engineering is challenging and rewarding on several different levels.
Weird point of view when most tech and engineering is used to generate political instability, misinformation and vote suppression.
In the case of coinbase I wouldn’t be surprise if the « amazing engineering » is mostly used for tax evasion or to by-pass politic finance laws, corruption laws etc...
That's a pretty jaded view of the world. Most tech I would guess goes towards increasing value in the company: improving their offerings, making new technology which solves problems for people/companies, etc.
Very few people have the time and money to fund tech and engineering purely to influence elections. Most money coming in to tech is going to be from customers and investors, the latter being in interest of making money off of the business getting more customers.
Companies like Cambridge Analytica are a very very minute minority compared to the swaths of B2B, consumer tech, etc.
I wish that we collectively had become more political in the past decade and stopped being apolitical cogwheels of machines that have, ultimately, used to undermine democracy.
We all bear responsibility to what happens to this world, and we, collectively, are building systems that affect how people think and view the world, and hence how they act. We are part of this shared universe, and now more than ever, we are the ones creating it.
That's of course coming from a point of view where Democracy is the only moral political system, and the understanding that democracy dies if not defended daily by being political. First very slowly, then very quickly. There are obviously other points of view, and dictatorships have their supporters.
What about when the engineering decisions you make today affect the politics of the future?
Perhaps this doesn't apply to your area of engineering, but I do feel that it does affect a substantial chunk of the HN audience.
How and what data you choose to collect about internet visitors is no longer a purely technical analysis, it now has broader implications that potentially involve political actors. You don't know who might have access to that data in the future or what they might do with it.
We as engineers are the final implementer of these decisions. Should we really abdicate the ethical responsibilities tied to these decisions so easily?
This seems like a disingenuous question. If there was a big BLM banner on the front page would you instead be accusing me of "performative wokeness" right now?
My personal view on this is that these "activist employees" are a predictable natural side-effect of any organization is:
1) Large
2) Has a culture that embraces optimism, reject cynicism, and has "Change the World!" type mission statements
3) Have overly-strict culture fit parameters.
Political activists share a lot in common with founders: They are stubbornly optimistic (Why fight for social change if you think it's pointless or impossible?), they want to change the world, and they have interests in building movements/organizations. If your hiring process is designed to weed out candidates cynical enough to know your organizations mission statement is bullshit and recognize you're just here to make money not change the world - or pessimistic enough to think they'll never be part of positive change - don't be surprised if you find yourself with a team full of activists... just saying.
You ever wonder why "politics at work" has flared up so much in the last 4 years? Have you completely lost sight of the timeline of events, or do you refuse to acknowledge it?
Do you think it's a reaction to something? Or did it just spontaneously instigate itself one day? Just uppity libs getting bored?
People are speaking up because people feel existentially threatened. Because people are being existentially threatened. This threat permeates peoples' lives. It doesn't get left at home when they "go" to the office. Asking them to turn it off at work is asking them to TURN IT OFF. And now we're in gaslighting territory.
DARVO. You know it?
We're in the phase now where the person under threat is the problem, the victim is being attacked for speaking up.
Extinguishing politics at work is not some "rational man" exercise. "I just want to be free to ply my trade, dude." It's asking people to pause their very real own pain. It's asking them to deny it, deny its effects; to pretend it's not real. To think they're the problem, not the person who's threatened.
This has never been about "ooh, should we, or should we not, discuss supply-side economics at work?" Broad segments of the population are under threat. That's not politics. That's just violence. Asking them to switch it off at work is just perpetuating and enabling the violence.
> We're in the phase now where the person under threat is the problem, the victim is being attacked for speaking up.
Yes; the victim is being attacked by activist coworkers for admitting that they don't agree with attacking people for admitting they they don't agree with things.
But that’s just the thing. Whether you feel like you’re being attacked or not is irrelevant. It’s not something your coworkers or company should have to deal with, so long as the attacks are not instigated in the workplace.
And I strongly disagree that most people arguing politics at work feel “existentially threatened.” No, most people that argue politics at work do it because it is a topic that is interesting and quick to generate vigorous (counterproductive) discussion (and division).
>You ever wonder why "politics at work" has flared up so much in the last 4 years? Have you completely lost sight of the timeline of events, or do you refuse to acknowledge it?
No, please, fill me in. What has changed in the last 4 years that has suddenly made people existentially threatened at work? It sounds like you're trying to implicate 'Donald Trump' as the start of all of these issues, and yet I'm not sure how the 2016 US election matters for me, in my country.
Accusing people who want to only do their job at work as "violent"? Your comment is a perfect demonstration of why apolitical work environments will be appealing to a lot of people.
Never said the workplace was threatening. I said people are being threatened at-large, and what you call "politics" is them responding to that threat, and it's harmful to the victim of such violence to suppress their ability to discuss it, in any environment, including work.
Now, please answer my question. Why do YOU think "politics at work" has flared up so much in the last 4 years?
'activist', toxic, cancerous ... Slapping these terms onto the people around understandably takes time and effort away from focusing on engineering and shipping features.
I understand the points of praise, but let me offer a counter argument. Companies have an obligation to defend the system that provided the environment in which they were formed and flourished.
This election is a bit different than normal. I've never seen a sitting president that would not commit to the peaceful transfer of power. You really think that coinbase would be where it is if we had that for the last 50 year? You think silicon valley would be silicon valley?
> Companies have an obligation to defend the system that provided the environment in which they were formed and flourished.
No, the only thing companies are obligated to do is what they want to do (usually profit), within the boundaries of the law.
There’s no obligation to support the environment in which you flourished. A particularly ruthless company might actively work against that environment to prevent competitors. And it’d be fine - use the law to define what a company can or cannot do instead of depending on personal (company) responsibility.
The article mentions Coinbase and Amazon, and we've also seen possibly related HR concerns from Google, Facebook, and others. Is this going to become a thing for many companies?
My current presence on a career site mentions my long-time involvement in societal implications of technology. In my case, the relevance to work is that I'm drawn to some companies and roles, knowingly avoid some others, and some of my technical and product work is informed by, say, some understanding of security&privacy -- but it's not that one day I'll spontaneously become woke on some issue, and organize a march of employees to a media event where we denounce our employer and burn the founders in effigy.
Given some news incidents in the last couple years, I'm wondering whether a job candidate looking like possibly an "activist" is going to become a standard factor for hair-trigger filtering by HR.
Will there be new hiring rituals in which the people who read the interview prep books know the right shibboleth to convey that they're "totally non-political"?
An interesting part to this is Coinbase's mission is, if it actually works out, absurdly counter-culture and near revolutionary.
Yeah, it's an exchange, trade w/o mainstream adoption will likely go on for a while, and there are a lot of caveats I'm not mentioning.
A mainstream Coinbase with mainstream cryptocurrencies, which will include Bitcoin (assuming a multi-currency future, not just BTC dominance), implies some serious changes to bedrock financial and geopolitical practices currently in place.
In the same way that wearing a mass-produced cotton shirt vs. a homespun one in 1890 implies the industrial revolution which implies Manchester mill-towns which implies...., so does a successful Coinbase if it reaches the end goals of its mission.
It's interesting that in exchange for not taking a stance on one set of issues, their very aggressive stance in another extremely societally profound area is getting overlooked. Like literally, interesting. Probably a nature of how Coinbase vs. other crypto cos chose to market itself.
> It's interesting that in exchange for not taking a stance on one set of issues, their very aggressive stance in another extremely societally profound area is getting overlooked.
It's not overlooked, it's explicit in the call to focus on the mission of the company and not unrelated politics.
I place political activity at work in the same category as religious proselytizing. It is an unwelcome diversion from the tasks at hand, and increases interpersonal tensions. It's difficult enough to grow and maintain one's technical competence and foster team cohesion without additional religious and/or political complications.
I've been around the block enough times to realise that any tech job inevitably has morally murky dimensions.
It's never in regards the big overarching social issues like racial politics though. It's the advertising companies you work with, the casinos and bookmakers (which is the only time I've made a moral stand at work), or people losing jobs that are replaced by automation.
The key, IMO, is to write software in the engineering industry not the tech industry. Plenty of interesting problems, large breadth and depth of knowledge across many disciplines, real business models, real product, really helping drive technology forward. It took me too long to realize that the 'tech' industry is mostly cult garbage looking for an exit.
Not participating in morally abhorrent behaviour is admirable and really important. The problem, I think, is when people put it on themselves to police other’s behaviour.
It would be so ironic if every Coinbase employee took this exit. It's not like there isn't more work out there.
The longer I work, the less I put up with dehumanizing actions from the top. You only live for so long. Why be told to your face that you're just a resource.
It's a bitter truth but it's true. Everyone at a company, except the founders, are essentially resources to help the company along with it's mission.
And I have no problem with this, when I decided to work for a company that relationship is you provide them your services for pay. If you like the company and feel you are treated well, stay. If you don't like it there, leave, it's that simple.
Please show me a modern tech company that treats its employees fairly, pays decent wages, whose mission to actually bring about good change in society, is profitable and won't go under next year, and doesn't say they support X social movement on Twitter for cheap PR points.
There are so many startups like this. If you're plugged into the ecosystem you know that this is a luxury for those who have found overwhelming product market fit. Not even just ones who've found a market. Overwhelming fit. Because then you make so much money you have time for this stuff.
Lots of successful companies who've found current fit and are chugging along.
This is only a problem because we live in a world where political issues are strongly affiliated with political ideologies in a binary fashion - i.e. identity politics. Even so much as people interpret a company's intention to remain politically neutral and avoid making any political statements as "a lurch to the right". Why can't we think of it more as a "return to the centerground"?
I think the inclusive apolitical approach will win out in the long term. I don't believe for a second that "not saying something is a statement in and of itself", and by subscribing to this idea you're bringing forward a style of authoritarianism the world is better off without.
Given that identity politics is so rife in 2020, don't you think it's a wise move to divorce company decision making from the clutches of any specific political ideology? The people that say no are almost certainly the authoritarians.
So much of this conversation seems stuck on the binary opposites (zero politics vs 100% politics), just like the way our politics is functioning in a binary fashion today. Obviously a company cannot be truly apolitical unless it hires no one and does absolutely nothing in the world, but we can at least minimize the surface area and allow topics less relevant to company objectives to the individuals outside of the workplace.
It's a popular idea that institutions with power have a duty to wield it, which is a completely ridiculous and dangerous idea. Simply put, we shouldn't be co-opting the influence of our companies to satisfy our personal political agendas or resort to cancel-culture tactics in order to force them into speaking. In a landscape where this is regularly happening, the neutral position is better and safer for all of us and healthy political discourse.
Brian Armstrong wants to have it both ways. He wants employees to focus “on the mission”, and not bring societal politics and activism into the workplace. Fair enough. For better or for worse, we live in a capitalist system, and companies are not first and foremost social justice organisations. I am not unsympathetic to the problems he is trying to solve.
But he also wants to influence politics and laws to benefit his company. Coinbase pays hundreds of thousands of dollars to lobbyists and lobbying companies around the world to advocate for their position (this is all public information).
He seems to believe that you can separate “political decisions that benefit Coinbase” and “political decisions that are irrelevant to Coinbase”, but you can’t. They’re all interconnected. It’s naive to pretend otherwise.
I have to say most companies I’ve worked for have subscribed to the policies in Armstrong’s blog post, and it has worked very well. But these companies were mostly outside the Bay Area.
I suspect the Bay Area is extremely nondiverse and homogeneous, and folks there aren’t actually used to having to work with and get along with people who strongly disagree with them on politics. In that kind of monoculture, it’s easy to think that politics can and should be part of work life. In a much more diverse workforce, though, it rarely works well.
If Coinbase is going to be remote-first, as they recently announced, the company’s employees are certainly going to encounter a level of diversity they haven’t been exposed to in the Bay Area. This could be preparation for that.
>I suspect the Bay Area is extremely nondiverse and homogeneous
I moved there from Ohio to work for a FAANG for six months. It's not nearly as bad on the ground as it might seem but you do witness spectacles with much more frequency.
Racially and culturally its definitely not homogenous but there aren't any black folks to be found. Alameda county is the only one around the bay to break double digit percentages, mostly because of Oakland. SF at ~6% is on par with Colorado Springs and Portland lol. The rest (Santa Clara, San Mateo, Santa Cruz, Napa, Marin, etc etc) are on the order of 1-2% black, and based on my short experience living and working there I imagine a good chunk of those are immigrants.
I had no idea and when I first noticed it I got extremely creeped out. Not because I'm some diversity champ, it's just that everybody else is there and you realize there's clearly some kind of filter at work.
SF did shove black people out with urban renewal but aren't demographics mostly like this in the West since the slave trade wasn't as extensive?
The real indicator for the tech industry's lack of diversity is that CA's 39% Hispanic population reflects as some minor fraction of the tech population.
Some extraordinary filter is occurring somewhere that's keeping Hispanic people out. Not alleging malice, just the scale is so huge.
That Wikipedia article has a measure for every 10 years from the Census starting with 1990:
1900 0.70%
1910 0.90%
1920 1.10%
1930 1.40%
1940 1.80%
1950 4.40%
1960 5.60%
1970 7.00%
1980 7.70%
and then you can fill in the rest with Census / ACS data
1990 7.40%
2000 6.40%
2010 6.20%
So, overall, it looks like it's about right. Black people were mostly in America through the slave trade and spread to areas adjacent to the South. The West saw very little increase.
Anyway, thank you for sharing that. It was enlightening. I do have to leave this discussion, though. I promised not to participate in non-tech here.
> I suspect the Bay Area is extremely nondiverse and homogeneous, and folks there aren’t actually used to having to work with and get along with people who strongly disagree with them on politics
This is extremely ironic given the hiring practices of Bay Area companies.
They’re only superficially diverse, perhaps due to the homogeinity of the Bay Area.
Basically the companies only look at skin color and what’s between your legs. As long as you have an American middle class/upper class upbringing or at the minimum had your education in certain American universities. So culturally they are pretty much identical.
From this point of view a white, black and asian American middleclass teenagers that have had identical education are wildly different and bring diverse viewpoints. Whereas a French, Italian and a Polish person would be non diverse. Even though the latter group has massively different cultural background compared to the first group.
I think he’s referring to diversity of ideas, not superficial attributes like race/gender/sexual preference/etc. A group of people that look different but all have the same world view is not a diverse group, imo.
>If Coinbase is going to be remote-first, as they recently announced, the company’s employees are certainly going to encounter a level of diversity they haven’t been exposed to in the Bay Area.
A lot of companies are going to get some serious culture shock if they increase their remote hiring.
But they are not the same. Every company and organisation will advocate for itself by advertising, lobbying, legal battles etc. Brands will also adopt a LGBT pride/BLM/etc campaign as soon as they think it provides good publicity. The aim of all this is to help the company/org. It's not the same as employees bringing up their social or political views while at work.
Companies do not merely advertise or lobby for specific regulations that affect their industry: they spend money to elect specific politicians who take positions on laws that affect that company's employees, in and out of the workplace.
No, companies spend money to elect politicians who will favor them, and the fact that those politicians have to have positions on social issues as well is (for companies) an unavoidable negative. Hobby Lobby type companies with an active social agenda are a tiny minority.
Lobbying about taxes and immigration is working as intended since it is just telling politicians what policies would benefit said company. It is important for politicians to know about it when they make policies so they can better consider pro's and con's.
However lobbying for for laws such as for/against gay marriage or religious rights is unrelated to their business. Then the company is used to exert some individuals political influence instead of just being a business.
Of course politicians are sometimes corrupt and get favors from the companies and then go to do whatever the companies lobbyist tells them to, that is what people usually mean when they mention "lobbying". But lobbying itself isn't inherently a malicious or political act, in its purest form it just conveys information so politicians can make better decisions.
That attitude reifies the company - the company itself is nothing more than the collection of people who work together to drive it. Political stances, even for business purposes, come from the individuals who make up the company leadership, not out of some abstract organisation.
In that sense, it's terribly unfair to forbid employees to bring up politics at work. After all, their bosses are doing it: and not only that, their bosses are using their employees' productivity to empower those political views.
Proportion is important - bringing politics up occasionally (rarely), peacefully, and in proportion to other topics .. is very different to crusading about it, bullying about it, being emotional and irrational and losing sight of others' perspectives.
Those strongly emotional actions are a whole different thing and it's dishonest to use mild language to describe those behaviours as 'bringing it up' and more accurate to call it something such a 'arguing about politics instead of working'.
Viewed in that light is it unfair to forbid employees to regularly argue about politics instead of working?
> their bosses are using their employees' productivity to empower those political views.
that's because the bosses (an owner of the company) is paying for it. Presumably, doing so reduces the amount of money the company can make (since employee time is diverted away to an unproductive, but political action).
The employee, however, do not have this right, because if they are doing so not under the instruction of the owner of company, they are taking away their productivity that they've sold to the company (for their wage/salary).
As someone who works for a mostly apolitical organization - it depends on the issue.
For example, the company refuses to take a stance on:
- Brexit (even though it will negatively impact them)
- Elections or any vote (even though again, this impacts them)
But for example actively campaigns on:
- Agricultural issues (It's in the food industry)
The company VERY strongly supports LGBT rights and minority rights, and will raise money for charities, but typically this does not transfer into support of individual political policies or parties.
The view is effectively that the company has lots of customers, and we shouldn't alienate them if they have opposing views, and that taking a strong political stance outside our industry can look like we are not respecting opposing viewpoints that our customers or competitors may have.
It's not true that "LGBT Rights" are value-free. Promoting LGBT rights also alienates members of the largest religious groups in the world, including those that are majority-non-European like Islam and Catholicism. Being a practicing L, G, B, or T or pro any of them is against sharia, the Catechism, and against the rules of many major Protestant sects like Mormons. Gay marriage is expressly against the rules of most major global belief groups that are not the US and its Marshall Plan colonies.
Without a lot of double speak, there is no such thing as a 'universally tolerant' corporate policy because different legal, social, and religious moral frameworks are mutually incompatible. In the US people just prefer to pretend that post-Protestant Woo-ism is universally friendly to everyone.
So many of these major companies are extremely vocal about LGBT+ rights but it's all just lip service, the second it comes down to money the whole thing goes out the window.
Look at Apple they were very proud to tell us about their pride themed watch face and emoji, yet some developer within Apple had to write the if statement to disable these graphics if the device is in Russia [1]. By choosing to take a stance on these issues but not willing to take the monetary loss you're causing someone in your organisation to write that if statement which could even be interpreted as an active act of oppression to LGBT+ people.
If your company truly holds these values then there shouldn't be even a question about giving up that revenue for the greater good. Until that moment then its just performative, taking advantage of those communities for the sake of advertising and headlines.
If money is more important which we know it is because you wrote the if statement, well maybe leave politics at the door then.
A 'principled stand' in Russia would be to accept all the legal punishments that would come from flouting Russian law and the moral conventions of the dominant religion in Russia. That would be consistent with the principles of 'civil disobedience.'
However, globocorps do not do that. They are woke where the educated elite are aggressively secular and the laws support it, and they are profit focused and 'business-first' where it isn't. The US educated elite is under a mistaken impression that its secularism is 'tolerant' or 'universal' when it is actually rather parochial, particular, and incompatible with most of the largest global faith groups. The US outlook is also incompatible with Chinese political culture, and China will control the largest and most significant economic power bloc over the next 30 years -- no one else will be close, including the rapidly declining US.
Your high level point about universal tolerance stands - but you might like to challenge some of your object level assumptions about world religions and LGBT. Iranian theocratic leadership for example
officially does not think that being trans is against sharia and the nation carries out more gender reassignment surgeries than any country except Thailand (not that their treatment of trans people is perfect by any means).
Point being there is no such thing as a universally 'tolerant' moral system -- no matter what stance you profess to take on a given issue of this type, it will be discriminatory against very large groups of people (billions of them).
A past employer decided to publish a rainbow themed design for LGBTQ pride and rolled back the UAE version of the website following feedback from clients there.
I think "impossible to reconcile with the codified teachings of religion X" and "would receive negative feedback / appear intolerant to people currently practicing religion X" are different claims. Though I totally agree the latter is a good argument for why "universal tolerance" is not a straightforward concept.
Specifically: I'm disputing the theological claim "Being a practicing L, G, B, or T or pro any of them is against sharia, the Catechism, and against the rules of many major Protestant sects like Mormons." That's not really a settled question.
Iran subsidises gender reassignment surgeries because homosexuality in Iran is a capital crime. Transitioning is that country's form of conversion therapy; hardly progressive.
i hope you realize that homosexuals in iran are sometimes forced to transition just so they don't get killed.
>Iran is one of a handful of countries where homosexual acts are punishable by death. Clerics do, however accept the idea that a person may be trapped in a body of the wrong sex. So homosexuals can be pushed into having gender reassignment surgery - and to avoid it many flee the country.
Yeah Iran remains massively homophobic and hostile to LGBT rights - the variety of approaches taken shows that there is scope for the laws to be interpreted as compatible. I'd argue that claiming that LGBT rights are irreconcilable with Islamic law makes things worse overall.
I didn’t say the company was value/culture free - apolitical doesn’t mean that they don’t have values, morals and core beliefs.
It’s about adopting values which tend to unite your customers rather than divide them, and in the U.K. at least LGBT rights is one of those issues. A stance of no-support on these issues would elicit a severe backlash from customers in the U.K. but meanwhile they aren’t campaigning for changes to the law in these areas, or supporting particular political parties because of it (as reasonable people could disagree on that because of how democracies work, and doing this will alienate specific customer groups).
Not to mention that "LGBT" rights aren't a single, unified campaign and increasingly are in conflict with each other. Many, many gays and lesbians feel threatened by modern transgender ideology, and not without good reason. "LGBT" is an increasingly shaky alliance.
Funny you should say that, as the Marshall Plan terms were quite generous and the countries that refused them due to commie pressure are now significantly worse of in terms of GDP per capita, etc.
My take on it: Most LGBTQ+ rights issues are almost entirely settled and agreed on anyways at the greater societal level. You'd be hard pressed to find an appreciable amount of people that rationally want to take away normal, everyday rights from LGBTQ+ individuals. Sure there are exotic and controversial discussion points (E.g. child transitioning, odd bathroom laws, etc) but no normal business touches those issues with anything but a ten-foot pole and vague "messages of support". Brexit, on the other hand, is probably a 50-50 split within the overall population in terms of support and is an arguable/defendable position that rational people can and do make.
Meanwhile LGBT rights are pretty much universally agreed, and I don’t think that “LGBT support” is generally classed as a political view so much as an expected cultural norm (i.e. not showing support would elicit a severe backlash within the customer base).
That statement alone will divide customers in the U.K. and the advantages/disadvantages of withdrawing from EU human rights agreements are something that reasonable people disagree on.
Generally supporting established lgbt rights with no specific link to policy is different - it’s overwhelmingly supported and not even generally classed as a political view anymore (along with “is evil bad?”).
You're missing your own bias. There are people in the US (and in the UK, in the Vote Leave team who are now in Government) who believe that LGBT people (in particular the T) shouldn't exist.
LGBT rights are human rights. Brexit absolutely has a human rights component to it.
> He seems to believe that you can separate “political decisions that benefit Coinbase” and “political decisions that are irrelevant to Coinbase”, but you can’t. They’re all interconnected. It’s naive to pretend otherwise.
I agree that it's hard and maybe impossible to make a hard line that separates the two, but wouldn't you agree that some political decisions are way more specific to Coinbase than others? Specifically the CEO sets out a pretty clear distinction: "If there is a bill introduced around crypto, we may engage here"
He addressed the lobbying for crypto related issues in the plog post, something to the affect that we may engage in political lobbying when it relates strongly to our core mission.
That seems fair to me, lobbying for crypto and maybe even internet privacy laws wouldn't seem outside the mission to better his company but publicly declaring support for one candidate or another would. Likewise getting involved in a non-crypto centric mission like BLM would be quite far outside its mandate.
Whilst this is true it's clear that plenty of individuals let alone companies go through life only caring about and acting on issues that directly impact them regardless of the larger scope of impact.
I disagree that we live in a capitalist system, the lobbying you mention in your post clearly points to that.
Companies do what works better for them, which means:
- Earn money
- Retain employees
Political discussions will definitely make some employees feel uncomfortable or unwelcome (unless you have an entirely homogeneous company).
This is deeply unfortunate and troubling (I blame education and the media for people incapacity to have a discussions without feeling triggered) but it's today polarised reality.
Preventing or discouraging polarising discussions on the private properties of the company sounds like a sensible choice.
Political moves from the company will definitely have some trade-offs but have less of an impact on employees. This is not zero (I remember some Google or Amazon employees leaving over their company's political choices) but it's far less common.
We do not live in a free market capitalist system, which is blatantly obvious from things like government bailouts of big banks during GFC and huge encroachment of government within areas such as healthcare.
And so for better or worse we're actually in some socialist capitalist system. Blaming capitalism for problems that are often rooted in bad government is often just wrong.
This won’t end well. The moment Coinbase articulates anything remotely related to an underlying set of values or business ethics, the accusations of politicization (and hypocrisy) will come flying.
I believe that corporations are not governed or regulated to support activism writ large, but there has to be room for dissent (even if it ends in separation). How else do you arrive at a shared definition of “economic freedom”?
It’s not about being apolitical. The question is whether they can draw a line between mission-related politics (related to cryptocurrency, employment, or just how to do business) and all other politics. There is no clear line to be drawn, so it’s a judgement call, and it will be debated.
> draw a line between mission-related politics and all other politics
Agreed. I wonder if they will take some word smithing to the mission statement. Even with the clarification and interpretation presented in the blog post, "economic freedom" encompasses a lot of "other politics". It is a helluva juggling act to want a diverse, thriving team, and a singular shared definition of economic freedom across that team.
More practically, I wonder how it will be debated. Who within the organization has confidence to debate where the line is drawn beyond what the CEO has shared? Is it the board?
I always thought it's quite normal for people to work together despite not having all the same ideas and definitions. That those flowery words on a mission statement are not precise or exact, and will never stand up to all situations and expectations.
Perhaps it's not really that important, and there's not even much point debating it for the organisation .. people at work could instead get on with the work they are doing and offering value to society through the outcome of their work. Of course they could do various activism in other ways, without inflicting it excessively on their colleagues just because they are earning a living across the hallway from them ..
Yes, and our current socio-political state has this CEO bringing more precision to the flowery mission statement.
> without inflicting it excessively on their colleagues
This is the tricky part. In a transition from the old normal to the new normal, I believe it's important to recognize who may have always been excessively afflicted but didn't have the platform. Or conversely, who may have never felt excessively afflicted and had full discretion over their professional platform.
It's the eternal theme of monoculture vs. multiculturalism. The Coinbase CEO is acknowledging both sides of the coin, and maintaining focus on one side (pun intended). I don't think that's right or wrong. It is what it is.
There is more than enough willing talent to keep the line he has drawn in the sand, but will people look back years from now and question the veracity of the original mission despite evident success (e.g. Facebook making the world more open and connected)?
What do you mean next step? You can process anyone’s money, it good for business. Name one money processing entity that’s ever taken a stand against...anything?
Apologies if I'm missing the mark on your question.
If the first step is "apoliticism or we'll help you find the door" then isn't a potential next step "amorality or we'll help you..."?
Again not arguing that any CEO should nurture activism (though I personally might like it), but healthy dissent is important for solving hard problems, and not every hard problem is purely logical.
If my company's mission is to create an open financial system for the world, how can we possibly do that without holding space for the multitude of values, beliefs, and political opinions across the world about financial systems?
Seems one way would be to take an amoral stance on the multitudes and stick to a tightly held definition of what an open financial system means.
Sorry, I probably wasn't clear. Coinbase is saying it is an amoral middleman. In my mind there is no next step. And if you look at the history of money processors, this is the default and probably the only way they ever operate.
That type of exception is explicitly stated in the CEOs blog post:
>We focus minimally on causes not directly related to the mission
>Policy decisions: If there is a bill introduced around crypto, we may engage here, but we normally wouldn’t engage in policy decisions around healthcare or education for example.
I will offer a personal take on keeping politics out of my 1-man video game company.
In theory, I am all for it. I do not use hashtags on twitter, or openly support any ideologies.
However, as a light brown dude whose parents immigrated here to Canada, my existence itself is a political statement (in support of legal immigration) that is bound to offend people.
I try, to the extent that is possible, to not say political statements on twitter, but I am only human. And for many humans, existing itself is a political statement.
I sometimes feel like a platypus.
There are plenty of taxonomist that want me dead.
There are plenty of well intentioned people that will protest for me to keep my rights to exist while never getting close to me.
And all I wanna do is keep platypusing every day. It's just hard to do that in deeply divisive times, I guess.
Just keep in mind Twitter is a piss poor reflection of society. There are some radical ideas on Twitter, but ask people in person what they actually think and everyone will sing a different tune.
This is one of the bigger problems I encountered when mentoring junior engineers: Many of them grew up consuming a firehose of hyperbolic Twitter and Reddit content, thinking that it was an accurate representation of the real world. Worse yet, some of them essentially learned their social skills from Twitter debates and Reddit threads, mistaking angry online arguments for normal adult conversation.
Fortunately, most of them are quick to pick up on the reality that they’ve been misled, but a small minority try to turn the workplace into an extension of a Twitter flame war at every opportunity.
I was thinking about this recently. They're probably the first (?) generation where online social interaction consists of a very large part of their overall social interactions. The online world is place where people can be ignored/blocked/shadowbanned. Then they venture out into the real world for Uni and find they don't have these censorship tools at their disposal, and don't have the skills to handle it properly.
The mainstream "anti-immigration" position is about curtailing future immigration, rather than removing current immigrants.
The objection isn't to the presence of the immigrants per se, but rather the consequences of continuing the flow of people on the labor market and on cultural cohesion.
Sure, and as a brown guy in Canada he's fine. But if he were in the US and it were all about "curtailing future immigration" you could easily turn off green cards and deport a quarter million Indians who have lived in America for ten years on temporary visas.
Yeah, it's all about the future thing there. Give me a break.
Hey, sorry, I unfortunately cannot delete the comment so just responding to acknowledge. The 'temporary visas' are dual-intent so they are intended to be for immigration as well. There is no fraudulence there.
Sorry, I was insufficiently explicit. "Indians who have lived in America for ten years" are past immigrants. They have already immigrated. A effort to "curtail[] future immigration" that allows deporting them to be part of it is fraudulently misrepresenting that past immigration as part of the "future immigration" which it purports to curtail.
The issuance of genuinely new visas (ie to people who have not yet immigrated) is a separate issue from renewing visas of people who have already immigrated, regardless of whether those are, on paper, both lumped into the single catagory of "[']temporary['] visas".
Sounds to me like the "temporary" visa system has been greatly abused by employers looking for cheap labor and needs to be fixed so that people who wish to make life in the U.S. aren't left in limbo for so long.
Sure, that's your stance and I won't attempt to change your mind. I just needed to clarify that you are requesting taking actions that will result in the deportation of a large number of immigrants currently residing in the US.
It was important to me that that caveat was applied to
> The mainstream "anti-immigration" position is about curtailing future immigration, rather than removing current immigrants.
So that it is clear that removing current immigrants resident in the US under dual-intent visas is part of the mainstream position.
> I just needed to clarify that you are requesting taking actions that will result in the deportation of a large number of immigrants currently residing in the US.
Please do not mind read. You are not very good at it.
Temporary work visas exist to help cover shortages of labor in a host country, which will naturally vary over time. If someone is in the US on a temporary visa, then that implies that they should only be in the US on that visa for a relatively short time, and that at the end of that time they should either be granted a more permanent status or they should return home.
To continue to extend such visas indefinitely, such that visa holder builds a life in the US, all the while still legally in the position that they could be forced to return at any time is cruel and unjust. If that is happening to a large (or small) number of Indians presently in the US, I think it would be entirely reasonable to grant special consideration for them - as part of an overall immigration reform that would avoid situations in the future.
Apologies for having to respond from here. I am currently rate limited. Made the new account so I could apologize for guessing at motivations.
I believe mainstream immigration restrictions actually do not share your view on dual intent visas. Not many people support the position you have on Indian/Chinese who are present in America for a long time on their dual-intent visas.
Consider my comments as being edited to not reference you but reference mainstream anti-immigration positions - none of which currently state any GC reforms that permit existing Indian/Chinese backlogs to be grandfathered in.
That you made this effort to apologize is quite commendable, thank you.
And I may be mistaken on where the mainstream anti-immigration position is, though I do think that many/most people who are in favor of reducing immigration would also be amenable to some sort of a deal if it were on the table.
I am caught in two minds on this, I’m personally extremely political, but I want to clearly understand both sides of arguments as deeply as I possibly can. For example I often argue things in my own mind from a conservative, let’s keep everything stable, work hard, individual responsibility POV even though I firmly believe probably 80% of people’s success is down to luck and consequently think a strong welfare state and 99% inheritance tax is the correct way to run things.
Now bringing these ideas to work and using that as a vehicle for change is not something I’m comfortable with, but if you as a company have a mission, you can’t expect your staff to not also have missions that might be aligned or orthogonal to the company.
It might make your company work better getting rid of politics (that disagrees with yours anyway) from the workplace by paying people. I wonder if it leads to a filtering out of potentially difficult conversations that people should have.
Anyway I’m against corporate stuff like this and I think you can cut this down quite a lot without the fluff. I wonder what the specific internal conversations were to prompt this public plea for apolitical-ness outside of the company’s political mission.
I think the common challenge leaders are facing is the missions employees bring into the offie in fact aren't particularly aligned or orthogonal to the company's mission.
This is exacerbated by a decade+ of claiming the company is "making the world a better place by X," when really of course it's not. It's selling ads or what have you.
So, I think part of the insistence to bring politics into work is also driven by that - the employees were sold a bill of moral goods at 23, slowly realize the company doesn't actually have the PR mission it says it does because it's a profit seeking company, and employees start trying to overcorrect.
At least CB is being open about what they're about :shrug:.
Every company has a mission, some are just more explicit about it.
I spent a lot of years as a traveling consultant. Every company I visited broadcast it's culture and in doing so, it's mission. It's in the way companies bring products to market, it's in the words it uses to describe itself. It's in the way it treats its employees.
The mission could be "We want to line the pockets of the founder's family." It could be "we want to build products that make people's lives better in these distinct ways." It can even be "We want to shine this turd just long enough to get acquired by our largest competitor." As employees, we buy in one way or another.
Each of those is a mission, just a very different mission from the way Coinbase is positioning their mission.
> I firmly believe probably 80% of people’s success is down to luck and consequently think a strong welfare state and 99% inheritance tax is the correct way to run things.
So you think wealth is based on 80% luck and your solution is to reset the family wealth every time?
So a family who isn't "lucky" can't pass on their little wealth to their children and have that compound over time? You'd prefer the children get the reset button?
You have some flawed understanding of how people can actually increase the probability to generate wealth.
I would say 99% maybe 100% above maybe ten million dollars or so, sure. Why do you think hereditary wealth is positive? Maybe everyone would have to improve society and try to make sure the bottom of it isn’t quite so horrendous as it is now. But I understand where you’re coming from, there’s nothing like working hard and doing well to make you think the money is yours not something you are lent largely by being born in the right place, at the right time, with the right parents etc. etc.
Because I have the right to provide for my children and ensure they can live their best life.
I don’t care if it’s “not fair” or if I “lucked out.” My family comes in first. Not the government, not anyone else - if I make something or earn something, it is my right to provide for my family.
> largely by being born in the right place, at the right time, with the right parents etc. etc.
You just think you have that right, but really it’s an opinion you hold strongly. My opinion is different from yours on this, and I certainly don’t think we’re about to persuade each other here.
I read his blog post and commend him on his insight and leadership. Politics can be divisive, destructive and at best distractive. One nutjob on either side of the coin (haha?) could be a risk to the integrity of the company of whole not to mention all of the other pitfalls if internal strife. Where I work there is plenty of differing opinion on politics but professionalism, respect and empathy have kept us pretty much whole. I think the problems of divisiveness are enhanced by remote working as the comradery gained by being at work in person is lost and that is essential in helping soak up bad feelings. Anyhow just my 2 cents.
If employees want to influence a company's political stance, then they've already lost, because employees are not shareholders. It's not their call to make.
They would have a leg to stand on if they were part of a worker's cooperative, because then they'd be owners. The juicy job market for tech workers may obscure this fundamental fact, but when the rubber hits the road any overpaid engineer is still considered hired help and forever "below the salt". Until workers build up a co-op sector to compete with private sector companies, they will never have a say, no matter how much they kick and scream.
So either sit your ass down and sell your soul like you already said you would, or get out there and start building. Not just for yourself, but for all of us. Because we will never have true democracy as long as most of the wealth the people generate gets sliced and diced at board meetings without even the veneer of representation.
This is true but in reality the percentage of ownership is so tiny that most regular employees have no say. This really just leaves billionaires, institutions or the C-suite with the power to control large companies.
I was looking for a response in general to this and I think your comment nails it for me. If you want to drive societal change you need to get off the bench and commit, and please do because the world needs more people to be engaged.
Thank you. One way I look at it is, imagine working for somebody who pays you in political campaign donations to causes of your choice, then takes the rest of the money you've made for them and doubles that contribution for the other side. It's really a no-win situation for the worker.
I came here to say basically this. An employer is responsible for its own political positions because of how corporate governance is organized. Employees who disagree with said positions, whatever they may be, are free to terminate their employment if management doesn't agree to be lobbied by employees to assume certain positions. True say comes with ownership.
There are other forms of cooperate governance than co-ops and corporations, and there are other ways to ensure non-investor stakeholders like employees (and the community) have a say in some business decisions. Unions are an obvious one. The German model for corporations is another: employees get an actual seat on the board with an actual voice and a vote, by law.
None of these are perfect solutions, but any of them would be a step in the right direction. When manufacturing was the engine of economic growth in America, workers figured out how to get it to work for them. Tech is becoming the new engine now, and it's time for us (the workers) to figure out how to implement systemic changes to ensure our concerns are heard and addressed.
As to your main point, I agree. Whinging about your employer won't change anything - the systems themselves need to be changed.
I love what this CEO has done. Basically said fuck off with your political signalling, we wont be part of it, if you dont like it leave and heres some money
If the logic is true that being apolitical is supporting the status quo, then arguing against being apolitical is a political argument supporting radicalism.
I feel the whole argument against being apolitical is just being made in bad faith to support radicalism, political acceleration and extremism.
Why would you wan't a workplace of radicals always fighting? If you can't argue this then you can't argue against being apolitical.
The current situation in these big tech companies reminds me a little bit of Wahhabism and the founding of modern Saudi Arabia.
Initially the king used the Wahhabi extremists as troops and it was quite a successful partnership. But eventually it went sour as the king tried to modernize the country bringing in phone lines and roads and he was attacked by his former extremist friends who were opposed to the sinful modern world. Eventually the king enlisted the aid of the British with airplanes and machine guns and the Wahhabi were subdued (with a large number being killed).
A couple of parallels and potential lessons here.
Beware of getting in bed with unreasonable and fanatical extremists. They will turn on their former benefactors fairly quickly and the danger often isn't worth the risk.
And, if you are an fanatical extremist (not passing judgement on just noting), you likely won't actually ever take power for long and will be quickly disposed of when no longer useful or you become problem which you will shortly. Cynical people will take advantage of your idealism for their own purposes but you won't see the benefits.
Is there no irony in your parallel with Wahhabism to social justice activists?
The people who put money above all are their own form of extremist. I guess it is normalized to the point of being a non consideration, meanwhile the planet burns.
Reading these comments I feel like the root of the issue is the collapse of American democracy. It's a bit grandiloquent but that's definitely how it looks like. If workers trust that "We, the people" are still in charge on the big picture then it doesn't make sense to bring politics at work. Just vote.
Now if you feel like your power as a citizen has dwindled and you can't meaningfully enact change through democratic means, it makes sense to try and "weaponize" your job, especially if you work for a powerful company and you're a valuable highly skilled worker.
But in the end if you're dissatisfied with your company and you know that there's a fundamental ideological incompatibility it probably makes more sense to just quit, especially when you're a software dev and you can probably find some other job fairly easily.
I guess an other possibility would be to have proper unions but for some reason I don't see that happening in the USA any time soon...
This is why I'm frustrated with the idea that we need to enact change and policies at the federal level. The federal government should just exist to protect our liberties and organize national defense. Everything else should be organized more locally at the community level where voters actually have some skin in the game.
It's the same idea as how modern agile companies run, small teams that work in the same environment, have more empathy/trust of one another, and are able to make compromises in order to have stability and direction within the team.
Additionally, we shouldn't be trying to put all of our eggs in one basket. Should we have single-payer healthcare nationally? No one knows if that's the most appropriate solution for all of the US, but why not let cities or communities try various localized healthcare strategies out for themselves. Each may try things differently. Some may work and some may fail. Other places can see how things worked elsewhere and either decide to improve, not implement, or take verbatim what another local government has done. You influence change by setting an example and letting others decide for themselves, not by trying to force the world to behave as a small subset of people want.
Having multiple baskets is essential for enabling different ideas and perspectives, especially if the bad ideas were to win out. I firmly believe humans are not meant to have such large scale societal structures where communities are expected to encompass an entire nation. You care more about and think more similarly to your neighbor than you do someone three thousand miles away.
> This is why I'm frustrated with the idea that we need to enact change and policies at the federal level. The federal government should just exist to protect our liberties and organize national defense. Everything else should be organized more locally at the community level where voters actually have some skin in the game.
You'd think that after months of "locally led" covid responses in the US that this naive take would somehow become less popular.
Whether small-government enthusiasts like it or not, the US is highly interconnected on almost every level. There are certain things that absolutely require federal responses. Things like pollution and viruses absolutely need to be handled from a nation wide perspective. How would healthcare work as a piecemeal implementation across local lines? Its almost as if "letting localities decide" is a nice way of ensuring something will fail without forcing it outright.
Your argument is implying that the federal government is somehow ineffective, but given the federally led improvements across the last century - from roads to environmental regulations, public health and even the internet just shows that you're either ignorant of intentionally dishonest.
None of this is unique to the US — the EU is similarly "interconnected", as is Switzerland. Subsidiarity and decentralization aren't new ideas, and are generally the prescribed solution to unlock governance in a large & heterogenous polity.
> from roads
The Interstate Highway System, while technically impressive, essentially entrenched the US as a car-centric society from the top-down.
> public health
The vast majority of our healthcare problems can be attributed to the fact that it's tied to employment, which was caused by Federal policies.
> even the Internet
DARPA falls under "organize national defense". The EU also has EU-level agencies that work on space research (ESA). Advanced research can also be organized among the States in a CERN-like model.
> The Interstate Highway System, while technically impressive, essentially entrenched the US as a car-centric society from the top-down.
Its been effective. It achieve the goals it set out to do. We discovered that focusing on highways and cars was ultimately not very good. But it achieved the goal it set out to do, so I don't get what your point is.
> The vast majority of our healthcare problems can be attributed to the fact that it's tied to employment, which was caused by Federal policies.
This is an absurd argument. What are you even trying to convey? That the Federal Government should take charge of providing healthcare? OK then.
Medicare/Medicaid/ACA are all Federal policies and provide healthcare to millions who wouldn't get that otherwise.
> DARPA falls under "organize national defense". The EU also has EU-level agencies that work on space research (ESA). Advanced research can also be organized among the States in a CERN-like model.
Again not sure what your point is. EU has Federal agencies too, yeah, so what?
> Insofar as "localities" are ill-suited to governing, the States are a sufficient mechanism for top-down control.
Hard disagree. While States have been great for introducing and experimenting with new ideas, spreading those ideas across the country requires Federal Investment and oversight. Obamacare traces its origins to Romneycare in Mass, but it required Federal dollars to bring it to the rest of the country.
> We discovered that focusing on highways and cars was ultimately not very good. But it achieved the goal it set out to do, so I don't get what your point is.
That's exactly the thing we're arguing against — a monopoly/monolith doesn't necessarily know whether the goal is the correct one. Enterprises rely on competition to arrive at the "correct" goal. The argument is to allow State actors to do the same. Discovering that something is "not very good" after experimenting on 300+ million people is worse than running those experiments and observing those failures more locally at the State level, where failures impact fewer people. GP commenter made the same argument, as follows:
"Additionally, we shouldn't be trying to put all of our eggs in one basket. Should we have single-payer healthcare nationally? No one knows if that's the most appropriate solution for all of the US, but why not let cities or communities try various localized healthcare strategies out for themselves. Each may try things differently. Some may work and some may fail. Other places can see how things worked elsewhere and either decide to improve, not implement, or take verbatim what another local government has done. You influence change by setting an example and letting others decide for themselves, not by trying to force the world to behave as a small subset of people want."
I don't know that I agree that healthcare systems should be fragmented at the city level, but there's really no reason why States shouldn't drive healthcare policy and try different approaches. Switzerland, Denmark, the UK, Singapore, and Germany all have wildly different healthcare systems — all with their own merits and demerits. There isn't a single system that is objectively "the best". States can enact the policies that the citizens want the most, and we can see for ourselves how they do.
> This is an absurd argument. What are you even trying to convey? That the Federal Government should take charge of providing healthcare? OK then.
And this is an absurd reading of that argument. The argument is that we got to where we have because the Federal government started off by 1) imposing wage ceilings that resulted in employers offering health insurance to get around those, 2) enacted a tax deduction to incentivize employers to keep doing this after the wage ceilings were lifted, and 3) instituted a mandate for employers to provide health insurance. These are all terrible policies, all advanced at the Federal level. It should then follow that we should reduce the degree to which the Federal government makes these decisions, not increase them. You don't promote a bad decision maker, you fire them.
> Medicare/Medicaid/ACA are all Federal policies and provide healthcare to millions who wouldn't get that otherwise.
Medicare subsidizes healthcare for overwhelmingly rich people (old people are the richest cohort in America, owing to a lifetime of accrued income). Does that mean we shouldn't subsidize healthcare for any old people? No, not at all — Medicare was just local optima. ACA entrenched employer-sponsored health insurance via the employer mandate. Are individual mandates bad policy? No, not at all, that's how Swiss healthcare works. But ACA was more than just that, and got us stuck in local optima.
Again, that's the entire point — when we give a monopoly sole decision-making power, it's very difficult to get ourselves out of local optima, especially when the polity is as ideologically polarized / heterogenous as ours.
> Again not sure what your point is. EU has Federal agencies too, yeah, so what?
Exactly. The argument is not that the US should have 0 Federal agencies, it's just that it should look more like the EU, writ large. One of the foundational principles of the EU is "subsidiarity" -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity_(European_Union). I (and ostensibly, also GP) argue that the US ought to follow this model.
> Hard disagree. While States have been great for introducing and experimenting with new ideas, spreading those ideas across the country requires Federal Investment and oversight. Obamacare traces its origins to Romneycare in Mass, but it required Federal dollars to bring it to the rest of the country.
Yeah but that's just because most of that taxation goes to the Federal government. There's no reason that can't change, and for the majority of one's taxes to go to their State government. Today, I pay around ~30% of my income to the Federal government and ~10% to my State. The argument is to make that the other way around, so that you don't need Federal dollars to bring things at the State level. This is exactly how it works in Switzerland, where the top marginal rate at the Federal level is ~10%, and Cantonal rates vary between 16-30%. Switzerland isn't some "libertarian" hell hole, it's one of the most prosperous nations on the planet. Likewise, the EU's leaves taxation entirely to its Member States, and not only do they do just fine, some of their States are arguably more prosperous than the US.
Pointing at Greece kind of makes the point: you get to isolate the failures, and Greece doesn't get to hold back Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden, et al. On the flip side, EU Citizens aren't at each others' throats about everything because they are largely enfranchised at the Member State level.
You can't say either of this about the US.
> Irish financial crises
Yeah but then as of 2015, Ireland became the fastest growing economy in the EU. As of today, it is among the top 10 wealthiest countries in the world.
> and Brexit
Yes, and now the UK no longer gets to sabotage the EU.
>If your argument is that there is variance within the EU, you can make the argument that there is just as much variance within the US
No, my argument is that the EU tries to "have it both ways" by taking away fiscal and monetary sovereignty but leaving cultural sovereignty intact. The result is that Greece, Ireland, Spain, etc were not really able to regulate their economies in any meaningful sense to prevent the kind of blow-up we saw in 2008, particularly because, when you share a currency and trade zone with a heavy exporter like Germany, their surpluses are your deficits.
The Spanish, Irish, and Greek housing bubbles were underwritten by the profits of German exporters. Greek fiscal malfeasance was overlooked because it was considered politically more important to grow the EU and the Eurozone than to let anyone at all have the authority necessary to enforce healthy fiscal and trade balances.
The United States does not actually work this way, because the federal government engages in countercyclical transfers between the states. The wealth of New York and California gets recycled, through taxes, to pay for military bases in Maine, pensions and Social Security checks in Florida and Arizona, and timber conservancies in Idaho.
> None of this is unique to the US — the EU is similarly "interconnected", as is Switzerland.
I live in Switzerland, and the response here to the virus and most other incidents are far more federally managed than the cantonal system would imply to someone accustomed to US states, in my opinion. If forced at gunpoint to generalize, the simplest explanation I would use having lived in both countries is that in Switzerland the cantons have more independence in execution, while in the US they have more freedom in legislation.
It's not so much about locality - it's about competition. Locality is just the means to that.
Everyone wins when competitors try different things and find out what's efficient and what works well and what doesn't. Marijuana legalization and gay marriage started as experiments by states and localities, which could find and set the example to be adopted federally.
Everyone loses when an entrenched monopoly (here the federal government) can forcibly impose one way of doing things with no room for deviation.
Not to say that competition isn't also relevant, but I think locality is still necessary for osmosis of ideas/thoughts.
I think both Marijuana and gay marriage legalization started because of a small group of like-minded people that found it acceptable and were able to spread that ideology enough so that eventually the state could vote on them. For those particular examples, competition doesn't really kick in until it's already been experimented with, but then it really speeds up the spread for sure.
Looking at the timeline of cannabis laws [1], recreational use in particular, Colorado basically tipped the ice berg. My point is that the organic spread of new and/or controversial ideas is localized before competition kicks in.
Everyone doesn't win when competing localities of government try different things. What actually happens is Amazon shops around for enormous public subsidies for its HQ, bankrupting local and state govnerments. We're in a world of globalised companies and expecting some backwater county in Arkansas to negotiate with Huawei is just absurd.
For the same reason that Google tells Congress 'You need to let us run free to fight those Chinese giants', the US needs federal level regulation to play on the same level as those companies, if it had the guts.
> What actually happens is Amazon shops around for enormous public subsidies for its HQ, bankrupting local and state govnerments.
I'll offer a different take: taxation (and budgets) are just the price we pay to society for a basket of services. There's some optimum price / optimum basket. This competition allows different societies to lower their price (taxes) or lower their basket of services based on the democratic needs of that society. Some societies will value job creation more than short-run costs to the budget, and others will not. It's not surprising at all that the city that didn't have a whole lot of jobs chose the former (via the democratically elected government), and the city that already had a lot of jobs (NYC) chose the latter, also via a similarly selected government.
The libertarian "Minimize the federal government" is an extremely misguided fanatical view which is devoid of any fact-based reasoning. Federal investments have lead to transformative change in most sections of the US economy. Federal Reserve keeping the interest rates low and providing unlimited liquidity is whats keeping the stock market from tanking today. Federal investments will be key to de carbonizing the US economy and reducing income inequality (e.g. by increasing the minimum wage).
Careful criticizing libertarianism on here. This is the hive.
A lot of survivorship bias on here and folks who want to think everyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, get rid of taxation and large government etc etc
Well, democracy is not just voting. Most of it actually happens before voting. I mean Russia has voting, Belarus has voting, USSR had voting, Iran has voting, I'm not sure whether North Korea has voting but they certainly could have. To have properly functioning democracy you need the support system that leads to responsible, informed voting and that provided feedback mechanisms between the government and the population. Which includes a vivid and robust public discussion of the topics important for people.
This is what is breaking down I feel. And what we're seeing is just a symptom - employers want to ban workplace politics not because politics and participation is bad per se, but because it has become so dirty and vicious that allowing it can literally destroy the company. You can't efficiently work together with people you hate, and I definitely feel like hate has become the primary weapon and the primary drive of US politics. It is basically required from anybody who plays in it to hate your opponent, and to hate everybody who doesn't march in lockstep with you. If you don't, you're probably secretly in league with "them" and must be targeted for hate yourself. There's no respectful disagreement, there's no difference of opinion allowed, there's no assumption of good will and willing to work through disagreements. The slogan of the day is "burn it all down". Of course there's only two ways for the company to survive in such environment - either everybody thinks the same and wrongthinkers are expelled - thus ensuring all hate is directed outside the company - or ban the politics and keep the hate outside the place of employment. Third way would be to actually remove the hate from the equation, but it doesn't look like there are enough grownups around for this to happen.
> I guess an other possibility would be to have proper unions
I don't see how the unions - especially US unions which are completely partisan - would help anything, except making the union shop inaccessible to those who isn't willing to join union's party.
You know ... there's a reason that US Unions are partisan, which is that the Republican party has been on a mission to destroy them since Reagan and has largely succeeded.
It's more like that centralized top-down economy is much more comfortable for the union leadership than chaotic horizontal competitive economy. It's much easier to enforce certain policy by the power of the government than negotiate it privately with each employer. That makes unions a natural ally of socialists. And of course there's nothing like government subsidies and regulations - which can be exchanged for votes and donations - to hide the inefficiencies of inflexible unionized setups and deflect the competitive threats from more agile and enterprising newcomers. Again, here the unions are the natural allies of centralized regulatory state. And the effects of this are pretty obvious:
https://nypost.com/2018/08/25/why-nyc-is-priciest-city-in-th...https://www.nj.com/news/2018/06/money_for_nothing_working_th...
(And Zerohedge is a trashbag of libertarian fanfiction and russian govt talking points - with the exception of their currency coverage - which is great stuff.)
>I guess an other possibility would be to have proper unions but for some reason I don't see that happening in the USA any time soon...
I think this will happen sooner rather than later. As the market gets flooded with more and more engineers, tech workers will continue to get more and more proletarianized. Unionization will be the natural avenue for workers to get a slice of the pie.
I don't think people earning 5x-6x median wage, not counting stock incentives, are what Marx mean when he wrote about proletariat. Outside of Hollywood stars and top sportsmen, one would struggle to find a less oppressed category of workers.
> If workers trust that "We, the people" are still in charge on the big picture then it doesn't make sense to bring politics at work. Just vote.
This is a bizarre, ahistorical sentiment. Go read about the history of labor struggle in the US. Even when everyone could vote, the organizing of workplaces and response by their employers was far more contentious and violent than anything that’s going on today.
Part of Coinbase's purpose is to provide its workers with a safe environment and fair compensation, even if it's not explicitly written in their mission statement. As such, protesting dangerous work conditions and collectively asking more pay is directly related to a company's mission. What happened at Coinbase was that workers walked out because their CEO didn't want to Tweet about the latest social issue du jour. It's very difficult to imagine what anyone seeks to accomplish with this.
Can you give an example of what you have in mind? I must admit that, being
European, I don't really have a good grasp of the history of American worker
struggles.
Here in France I can't quite think of something really similar to Silicon Valley
activists. When I think about worker-led revolts I think of Germinal or Mai 68,
when the proletariat (and, in the case of Mai 68, the students and then the
proletariat) fought for better working conditions and more rights.
I don't think that's very similar to the time of activism we're talking about
here. For one thing IT workers are not exactly the lowest dregs of the
proletariat, it's a very privileged position with much better working conditions
that most. Beyond that the fight is not usually for the direct benefit of said
workers ("higher salaries!" or "fewer hours!" or "better food at the corporate
restaurant!") but more ideologically motivated. An obvious instance of this is
the very polarizing firing of Brendan Eich from Mozilla (that's still making
waves all these years later). Doing that didn't directly change anything
material for Mozilla's employee, it was motivated by ideology. The only thing that comes close I think is videogame devs complaining about their bad working conditions, but I don't think that's what we're talking about here.
Conversely the 1984's UK miner strike wasn't triggered because the National Coal
Board had said something homophobic. It's just not comparable, IMO.
The lack of violence is also easy to explain: violence is the weapon of those
that have no other way to be heard. Developers in the silicon valley can make
themselves heard without having to burn their company-provided MacBooks and
taking their managers hostage at the next SCRUM Sprint planning.
There was all kinds of trade union opposition to the Vietnam War, which is really no different from tech workers protesting against collaboration with the military and other violent state forces. Many of the leading figures in the Civil Rights Movement also came from labor organizing backgrounds, and while unions like the AFL-CIO have mixed records, support from organized labor was crucial to it success.
The cleavage you’re describing between ideological and material concerns is one that was introduced as part of the neoliberal ideology of the 1970s, in which Capital intentionally carved out a narrow space for identitarian claims to better defend itself from the multi-constituency groups that were attacking it in the 1960s. But it doesn’t reflect the real history of how solidarity functioned in the period.
There is certainly a shift in white-collar workers beginning to understand themselves in terms more akin to their working class predecessors, especially as it relates to hierarchy and power dynamics in companies. But this is not too terribly surprising given that massive wealth inequality has produced an even greater degree of proletarianization, even among the highly educated workforce. Google has more contract employees than regular employees now, for example.
I'm old enough to remember the Vietnam War and the AFL-CIO of the day was staunchly anti-communist and pro-war. Most of the opposition to the war before Nixon became president came from the pacifist left and student led organizations like the SDS.
I already cited the AFL-CIO’s conservatism. Under McCarthyism, most real leftists had been purged from the leadership of large unions. What you say about the students is true, but an incomplete picture. If you want a better one, check out Philip Foner‘s US Labor and the Vietnam War.
Most of the current tech activism is for things like salary transparency and employee representation/governance.
These are progressive ideals pushed usually by people who share other progressive ideals, but employee representation is not itself ideologically motivated.
> I don't think that's very similar to the time of activism we're talking about here.
I think that was exactly the OP's point. The kind of activism we're talking about here is low-key activism by privileged people. I can't think of any examples either - that didn't mean they didn't happen, it just means they weren't important enough to make the history books because they were settled without any violence.
> Now if you feel like your power as a citizen has dwindled and you can't meaningfully enact change through democratic means, it makes sense to try and "weaponize" your job, especially if you work for a powerful company and you're a valuable highly skilled worker.
I think you're close, but not quite right. I think what has happened is that ideas well outside the Overton Window have become popular with a couple small, but very vocal, groups. Their ideas aren't very popular with most people, so they can't achieve their desired outcomes democratically. They therefore try to "weaponize" their jobs in influential institutions, like Software companies, to gain influence over the rest of society.
> But in the end if you're dissatisfied with your company and you know that there's a fundamental ideological incompatibility it probably makes more sense to just quit, especially when you're a software dev and you can probably find some other job fairly easily.
While true that you could find "some other job" - it likely won't be a job that pays as well or has some other detestable attribute. If you have a pathological disagreement with companies collecting lots of data - you're going to have a hard time finding a company paying you $400k+/yr as an IC software dev.
If you're not wealthy (bought real estate before the big boom) or come from a family of wealth (they bought you a house) - you're going to have hard time in many cities only going with companies that you can find almost no ideological incompatibility with. And, turns out, a lot of these major cities that are very expensive also happen to have most of the job listings. God forbid you move to BFE and the few places that hire ICs stop hiring. You'll have to upheave your entire life and move - or pray you can find a suitable remote job.
Like most of us - you sacrifice your ideology because it isn't compatible with living in a capitalistic world and you've decided you're also not ready to be a martyr. You stand to lose a lot in the developed world (as you start with a lot more than those in less developed places) - martyrdom isn't worth it then. Only when you're independently wealthy can you truly make decisions based on your ideology. Making the presumption here that everyone wants a middle class to upper middle class American lifestyle (SFH, 2 cars, live in a somewhat desirable area, kids, retirement savings, etc.).
Never forget that calls that protests and political expressions aren't happening "in the right venue" or "in the right way" only help one side.
Take for example NFL management telling the players not to kneel in solidarity. That is the players' most effective (and frankly, peaceful, and not particularly disruptive) way to send a message. But if you don't agree with their message, moving to shift it to a less visible place is absolutely a political attempt to neuter it.
That's the point. Why should a private business like Coinbase accommodate far-left ideologues against capitalism and its very existence? That seems incongruous.
We're all faced with a difficult challenge in how to balance personal expression and professional conduct. It's especially difficult as shelter-at-home mandates push our work lives into our private spaces.
It's a good thing to try to be so generous with supporting an exit over values alignment. It's unfortunate, though not surprising, for Armstrong to want Coinbase to be like other for-profit financial firms -- quietly amassing wealth and influence vs. noisily in the spotlight.
If Coinbase is going to be completely apolitical are they permissive of any political activity outside of the office? If a Coinbase employee goes to a white supremacist rally with a tiki torch, and posts it on their personal Facebook visible to other Coinbase employees, are those employees forbidden to discuss it at work? Is this considered permitted behavior at Coinbase?
That's my problem with all of this. Purely mission-focused companies sound great -- in a vacuum. A totally apolitical workplace could only exist in a vacuum.
Politics is not something that happens twice a year in a voting booth, or even something that happens on TV; it's how you and I engage with civic society at large, and to say that the workplace should, or even could be divorced from that seems almost silly.
Coinbase doesn't walk to talk about politics at work? That's neat, and sounds nice. But they're making that statement in a time where "not talking about politics" is something that very much works in favor of some groups and against others.
I know that we're engineers, and we want to spend our days building and shipping. I wouldn't ever fault anyone for that desire. But we have to acknowledge the fact that neutrality favors, and will always favor, one side of a debate. To protest that politics are something that "doesn't happen here" is to bury one's head in the sand.
Totally depends on the form of the "politics at work". If we're talking about in-depth dialectic aimed at learning and problem solving then I'm all in.
Some other forms that I'd be happy to eliminate:
* Virtue signalling via preaching the doctrine of the party predominant at the company
* Bob from IT talking endlessly about his pet theory of Soros conspiracies
* Portraying politically grey areas as completely black-and-white and deplatforming those that disagree
After reading The Toxoplasma of Rage[1] I can't help but regard the vast majority of current politics with a great deal of cynicism.
It opens up a whole can of worms though. What's "political"? Nowadays anything uncomfortable is brushed aside as political? Racism? Political! Gender inequality? Definitely political! Wealth in... you see where I'm going with this. So what that screams to me is this will to bubble up Coinbase with people happy in the current status quo, whatever that is!
I don't see why he's offering them any sort of package to leave, it's not like they're being made redundant. It's very generous but sets an odd precedent. It's like it's a compensation payment for not being allowed to make the workplace toxic.
Would be great if liberal tech companies could give similar benefits to whoever wants to leave because their political views don’t align with the company’s views. I don’t talk about politics at my workspace because I know only one side is welcome there.
I expect a lot companies and capital, given the COVID nudge, will accelerate moving to other locations and hiring remote, because they want to pay their employees to the their work, and not to go on moral crusades on company's time.
Any & all politics at work is unacceptable period..you are there to do the job you accepted and agreed to do. Nothing more! Go create your own company that embraces and hires only activists with various views...I wonder how successful such a company would be?
I was taught politics isn't polite to talk about it.... illogical (what politics are to me ...a pissing match driven by billionaires on each side fueling fires for their side and their sheep almost mindlessly following along ) views aren't a welcoming or warm human experience that fosters teamwork.
All companies should follow with this stance ..letting all know discussing politics at XYZ company is frowned upon and if troubles arise from it (other employees feeling harassed and or uncomfortable by it; report it) then XYZ company isn't the place for you!
The state of politics today, as a base layer under and inside everything, is such that politics cannot be kept out of work. Look at something very straightforward like Covid-19, an airborne disease. For reasons that I can't explain, attitudes towards this virus in the US are political, such that there is a strong correlation between one's view of the severity of this virus and one's attitudes towards the legal status of abortion.
A company deciding between "everyone work from home" or "everyone come into the office and sit in open seating" has to engage with the realities of what the virus is, which necessitates taking a stand on issues which are political.
This is doubly impossible for Coinbase since cryptocurrency is the most overtly political area of technology.
I believe this stance is dangerous for the company. The founder has exhibited and is overtly displaying here traits that are known predictors of fraud.
Encouraging explicitly amoral stances from companies and retaliatory actions such as this may be appealing to some but is ultimately harmful to the company and society in general. That's a debatable assertion of course but the more we learn about white collar crime and companies which disregard the harms they do the more we find that individuals lacking empathy are core players.
Is the current wave of political tension in workplaces limited to tech/SV companies, or is this a more general thing? Have there been any significant incidents/announcement in other areas?
Hypocrisy is rampant with some Coinbase figures that cry out for "acknowledging the injustice and inequality that affects many current and future Coinbase users."
Good God, your firm exists to facilitate trading in speculative assets peddled by libertarian internet millionaires and that just so happen to be exceptionally useful for laundering money - enabling a whole online industry of shadow markets that were thought impossible a decade ago.
I understand that your values dictate that association with this unsavory bunch is an acceptable compromise when pitted against the grave dangers of government overreach and surveillance - I am of the same opinion. But social revolutionaries you are certainly not, just opportunists speaking the slogans of the day while lining their own pockets. So Armstrong's sincerity and lack of pretense is refreshing.
> Good God, your firm exists to facilitate trading in speculative assets peddled by libertarian internet millionaires and that just so happen to be exceptionally useful for laundering money - enabling a whole online industry of shadow markets that were thought impossible a decade ago
This is a fantastic sentence. One of those times when I wish I could upvote more than once.
Arguably even more puzzling are the social activists at Facebook etc. They work for a platform that has interfered with democracy, has been proven to cause or exacerbate mental health problems, tramples over privacy, and at the very least is deliberately designed to be addictive and waste a lot of people's time.
It is strange that people can (claim to) care so deeply about the welfare of certain identity groups, yet work for a company that shows contempt for humanity as a whole.
Not quite -- he's rebounding from internal demands that he make particular political speech and seeing employees "walk out" when he didn't. None of the issues are relevant to Coinbase and its mission and he doesn't want that distraction in his company.
Coinbase, and Armstrong, have been a blight on the BItcoin community since about late 2013, one only comparable to MTGOX in overall severity. They really showed that they had their origins in Goldman Sachs from that point onward and that their cronyist playbook would predictably be used as they did in the Legacy fiat system to their advantage.
Their 'social activism' as its presented in that post includes trying to conflate BCash with Bitcoin to noobs who were unaware of the fork in order to bolster the price of a alt coin with no value or usecase just as mainstream attention (read: non-technical users) was being gained, and by extension they promoted Ver/Jihan/Bitmain's agenda and failed coup. If that dishonest behavior of their user's wasn't enough they would later report its users to the IRS and then, as released earlier this year [0] they are DIRECTLY offering Blockchain analytics to the IRS and DEA. And then ban Wikileaks account from their platform.
I regret to say that as a Community we never learned our lesson in the MANY pitfalls of allowing the growth of a cancerous central point of failure after Mt Gox, and that the path of 'least resistance' to on-board people into this tech had many (predictable) dire consequences. I've used centralized exchanges before, but it didn't feel as a enthralling as when I went to a meetup, spoke to like minded people in the Community and bought some in a p2p manner--its really a night and day experience contrast. Or simply got tipped by total strangers online for a project or an idea I wanted to explore as I had in the early days.
What were supposed to be training wheels to gradually create an ecosystem primarily driven to be a p2p currency, as was intended, became a crutch that atrophied and poisoned the general curiosity which denied it's users the rewards that often followed which made this really remarkable.
This neglect has allowed Coinbase as a single entity to now hold a large percentage of the total Bitcoin in existence, not including the large amounts that they hold custody of its user's who simply do not take possession of their funds.
To say Bitcoin can be a-political is grounded in the very ignorance that created the aforementioned consequences; it is by default the reaction to the perpetual failures of the politicizing of State-based currencies and the corruption of Central Banks. It's very Genesis Block states why it was created: as an alternative to the bailouts of 2008.
I honestly don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that Coinbase represents the very worse, and the toxic nature of what YC can bring into existence. That sounds entirely scathing, and perhaps unwarranted to those unaware of the dire nature, but this is really no different than enabling how FAANG has created a business model that has pretty much them an extension of many countries Intelligence Agencies who directly sell their user's data/information to the highest bidder. The difference being that this Trojan horse was only possible because YC funded them in the early stages.
Who's to say they won't, or haven't already, created another?
Why is a company wanting to be apolitical is controversial? That should be the default, is this an American thing like how masks and healthcare are controversial?
I would expect a government to have proper separation from church and state, so why is it weird to want a company to separate politics and mission?
I can't see any good coming from being in a work environment where the company supports a political issue I'm strongly against, it would make co-workers and myself feel like opponents and likely make for a hostile work environment.
I (and many others) are of the opinion that you can’t truly be apolitical; claiming to be so is its own form of politics (and generally one that supports the status quo).
Politics is ultimately about how we engage and collaborate with each other as a society, not just which “party” you like. The very act of being a company is very relative to the laws and regulations your country has, which are of course determined by politics.
Coinbase is specifically a company about cryptocurrency. Crypto is directly related to a how governments manage their own currency, the right to privacy, law circumvention (see Alpha Bay), and so on. How can they truly be neutral on all of these issues that are directly relevant to the business they do?
that's one of those "you're either with us or against us" type of deal - which is not the right way to deal with anything imho.
You _can_ be apolitical - as in, you do not let your political views affect what you do. You keep your political views private. You do not try to change anyone else's political views as part of your job.
> that's one of those "you're either with us or against us" type of deal - which is not the right way to deal with anything imho.
I think it's more like saying you can't truly be unbiased. Try as you might, it's arguably impossible to truly be unbiased when making decisions an interacting with people. Journalists try their best, by presenting "just the facts" but even that is tough as which facts you chase down and which you deem important is colored by your biases. The flavor of words you write is also thus colored. I know they go through lots of training to account for this, and the truly great journalists we know of are mostly those that achieved some measure of success here, thus earning the respect of their peers and those that they interview.
So, you can try to be apolitical, but it's perhaps one of those impossible goals, because our political views are a form of bias, and if highly trained journalists still have trouble with this, everyone else will as well.
Companies are change agents, even if it's just to get people to use their product over somebody else's. But in Coinbase's case, it's more than that. They're trying to change the way the world exchanges goods and money. That would be a big change to how we all live, and thus it touches on politics in many places. As far as Coinbase is concerned, this makes sense. Many people are finding that just "having a job to collect a paycheck" is not fulfilling enough. They want to change the world as part of their jobs too. So they find jobs that align with their views. Awesome for them.
> I think it's more like saying you can't truly be unbiased. Try as you might, it's arguably impossible to truly be unbiased when making decisions an interacting with people.
That's the point of blinding yourself to the people you interact with, isn't it? If you pick and choose who to do business with, I agree. If you have a website where people buy things that get mailed to them, there is no biased decision making.
> if highly trained journalists still have trouble with this, everyone else will as well
Not sure about this bit. Journalists today (at least for Europe) tend to be politically active first, journalists second. They view their role as educators of the masses, not information presenter, that is, to explain to their audience, why they should believe whatever the journalist believes, not provide facts to their audience and let them decide. I don't see a lot of evidence for individual journalists and even less so companies trying to be neutral.
I understand the argument to be more that, if you don't actively fighting for whatever you believe should be the way society operates, then you're implicitly actively fighting for whatever way it currently operates. I don't agree with that at all. It would include that a doctor who saves a person's life without checking whether they are for or against some issue would be considered putting their weight on one side of the issue. They're not, they are doing their job and saving a life.
> Not sure about this bit. Journalists today (at least for Europe) tend to be politically active first, journalists second.
Then that is pretty sad. But, not surprising, and it's often the same way across the pond. Take a look at the Journalism Code of Ethics [0] and see if your news sources abide by it. This is what I hold my reporters accountable to, as much as I can.
Needless to say, I disagree that what you describe should be considered OK and normal.
> It would include that a doctor who saves a person's life without checking whether they are for or against some issue would be considered putting their weight on one side of the issue. They're not, they are doing their job and saving a life.
Agreed. But, have you thought about why the Hippocratic Oath exists in the first place? The very point of it is to force doctors to consider all lives equal and, to the best of their ability, ignore their personal beliefs and do their job. It's literally trying to prevent people from following their base instincts. Very similar to the Journalism Ethics, in a way. That said, it's not perfect; there are many studies showing that, statistically, minorities have higher rates of mortality and other adverse effects in hospitals. That's not causation, but it does point to some potential troubling behaviors.
Anyway, I digress. Not all jobs are considered equal, which should be obvious. If you only want to save the lives of your favorite political party, you should really not become a doctor. Or you will hopefully be found and reported by other doctors / law enforcement and rightly put in prison. Programmers, for better or worse, do not have the same issues.
> Programmers, for better or worse, do not have the same issues.
I think they do, and we generally expect everyone to behave that way, but we're making it very explicit for doctors and lawyers and some other professions. Of course, it's not as immediate when you're dealing with programmers, but viewing the economy not as a total war with temporary alliances between buyers and sellers but as a way to get things done with the market place being the most efficient way to do so (which, I believe, is the more appropriate way, and it's also the way we look at it from the nation state perspective which will happily disable the market place in times of war or catastrophic events), discriminating with regards to politics when selling your services is throwing sand in the machine.
It's not outlawed for many professions (but usually is once you have a monopoly in some location), but it's neither wide-spread, nor encouraged or accepted, I believe.
For example, can you be a gun shop owner without being pro-gun? Some would say actions speak louder than words.
On the other hand, if you own a bakery being apolitical is a lot simpler. Avoid the Masterpiece Cakeshop case and there's as little politics as you'll find anywhere.
It's funny you bring up bakeries. In 1905, the Supreme Court ruled that a NY law limiting daily working hours for bakers was unconstitutional under the 14th amendment (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lochner_v._New_York). The point of the law was to keep overworked and tired bakers from making a mistake and blowing the place up (aerated flour is quite the accelerant). This ruling began the era of the Lochner court during which many of the labor protections we take for granted like child-labor laws and overtime protection were struck down under the 14th. Fortunately, we have since pivoted, but that bakery owner's seemingly benign decision to work his employees a bit harder had massive political ramifications for years.
It's not as easy as one thinks to just steer clear of politics. Just about everything has an impact.
The announcement from Coinbase specifically says that issues concerning working conditions are in bounds:
> Of course, employees should always feel free to advocate around issues of pay, conditions of employment, or violations of law, for instance. Hopefully the above sets some clear guidelines.
One might make the argument for related vs unrelated politics. (Though the line between what's related and unrelated is fairly subjective)
A bakery is obviously going to have an interest in politics directly related to operating a bakery and the employment laws affecting it. A bakery might reasonably avoid political stances on something unrelated, such as nuclear power, foreign conflicts, etc.
This is a bit off topic from the original discussion, but I think you definitely can be a gun shop owner and be against guns at the same time, albeit still in a political sense. Having a gun shop provides you with the best possible venue for educating your customers about guns "from the inside", hence being able to push your agenda in the long term.
That being said, running a gun shop is definitely a political statement. I guess you could control what you sell as well, like "I only sell hunting rifles - for hunting" and refusing to sell hand guns or automatic rifles. Sorry for the example of guns, I'm swedish and have no insight in what is commonplace in US gun stores.
But owning a gun shop would by its very nature makes you pro-gun from a conflict of interest standpoint. Your very livelihood would require that the laws stay lax. It might even require that you actively advocate against any proposed legislation that might damage your business. To remain apolitical or even anti-gun would be failing your duties to your family, employees, and shareholders (if you have any) to grow and sustain the business and keep them fed, housed, employed, and paid.
> But owning a gun shop would by its very nature makes you pro-gun from a conflict of interest standpoint.
No it most certainly doesn't. A person can hold the opinion that many people can engage in some activity responsibly, while not everyone can.
Being a gun store owner that favors regulation on the ownership of guns is not all that different from a beer brewer that favors regulation of drinking age or laws against operating vehicles while inebriated.
Ignoring morality for a moment, there's a business argument in there too. A bunch of drunk hooligans causing car accidents is bad for business. Anyone in the business of dealing in "harmful" products is aware of potential public backlash from irresponsible people and will seek to mitigate that in some form.
Sure, I suppose our disconnect comes from two things: 1. The laws I imagined when I was drafting my comment were more akin to taking away guns completely, not something like more stringent background checks or cool down periods. That was my mistake 2. I personally believe the dollar has more political power than any vote by way of directly enabling or disabling the ability to act in any manner. In that regard, I feel that businesses are political in, for example, the supply chain activities (environmental impact, labor practices, etc) that they choose to fund. Merely by existing and directing money towards real world consequences, a business is political.
“Hunting” rifles and semi-automatic rifles that are erroneously referred to as “assault rifles” are functionally the same. Almost nowhere can you readily buy automatic rifles.
Not to dive too far into the politics or semantics of this, but I feel like OP meant "hunting" rifles to mean "bolt-action" or "single-shot" type rifles.
Also, OP didn't actually say anything about semi-automatic rifles, at all. So it's really a nothing statement to make that distinction; I guess I took the bait, though.
For most people, the debate about "assault rifles" seems to be a misunderstanding about the language being used by the other side. For people who label semi-automatic rifles as "assault rifles", they think of hunting rifles as small capacity, bolt-action rifles. Whereas folks like you do not make that distinction.
It's so weird to see that conversation play out, and realize that neither side understands the most basic definitions of the other. It's super common in gun debates. And very, genuinely strange.
> It's so weird to see that conversation play out, and realize that neither side understands the most basic definitions of the other. It's super common in gun debates. And very, genuinely strange.
it's not symmetrical that way. the way gun control advocates use "assault rifle" is usually pretty vague. I have friends who would call a semi-automatic MP5 an "assault rifle". to a gun enthusiast, an "assault rifle" is a specific type of gun that is quite difficult to legally own as a civilian. I suspect 2A folks understand what the other side means by "assault rifle" (as well as they do themselves, at least), but choose not to give it the dignity of acknowledgement.
the inverse occurs in discussions about racism. the left uses "racism" to mean "power + prejudice", while the right understands it simply as "discrimination on the basis of race". folks on the right don't necessarily understand through context which definition is being used (if they're even aware of the "power + prejudice" definition). folks on the left absolutely understand the source of confusion, but pretend they don't to leave their interlocutors looking stupid.
in both cases, you essentially have one side mocking the other for not having done their homework. not unfair imo, but probably not the most productive way to have the discussion.
To be honest, in the second case I refuse to acknowledge because it is newspeak: redefinition of words to mean whatever benefits the party now. (it has been a few years since I read 1984, but I think I remember this correctly.)
It is immediately clear even as a foreigner what racism really means and whoever tries to redefine it as a general slur deserves to be called out for it, just in the same way as they try to redefine assault rifle to mean any scary looking gun.
I can see why you would feel that way, but I don't think it's malicious usually.
the way I look at it is the "power + privilege" definition comes from "racism" as an academic term of art, a meaning that everyone engaged in a certain kind of study/research agrees on. a comparable example from CS would be "syntax" vs "semantics". when people scold someone for arguing over semantics, they mean something more similar to the CS definition of "syntax". if you, a CS person, interpret them using the CS definition of "semantics", it would sound quite ridiculous. I often see left-leaning people (esp college educated) using certain words with their academic meanings. they're not being deliberately misleading, but they don't always do a good job of handling the confusion that ensues when addressing a broader audience.
Lots of hunting rifles have an internal magazine with a smallish fixed capacity.
That's functionally quite different from a rifle with easily swapped external magazines with high capacity.
Chambering also matters a little bit. Weapons with a military lineage tend to have smaller rounds than rifles for big game. The smaller rounds make it easier to pack large amounts of ammunition and reduce fatigue.
Of course assault rifle is a meaningless term, but that's a result of many efforts to warp the discourse and not because the weapons used for war are literally the same as a weapon that is sufficient for hunting.
Assault rifles are marketed as "sporting" rifles by their manufacturers. My rifle doesn't accept detachable magazines which is one of the features of assault/sporting rifles.
>For example, can you be a gun shop owner without being pro-gun
What do you mean "pro-gun"?
You're fundamentally trying to reduce something that's a range to a binary and you're gonna lose a lot of accuracy doing that.
There's lots of gun shops owned by fudds who support various things from the "anti gun" wish list. Just by virtue of being older the "people who own gun shops" demographic is likely less extreme on the pro-gun spectrum than the average person on the pro-gun spectrum.
Obviously this is gonna generalize pretty well to other issues. Anyone running an abortion clinic is gonna be pro-life to some extend but selling the service doesn't necessarily mean they're at the super extreme end of it.
> For example, can you be a gun shop owner without being pro-gun? Some would say actions speak louder than words.
That's a false dichotomy. There are multiple stances on guns besides "guns should be completely unregulated" and "civilians shouldn't be allowed to own guns".
Working at a gun shop is, for example, very compatible with the notion that people should be subject to buying background checks before being able to buy a gun. After all, it's the brick-and-mortar gun shops who have to abide by background checks; the more these shops dominate the market, the smaller the market will be for gun shows where such background checks aren't required.
You're repeating a common misunderstanding about gun shows here which is that there are different rules for gun shows. There aren't. All licensed firearms sellers, i.e. all the people with booths, must do all the same background checks they would when selling from their stores. Meanwhile, all the non-gun-dealers (i.e. attendees) follow the same rules they would any other time of the year, which is that private-party transactions don't require background checks in some states. But that would be the same as if they sold a gun on Facebook or whatever. The dealers at the gun show are all doing the background checks as required by federal law (and additionally many states have more checks and/or waiting periods that also must be obeyed).
In any case, working for an actual gun dealer is still compatible with a stance of "I support universal background checks and closing the private-seller loophole", which is still a form of gun control and a departure from the status quo.
I don't know what political issues affect bakeries today, but infamously, being any sort of consumer business in the US (particularly in the South) in the 1950s and 1960s was extremely political.
I'm not one of them myself, but I know people who would argue that the ubiquity of sugary foods in our diets is a bigger net negative to society than guns.
I don't totally disagree, but you have to go a little further to really make the point. excess sugar seems to cause more deaths than guns, but how many years does it take off of people's lifespan? a poor diet killing someone at 65 instead of 78 is not quite as bad as a healthy 20yo being shot dead in an instant. to go even further, what's the cumulative impact to quality of life, even if one does live to a ripe old age?
It's only possible to believe this if you are in a majority with a majority opinion. If this was 60 years ago, during Jim Crow, is the apolitical thing for a company to do when it comes to their workers? Were companies in the right to have separate bathrooms, to hire less or no minorities so that they didn't have to maintain separate facilities? Saying those acts are ok is a political opinion endorsing Jim Crow simply because it was the law.
The entire mission of a company doesn't have to be front and center in politics but there is no such thing as being apolitical for any company interacting with the world in a meaningful way
Coinbase is an exchange for people to access cryptocurrency. The gradual adoption of cryptocurrencies weakens central governments’ currencies. Their entire business is by nature, political.
Yes but it is also subject to the powers of the market. As lonng as they don't use lobbying to give their product an unfair advantage, it's (literally) people paying with their wallets.
That's a political stance. As long as you're part of society, you'll always have a political stance. That's what the other commentor was getting at.
Why would you ever want your views to not influence what you do? If not yours, whose perception would you use to inform what you do? And why would you want to keep your views private?
If you think that your views are so inappropriate or unimportant that you can't share them, that's a view in of itself and that's what people will see.
> You do not try to change anyone else's political views as part of your job
Whether you should try to actively change someone's view is a big question. It's a very different question than whether or not you should have/share your worldview. Whether you like it or not, your views are what they are because of others sharing theirs (explicitly or implicitly).
> It's a very different question than whether or not you should have/share your worldview.
the very act of sharing your view (implying it's unsolicited) is trying to change someone else. Let me use as an obnoxious example: vegans trying to sell the idea of veganism to non-vegans.
The view you just described is active support for the status quo.
One fairly non-controversial part of the status quo right now is our dependence on fossil fuels and co2 emissions to keep our economy running.
Saying "I'll keep my views private" means I'm giving an okay to what's happening now. If every individual shares the thinking at every company then it is impossible to even imagine how the most catastrophic climate change can be avoided.
Beyond even this example, it's is politically naive to believe there is some "normal". The status quo today is the politics of the current dominant power (which is largely market forces). Agreeing to be "apolitical" is actively support of this system. Your view is the one that is strongly "with us or against us" in that any opinion other than the dominant political ideology is supposed to be silenced at work.
"Just do you job and don't voice contrary opinions" is a pretty radical political opinion if you ask me, so your definition of "apolitical" is only "A"-political because you are so intensely in opposition to non-status quo beliefs that you disregard them completely.
Being apolitical at work is not active support for the status quo. It’s simply not using your role as an employee for your company as a vehicle to advance your political agenda. An agenda which is most likely irrelevant to the mission of your company.
You can be apolitical at work while still opposing the so called status quo with your vote. Or you can oppose the status quo in an explicitly political organization outside of your job.
And the alternative is the company's political agenda. So you are saying we must all, 8+ hours a day, support our employers political agenda, and then in the time remaining we can try to counteract that a bit.
If you think political action begins and ends at the vote then you have a lot to learn about the nature of politics in practice.
> Isn't this the whole point of work? Exchanging your own preferences and time for money?
In our current economic system, yes for some people; but less so for some individuals, and again even less in economies with UBI.
A founder, for instance, is often not looking to trade preferences but instead to actually make an impact on the world while sharing in the profit of that impact. This is different than just trading things away: you are collaborating actively. Of course, that’s currently mostly available for small groups such as founders and small-business owners.
And you may note that… all of this has political ramifications :) Small business owners are heavily impacted by political regulation; the ability of workers to organize and take a joint ownership over their work is governed by laws too.
None of this exists in a vacuum. We are who we are because of who we all are, and we do what we do because of what we all do. That’s political. Some people just want others to be passive.
You aren’t being paid to promote your political agenda, you are being paid to perform your function as an employee. If you don’t support your company’s agenda, why would you work there?
While we're focused on the purely "Political" agenda in this conversation, politics of a company include anything from how on-calls work to how sick days are counted.
You can work at a company and advocate for changing things and it can be as comparatively small as ensuring on-call rotations are fair to ensuring the company voices support for and takes actions in line with supporting Black Lives Matter. These are all political in the spirit described up thread as saying that politics is the figuring out and deciding of these issues as a group.
The decision of how many sick days, etc. is relevant to the business of the company. Social justice movements like “black lives matter” are not relevant to the mission of companies like Coinbase, as determined by their leadership.
> Social justice movements like “black lives matter” are not relevant to the mission of companies like Coinbase
That's the whole issue, and you're just affirming the consequent by saying this. Structural equality is unavoidably the concern of every person and group in a society.
Not having the time to concern yourself with politics isn't a position of neutrality or agnosticism. You can only adopt that position if the status quo of a society provides you sufficient protection, stability, prosperity, etc. to allow you to tune it out. If those conditions aren't true, it's not possible to "not concern yourself with politics" in a Maslow's hierarchy sense. And so doing so is unavoidably a tacit defense of the status quo.
Also false, many people who you would claim are affected by “structural inequality” and who are more focused with improving their individual conditions also do not have time to concern themselves with politics.
Example is myself. I am a child of poor immigrants. I am neither white nor wealthy. I do not care about involving myself in your politics, I spend my time focused on working and being productive for the sake of supporting my family. Frankly your politics destroyed my country.
You’re twisting words to make your point vacuously true. I do not care about changing federal government policy or who runs the federal government. Call that whatever you like, doesn’t mean I have ever received special benefits from the system any more than anyone else. That is my stance because I have better things to do with my time, like being productive.
The fact that you are able to not care about these things is a privilege you enjoy. And not caring about them is a political decision that you've made.
It’s literally a privilege everyone enjoys. No one is forced to care about politics at all. That’s a false premise. It’s always a choice, it’s not a privilege.
If you are a trans person and need to use the bathroom in a conservative state, then you are forced to care about politics. If you are a black person who is stopped by the police and rightfully fear for your life, then you are forced to care about politics.
that's not a political stance - that's negotiating your working conditions. It's private and individual, and only affect you (and your colleagues). It doesn't affect society at large whether you have on-call or how sick days are counted _at_ your place of employement.
But to use your position as an employee to push for universal sick leave, or for BLM, which affects society at large, not just yourself, is a political stance.
You take for granted current working conditions which were won via hard-fought political battles and which affect us to this day.
Also what about Maternity leave? Paternity leave? Are those not political?
How is negotiating working conditions not related to "how we engage and collaborate with each other as a society"? It's inherently (little p) political even if the engagement is at a company similar to how politics on your local HOA is still politics.
I think you’re conflating issues relevant to the business of the company, which might be considered political, and political issues which are irrelevant to the business of the company. The former is okay, the latter is not. The subject of OP is the latter.
In this case: basic and functional equality of the members of a society. Like pornography, this is hard to define precisely, but I know when the violations are egregious enough, and the functional equality of black Americans through in the eyes of the police right now is certainly egregious enough.
> ... that's negotiating your working conditions. It's private and individual, and only affect you (and your colleagues).
No. That's an "it depends" thing. If the "political issue" in question is something team or working condition related then it's not necessarily private and individual affecting only you.
Some people will care about that and want to potentially co-ordinate. Other people won't consider it important, and/or have other priorities.
> It's private and individual, and only affect you
You must be aware of the existence of unions. You're mentioning US-political concerns, so you're almost certainly familiar with the notion that the mere existence of unions is highly political. Whether or not you are a union member, union activities effect US workplaces.
Ignoring their existence in this discussion is itself a political position.
It’s very brave if you, in the middle of a pandemic, to say that “sick days are private and have no impact on society at large.”
You must have missed March and April when sick days at “essential work” (such as grocery stores, restaurants, coffee shops, and more) was in fact a matter of national conversation: sick people going to work spread disease. The number of sick days was also of debate: most low wage jobs don’t offer more than 1 sick day a month or two. Not so good when someone needs two weeks off.
This kind of short sightedness and inherent support of the status quo as “it’s fine, I see no problem here” is exactly what the other commenter(s) are talking about.
You honestly don't see how what you're describing is a fairly radical political opinion? You are now arguing that you should choose your means of survival as a political statement. If you don't lock-step agree with the politics of tech companies in general, you should find a lower salary someplace else that agrees more with your political beliefs.
I would love if people who are privacy advocates could get facebook salaries working for the EFF.
It looks like what you are advocating here is that not only should you silence non-status quo opinions, but your income should strongly correlated with your alignment with dominant political powers.
The premise of your argument is that you have no choice in your employment, which is false. There are hundreds of tech companies to work for, if not thousands.
No one is forcing climate change activists to work for oil companies. As a corollary it would be absurd for a climate change activist to argue that oil companies must employ them to allow their companies to be destroyed from the inside out.
I’m simply saying your employer does not pay you to advance any agenda other than their own and that using your employer’s time to advance a political agenda irrelevant to theirs is theft, for lack of a better term.
> choose your means of survival as a political statement...[or] find a lower salary someplace else that agrees more with your political beliefs.
or, compare how much you like a higher salary, vs a company that agrees with your political views. And choose appropriately.
What's not appropriate is to choose the company with the highest salary, but whose owner's political views differ from your own, and then try to change that to something more suitable to your own. Or use such a position as leverage to push your own political views to a wider audience than you could on your own.
A lot of people need to lie to themselves and others that they’re not complete sell outs who forfeited their morals for a high salary. Being loud at work and social media is one way of doing that. It ends up with no real traction in reality though because the companies they work for don’t prioritize it over profits.
> What's not appropriate is to choose the company with the highest salary, but whose owner's political views differ from your own, and then try to change that to something more suitable to your own. Or use such a position as leverage to push your own political views to a wider audience than you could on your own.
Very well put and I’m terrifyingly surprised at how many people are arguing for the opposite. That is literal subversion.
> What's not appropriate is to choose the company with the highest salary, but whose owner's political views differ from your own, and then try to change that to something more suitable to your own.
Why is that inappropriate exactly? If my boss’ opinion is “unions shouldn’t exist because I think I’m entitled to treat people however I want/play them off each other/depress wages” why am I not allowed to rebel against that and organize with my coworkers? In fact, the right to do this very thing is enshrined in law.
Did you read the Coinbase blog post? The conversation has really devolved away from the original topic. Coinbase issued a statement saying they are focused on their mission as a for-profit company. You're spinning it into something its not.
"I don’t think companies can succeed trying to do everything. Creating an open financial system for the world is already a hugely ambitious mission, and we could easily spend the next decade or two trying to move the needle on global economic freedom."
What exactly do you disagree with about their statement? What are you proposing that Coinbase do differently? Should they collectively vote to align the company with a political party?
If you think that politics is an overriding consideration at all times - that every hour you spend working for someone is an hour spent supporting their political agenda - I don't think you have any choice but to choose your means of survival as a political statement. I agree that this is a pretty bad outcome, which is why I'd encourage you not to embrace such totalizing views of politics.
I think what they’re suggesting is an employee who focuses more attention on work at work will outperform the employee who doesn’t. It doesn’t matter what the subject is.
> You just believe that 'politics' is outside the scope of the company. Other's believe that it is not.
I believe this is a strawman. The issue at hand is political issues that are explicitly irrelevant to the mission of the company.
Issues that are relevant to the company should be discussed and potentially acted upon, if that furthers the agenda of the company (and not just some irrelevant political agenda that you might be passionate about).
I have seen companies claim that the things that their customers do with their product is not their responsibility. They have claimed that they are right to ignore that issue because they believe it is "political".
Naming something as political can be used to shutdown conversation that can and should be happening in a company.
Let's get concrete with this:
Do you feel like a soft drink maker has an obligation to disengage with countries that have set up systemic discrimination and regularly violate human rights conventions?
It really doesn't seem within the mission of providing the world with sugary carbonated water.
It's hard to imagine cutting ties with a country due to disagreement with how they treat their population as non-political.
But wait you say: it's just a prudent business decision because the economics were against them and it was a "PR" win.
It doesn't matter. It's political.
This is an inherently political statement:
“Our decision to complete the process of disinvestment is a statement of our opposition to apartheid and of our support for the economic aspirations of black South Africans.” -Donald R. Keough
That was a decision that the leadership of that company made. I don’t see how that justifies employees bringing their irrelevant politics into an environment.
Yes. When you join a company, you are signing onto their political agenda. If you don't believe that, then I wonder if you'd have an aversion to working for Jeffrey Epstein.
> The view you just described is active support for the status quo.
A passive stance is, by definition, not active support for anything.
Coinbase is actively working on financial infrastructure. That's what they "actively" do.
> Saying "I'll keep my views private" means I'm giving an okay to what's happening now.
No, it means that what's happening now is, while certainly important to many employees as people, not a part of or in any way related to the company's business.
> A passive stance is, by definition, not active support for anything.
Passive support for the status quo is that we all have to work and survive in this world. If you have to work for an airline to live, but hate what co2 emissions is doing for this world, you are passively supporting the currently political narrative.
Insisting that any belief that is non-status quo be silenced is active political action. You can pretend that it's passive, but that is just a cowardly way of abdicating political responsibility.
So, if I tell you about the issues of South African droughts in Capetown and now that you know this but haven't done anything about it and any excuse you give me like 'I don't live there' or 'I don't have the time' or 'I don't have the money', don't those all fall under 'we all have to work and survive' and thus you're passively supporting the status quo of bad things?
I think the next step is then I can assail you with facts of every bad thing going on in this world and if you do nothing about it, you're cowardly abdicating your political responsibility, neh?
I might go a step further with your position and say that silence/speaking out are really two sides of the same coin. After all, silence and 'talk' is cheap. If you really want to fight the status quo you ought to commit your life and the majority of your money to the causes you believe in.
> thus you're passively supporting the status quo of bad things?
Absolutely, as a relatively well-off Westerner, me and my way of life absolutely are the direct and indirect cause of a lot of violence and harm around the world. I likewise creates a lot of CO2. Filling up my gas tank causes a lot of bloodshed. Doing this things is a part of the life I am used to, but absolutely yes I am passively supporting these things.
An activist against these things will likely take active steps to resist this passive support.
> if you do nothing about it, you're cowardly abdicating your political responsibility, neh?
No. My point is precisely if I tell you "we don't talk about those things, it's not polite, I want this to be an apolitical statement" that I am switching from passively supporting the status quo to actively. But by claiming that this is somehow "apolitical" that is the cowardly abdication of political responsibility. What I mean here is being responsible for your political choices.
Saying that "wow I do passively contribute to co2 emissions, I don't know what to do about it but I don't like it." is taking political responsibility. Say "don't talk about that at work!" and claiming your taking the neutral ground is abdicating that responsibility.
> If you really want to fight the status quo you ought to commit your life and the majority of your money to the causes you believe in.
This is literally the definition of activism, and I of course support it. But the source of all activism is 'talk', which is not a cheap as you make it out to be. People who 'talk' about unions at Google tend to lose jobs. People who 'talk' about questionable legal practices at their company tend to lose jobs. And 'talk' is the seed of activism.
If I followed you around at work all day pestering you about obscure political issues irrelevant to your job, you wouldn't be able to get any work done.
> If you have to work for an airline to live, but hate what co2 emissions is doing for this world, you are passively supporting the currently political narrative.
no that's just surviving. It's not politically supporting "the status quo".
> abdicating political responsibility.
implying that everyone _has_ to have some political responsibility.
Not everyone cares enough - they believe climate change, but they also don't want to expend energy fighting it - that' snot a political stance. It sucks, but that's the majority of people.
"Silenced" strikes me as a uselessly broad category. If I tell my friends to stop yelling about politics because we're trying to have a nice dinner, that isn't an active political action.
The financial infrastructure that Coinbase is working on brushes up against the lines drawn by the law in many countries. Working with Bitcoin could be seen as a somewhat political act in itself.
No I don’t think so. Upper management yes. Not rank and file. It’s like if the company vision failed and their next big product fails. That’s on management but not on the rank and file.
> A passive stance is, by definition, not active support for anything
You are sitting at a bus stop and you see a man having a heart attack in front of you with nobody else around. If you call the authorities and send for an ambulance, you will save his life. If you don't, he will die.
Whether you just passively sit there and wait for the bus, or whether you take action to save the man's life, you are making a decision and that decision will have consequences.
There is no such thing as being apolitical. Not making a choice is making a choice.
The reason the word 'political' exists is that some things are very political and many things aren't. To be political in your example would be to base your decision to call an ambulance on whether the victim is wearing a maga hat or blm shirt. To be apolitical is to set aside your and their views of government and focus on the thing at hand that has very little to do with government, which is that someone is dying and you can save them with a phone call.
The point was just to illustrate that inaction is an action. Not taking a political stance is taking a political stance. It is a game you cannot help but play.
Politics is more than government. It's our society, it's how we deal with each other. It's how we approach the economy, the family, the church. It's intrinsically linked to being human, or as Aristotle put it, the "philosophy of human affairs".
If your business does not actively support a reform, they are actively supporting the status quo. Which is fine, humans disagree. But to pretend it's something it's not is disingenuous or naive.
> First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action" MLK
Ultimately the people that don't care enough about a specific reform are the reason it isn't happening in the first place. I'm not trying to advocate for tribalism and polarization or promote a "mindset". I'm just stating a truth.
> The view you just described is active support for the status quo.
Not really. I can do my job from 9 to 5 in a non-political way and then actively try to change the status quo on evenings and weekends. That doesn't align with how you are describing being apolitical at work means.
> If every individual shares the thinking at every company then it is impossible to even imagine how the most catastrophic climate change can be avoided.
Because many individuals can sincerely believe that the way to deal with climate change goes via individual or citizen advocacy groups changing cultural attitudes and then exerting pressure on the Governments to bring in the necessary regulations. Companies should not be engaged in climate change politics (or global poverty or abortion rights) if they want to avoid it.
> The view you just described is active support for the status quo.
It's really not.
It's just not giving a shit about whatever the thing is the political argument is about, instead putting time and care into other things you consider more important. eg kids, family, etc.
"Kids, family" aren't necessarily in opposition to "political argument". When you watch a political protest, you should see people fighting FOR their children's futures. Whenever politics has a multigenerational timescale, that's what it's about.
I also point out that "not giving a shit" and "considering more important" are synonyms for "not mattering" and "mattering", respectively.
Well yes. Some person may feel that their particular hot issue is "the most important thing ever". (!)
Other people don't, and care about other things.
Claiming that people who actively put their time and effort into stopping that change ("supporting the status quo") are the same as people who prioritise other things (eg "looking after their sick sibling"), is outright dishonest. And seems both silly, and like it would generate a bunch of negative things by trying to push it.
To illustrate, lets take a dumb example...
Lets say my sister is dying of cancer, and I need to pay for her treatment, her family's housing and costs meanwhile, and whatever other expenses come up. So, I'm doing bulk hours at my job to make that work.
In that situation, someone pushing an agenda of "there needs to be more sausage rolls in the canteen" (!) can go to hell. I have more important (to me) things to care about. I don't care about their hot issue in any way.
But if they keep on trying to take up my time with it, they're not going to get a positive reaction as they're literally wasting time I could be using productively. ;)
> "Just do you job and don't voice contrary opinions" is a pretty radical political opinion if you ask me, so your definition of "apolitical" is only "A"-political because you are so intensely in opposition to non-status quo beliefs that you disregard them completely.
Which is your personal opinion on the matter. What do I suggest for you? Start your own company and allow your employees to have their political views expressed as part of your ethos (or Manifesto if you can relate more to that).
Perhaps I want the status quo at my job. If I worked somewhere truly objectionable I would quit working there and rally against it in my own time. I get paid to produce services that we sell. I don't get paid to change the world as powerful as we'd like to think we are. Also I don't expect my employer to pay me to be an activist unless they really wanted to. I have every other hour than the 40 I work to do whatever I want.
I admire people that are willing to put in the time to advocate what they believe is right and just. And they are free to do that whether I agree with them or disagree with them. I just don't want to be at work where just coming in and wanting to do your job is considered insufficient and you have to be saving the world somehow. That doesn't mean that I disagree with the cause or won't contribute in my own time. I just want us working on the goal for our company. It could work both ways. Like what if an oil company gave you days off to counter protest at climate change events? If you did not attend, it would be questionable and perhaps ruin your career. So I think as a whole we support activism because it is the activism we like but it might not always be that way.
Will you be OK with everyone else doing the same, including people you deeply disagree with?
Because those people also have strong opinions, not because they are evil, but because from their point of view it is the right thing to do.
I'd say: unless you are OK with both Trump supporters, Biden supoorters, Pro-Lifers, Pro-Choice etc etc all bringing their politics to work, be careful about trying to use work for politics.
Edit: let me also add the Communist party, Jehovas Witnesses, the Catholic Church, Hinduism (a number of my colleagues wanting to learn meditation got stuck between two factions arguing loudly and angrily about some detail regarding reincarnation), the local NRA and everyone else. Unless you want to accept them doing activism on company time: don't be the one who starts it.
> in opposition to non-status quo beliefs that you disregard them completely.
Many of us disagree strongly with the status quo because we find it is way too little conservative.
Do you really want us to start using harder tactics instead of sticking to our current strategy:
- hoping the kids on the left will grow up soon. Traditionally in generation after generation they abandon the dumbest ideas after a decade or so. (And yes, this holds true for me too, I was influenced by socialism as a teenager even though I never torched anything.)
- be nice so that others will be nice to us, or at least think twice who they want to support
- stand up for others and hope others will stand up for us (and yes, despite me being deeply "conservative" that also means standing up for immigrants. I do that.)
- vote
- pray
- depending on location: make sure we are able to defend ourselves and our families if police cannot be expected to do so (we don't need to think about that here as crime rates are low and police arrive quickly if you need them)
> The view you just described is active support for the status quo.
I hear this all the time but I cannot for the life of me figure out why it is "active support" isn't it at most passive support? If you were actively supporting it, you'd be taking political actions and therefore not being apolitical?
I don't agree. Opponents of the status quo can get an advantage by defecting from an apolitical equilibrium, by bringing politics into spaces where people who disagree with them aren't willing to. But when everyone starts being political, opponents of the status quo lose, because almost by definition their views are less popular.
> The view you just described is active support for the status quo. [..] fossil fuels and co2 emissions to keep our economy running.
So there's really no difference between doing nothing, and donating to FUD campaigns against climate science? They're both equally active in their support for fossil fuels, both equally "apolitical"? Or have you diluted the term "apolitical" to the point of meaninglessness, if it can describe such wildly different behavior?
Would you describe yourself as "actively supporting" Kony (or some other, similar warlord)?
In January 2017, several of my coworkers were banned from reentering the country to go home to their families, while they were on business trips to visit other offices. How is anyone supposed to be apolitical in that context? How are the people who can't ever come home supposed to pretend everything is fine?
A functional definition of privilege is that politics doesn't matter that much to you. No matter how it turns out, you'll be fine, so you're able to mentally compartmentalize it and go about the rest of your business. There are many people whose lives are not like that, and it's unreasonable to expect them to treat politics as a game separate from real life.
> A functional definition of privilege is that politics doesn't matter that much to you.
The more privileged a group is the more they tend to be involved in politics. So a better definition is that privilege is when you have time and energy to spend on politics.
> mentally compartmentalize it and go about the rest of your business. There are many people whose lives are not like that, and it's unreasonable to expect them to treat politics as a game separate from real life.
I bet the closeted gay folks in countries where that's a death sentence would MUCH rather have their coworkers compartmentalize their views.
> A functional definition of privilege is that politics doesn't matter that much to you
You're even more privileged if you're so confident in your job security and the popularity of your political views that you can spend your working hours advocating them without worrying that it'll affect your ability to feed your family.
An Iranian immigrant can't help but advocate for their political views simply by existing. Living and working in the US is an assertion that they should have the legal right to do so. Simply by being glad to have them as a coworker (the most anodyne possible affirmation that everyone generally expects from the people around them) you are making a political statement. If I say, "I'm glad you were able to make it home," I'm expressing support for the court case that invalidated the executive order that allowed them to come home.
As long as some parts of politics are working to harm the people you work with, coexisting with them and exchanging pleasantries is political.
Right, so said Iranian immigrant is for the status quo where he is allowed to work in the US and therefore would be in favor of banning discussions related to it, no? Enabling discussions would favor the people who want change, that is the people who want to kick him out, is that really what you want, do you want to help him get kicked out?
This is roughly how the people who argue against Coinbase decision sounds.
It was obviously not the status quo, because they were banned from the country.
Companies should advocate for the rights of their employees. They should demand their employees treat each other with respect. Both of those stances will often conflict with some people's politics and there's no way around it.
In nearly every case, the people who are claiming to encourage politics in the workplace are actually demanding allegiance - try supporting the other side and see how they feel.
That is not what the parent comment is arguing. It is arguing that cryptocurrency has heavy political baggage it cannot shed. That is evident in the kinds of people attracted to cryptocurrency. There are many tribes, but, to take one example, there are a lot of enthusiasts who think central banking and/or national currency is a conspiracy of some kind.
They think that cryptocurrency eliminating the ability of nations to set monetary policy, or to enable people with enough means to escape from the impact of monetary policy, is a good thing. This is politics baked into the product cryptocurrency companies create, and it is part of their "mission."
But they are baked into the product. Coinbase’s success depends on the success of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. That is fundamentally related to questions of wealth inequality, banking, state economies, and crime.
Would you say that Facebook is an apolitical product since it is just its users that are affecting public behavior?
Absolutely I'd say that! If a tool just improves communication efficiency, that efficiency improvement doesn't necessarily mean that the medium is political.
If coinbase and its cryptocurrencies improve the means of wealth and capital exchange, that doesn't mean that cryptocurrencies are political. That makes it a tool, just as a shovel and rifle are tools. How they're used by people is what makes them potentially political.
Facebook's choice to moderate content that isn't advertiser friendly is what makes it political, not the fact that it improves communication. They're deciding what other people see. Cryptocurrencies make no such choices for users.
> Facebook's choice to moderate content that isn't advertiser friendly is what makes it political, not the fact that it improves communication. They're deciding what other people see. Cryptocurrencies make no such choices for users.
Coinbase has. They've done things like blacklist wallets that they believe were involved in crimes or scams.
which is not a political action. You can argue they are acting extra-judicially - which is true, but it's not a political action. If coinbase refuses to serve a customer because they are anti-whatever-political-stance-of-coinbase, then coinbase is acting politically.
Sure it is. How is this different than refusing to work with ICE because you believe what they are doing is illegal or wrong? Scammer wallets were never given any trial.
You can be apolitical in that you are not interested in politics.
But:
1. Doing so is a political decision.
2. Your views shape your perspective and there will be actions and omissions that you take that impact politics in ways that you are unaware of.
It's very destructive to discourse to force people to polarize to one side or another. Most people when intimidated to "choose sides" will choose the side of the person NOT trying to pressure them into taking sides.
To give you an idea of the types of historical figures that used the "you're either with us or against us" most famously...
You seem to be arguing anyone who is political is either for or against every political issue if they aren’t allowed to claim to be neutral in general.
But to people who are arguing that being “neutral” is actually a political stance and usually supporting of the status quo, you try to say they’re tantamount to Mussolini.
Really? Someone disagrees with you so your go to response is to bring up Mussolini?
You really don't see the irony that you believe your side, what you currently view as "neutral" is so absolutely unquestionable that any one who critiques it should be silenced?
You're not even allowing for the idea of opposition to exist which is a radical view pretty similar to the ones held by all the people you have mentioned.
No one is saying opposition to the so called status quo should be silenced. Simply that political advocacy may be outside the scope of your role as an employee for your company.
You're not even allowing for the idea of opposition to exist which is a radical view pretty similar to the ones held by all the people you have mentioned.
Right, and the person you’re replying to is stating that many questionable political leaders have used that same argument to bully people into submission.
Taking a non binary position is still a position. Ignoring the divisive nature of political discourse doesn't keep one from having to deal with the political and economic reality that it's creating for everyone. Crypto itself is fairly heavily married to libertarian politics which most now see as the gateway to the unfairness->nihilism dialogue being promoted by the right as a cover for their political machinations.
Crypto is also very capable of moving huge amounts of money from hostile foreign nations to disruptive factions anywhere in the world. Claiming libertarian alliances could be an easy cover for those kinds of activities. That whole space has been a cesspool.
>It's very destructive to discourse to force people to polarize to one side or another.
Do you mind quoting the GP on where you feel like he's trying to force people to polarize and why that makes you feel that way?
edit: Could those downvoting me please make an effort to help me understand parent comment's viewpoint instead of making low effort downvotes? I really don't feel like asking for clarification on something warrants a downvote without response.
That's an easy stance to have just as long as nobody is trying to politicize your gender, sexuality, skin color, ethnicity or other things that you literally can't do anything about or go anywhere without. Your skin color is either white or "political". Your gender is either male or "political". Your sexuality is either straight or "political". If you are not in the group that is protected under the status quo, then being asked to not "politicize everything" is the same as being asked to accept being stepped on. They didn't pick this fight, the people that decided to politicize their very person did.
I think you and at least the person you’re responding to are using different meanings of “political” here.
When the people in this thread are arguing for being apolitical, they’re arguing for companies not being involved in seeking to lobby for change in formal, legislated power structures. They’re not arguing for companies to not take a stance in cultural power imbalances, because to them, power imbalances enforced by a government and power imbalances enforced only by social norms are not the same thing, and only the former is actually covered by the term “politics”, i.e. the thing that politicians do for their job. The latter, in most countries, is usually just called social — and there’s nobody arguing that companies should avoid taking social stances.
Forming a company to do something is inherently a social stance — a stance in any culture-wars that might be shifted by the product or service the company provides. But forming a company to do something isn’t inherently a political stance. For a company to take a political stance, someone from the company would need to actually talk to a politician at some point, in their capacity as a representative of a company — i.e. to do the thing we call “lobbying.”
Tangent: associating “politics” with attention paid to cultural, non-legislated power imbalances, is really mostly a US thing. I think this might be because most other developed, democratic countries have a lot fewer such cultural, non-legislated power imbalances; for painful historically-segregationist reasons, their entire populations are mostly formed out of what in the US would be considered a single mostly-uniform voting bloc. And so politicians in most countries, can’t really base their platforms on the cultural stances of any particular bloc — there’s not enough variation in such stances that highlighting one would win you any points.
The US is unique in that it ended up as one country composed of many extremely-divergent blocs, but with there being basically no formally-recognized, legislated divisions between most such groups†. Compare to all-of-Europe or all-of-Asia (which are the most sensible comparisons, given the land areas involved): the people within those continents have long ago assorted into relatively-like-thinking groups, splitting off into their own smaller countries, historically not granting citizenship to those who are “not like them”, and so becoming each much more internally-uniform in both makeup and viewpoints. (And then, if one of those countries went on to conquer the other, the introduced power-imbalance would be a formal, political one, with real legislation — the sort of thing you do “politics” about — determining the relative power of the two sub-nations within the new merged nation.)
† The US does have one formally-recognized, legislated division, where both sides explicitly sit at a negotiating table within government: that division being the one between native/indigenous Americans and N-generations-naturalized-immigrant Americans. And guess which group in the US isn’t heavily invested in the culture war? That’s right, the native population. Because they form a politically distinct group — effectively an annexed nation, as above — whose problems are raised to the level of actual politics, rather than social debate.
Yes, you’re right, we’re using somewhat different definitions interchangeably.
No, I think that many are arguing for companies not to take a stance in cultural as well as legislative power balances. (I would argue that legislative power structures and cultural power structure are not so easily separated, as they inform each other).
Both concepts are covered by the term “politics”. The colloquial “office politics” is just such an example of that.
To sum up, I appreciate the direction you took to uncover the crux of disagreements that ate going on but I feel that your analysis is flawed because you assert that the issue is cut down a particular line (which I believe it is not) and then invalidate the opposing half through a projected misuse of the term “political” (when it is in-fact mot a misuse of the term “politial”).
To your aside: I would hesitate to say that this is a uniquely US thing. Womens rights would appear, to my relatively lay self, to still be a prevalent source of cultural and legislative power imbalance in many countries and blocs across the world.
The only people who are actually in career (and sometimes physical) danger based on their political views in America right now are right-wing Trump supporters.
People do make big sacrifices when they work for an employer. They literally sell a sizable fraction of their lives which they could spend doing something else.
Perhaps that is because, in this instance the term “political” has 2 meanings which we need to tease out to see why your statement is false.
1. Political intent - acting or omitting to act because of a political view point.
2. Political outcomes - the results of actions or omissions to act which impact politics.
I guess my point is that your actions and omissions have political outcomes whether you want them to or not.
We should also agree what “politics” means. I’m not simply referring to the science of government but to the decisions around the distribution of power, resources and status in groups of people.
> I guess my point is that your actions and omissions have political outcomes whether you want them to or not.
It does not even stop there. If we choose to understand what's political in this way everything that humans choose to relate to (even things that do not exist beyond human imagination) have, of course, probably some influence on political outcomes.
Rain, an escaped alligator from the local zoo, the color of a button in a web form, etc.
I think that this second idea of what's political is merely the realization that we can choose to view everything according to it's political impact. Like a pair of glasses we might wear or might want others to wear.
...to stick with my example: One might end up making a long term study on how news about escaped zoo animals affect election outcomes. That might lead to surprising results. It's just not always guaranteed to be a very productive use of time.
I think there's probably a healthy middle ground here. It's not hard to argue that there's some reasonable moral expectations regarding company decision making. Like, don't construct gas chambers. (Local example from my German home region.)
On the other side it's easy to see that insisting on questioning every minor decision will lead to almost instant gridlock.
That's why I think that both radical positions are pretty hard to defend. A better society might hide behind pragmatic decision making with some reasonable, probably even academically shallow moral questioning of ones own actions. Not in corporate apathy or zealotry.
You’re constructing a hypothetical “what-if” that sometimes could be true, but is not guaranteed to be true.
I could just as well say “no one should ever argue anything because then people could argue about every little thing and it would be impossible to do anything at all.”
I don't think it's a hypothetical. Overpoliticization is already at this point. There was a week or so at my company where a slack bot would automatically scold us for not being inclusive if we used the word "guys".
On a recent project we decided to use the term “main” instead of “master” for our primary branch.
At first I was like “ugh” - not a big fan of that kind of language change, but then I was like, well, if it does matter to some people, what is my investment in this particular term anyway?
I could see how it gets trickier as a company policy, as opposed to something chosen collectively by the group.
Nonetheless, with everything going on in the world right now - and I say this as an advocate of free speech and of freedom of expression in art - this seems like such a small thing to stress about.
Tbh if this is your big fear then I’d say maybe read more news?
Being excoriated for an honest slip Of the tongue or absent mindedness is a different story though and there are definitely people that do that.
In some ways I think the conversation to be had around changing how we use certain language is equally or more valuable than the change itself :).
If anything, I'd say the news is what causes me to be concerned in the first place. I don't personally know anyone who's been fired for not using precisely the right language, but I've read a lot of news stories about it.
I feel like that's kind of a manager-conversation thing, plus, like many policies, will depend on the workplace culture to begin with.
IMHO the tricky bit is that, there is both an honest and genuine way to express concern around using "precisely the right language", so to speak, and, a malicious, not-an-honest-partner-in-the-conversation, gum-up-the-works way.
And also, I guess a "this-is-all-unpleasant-and-I-just-don't-want-to-think-about-it-or-think-about-the-historical-context-for-why-we-are-talking-about-this-in-the-first-place-I-have-enough-on-my-plate-as-it-is" kind of way.
Of course there is also virtue signaling or what have you; that's a thing. Human foolishness has no bias.
Obviously HN is not the right place for discussing specifics, but, IMHO, that's maybe the only way to have a real conversation around this stuff. Which takes trust and a shared safe space.
Which can be hard to come by these days.
That said, IMHO my patience decreases a bit, sadly, every day when I read the news. There's a context to all this, after all. And a very real history.
My point is your parent is right and you are wrong.
Artificially extending what's seen as political to excess is a pointless exercise that removes all meaning and usefulness from the concept.
That's bad because a shared understanding of some political sphere (which comes into existence through its boundaries) is really important for democratic discourse.
In a best case scenario those boundaries are continuously questioned in the democratic discourse.
Some moral entrepreneur might argue: Politics should govern the bedroom for [reasons]! ... and others might object: No; the bedroom is a private sphere where politics has no say for [reasons].
... and over time there should emerge a shared understanding of which aspects of life are political grounds and which are taboo.
The bedroom case is mostly decided today. One side won (mostly LGBTQ&Friends) and now we see the bedroom as something that should be free from politics. ..like I think that the vast majority of people in the western world now sees sodomy laws as bad fit for modern democracies.
But there are other issues that are more contemporary: The idea that speech is violence, for example, is prime moral entrepreneurship. Western societies regulate violence in a certain way and this equivalence would suggest to treat both equivalent, one way or the other.
... and it's far from decided how speech will be treated in the future and we all have many open arguments on the matter.
It's a healthy thing for societies to continuously re explore their specific boundaries of politics.
I have difficulties seeing the "everything is political"-trope as anything but the proposal to be reckless regarding the process of a shared understanding of the boundaries of politics.
> It's a healthy thing for societies to continuously re explore their specific boundaries of politics.
To rephrase: through political action (such as activism, lobbying and campaigning), societies should continuously reevaluate what topics are within the political sphere.
If how we decide what is or is not "acceptably" political is itself a political process, how can you honestly say certain things aren't political.
Claiming that bedrooms "aren't" is naive. There are still absolutely exist people who have and are and will continue to try and control what people can do in their bedrooms. Just because one side, and the side you presumably agree with, appears to have won the argument for now, doesn't mean that things are finished.
There are lots of things that I think should be outside of the realm of politics: basic human rights, white supremacy, a woman's right to choose. And yet.
So we return to the original question: how come those topics are "political", but in your opinion "bedrooms" aren't? (And would someone in the UK agree with you? They probably would, despite laws that affect them).
Who decided that bedrooms were off limits but uteruses weren't? How? Why? Can I change that? Those are all political questions.
And when you start into this meta-discussion of how do we make something political? The answer is pretty straightforward: you find people who are that there's an issue and you make noise about it.
When lots of people see a problem and make noise about it that problem becomes political. Disagreements, on a societal scale, are politics. So "this shouldn't be political" isn't much more than "I don't think the status quo is worth spending resources on". And, well, the people who think there's a problem will disagree on that. And thus: politics.
Yeah there are things that I wish we didn't disagree about, but I also am willing to stand by my convictions and say I disagree, instead of hiding behind "this isn't even a discussion, you're not allowed to bring up this complaint because this isn't acceptable politics". If you're fine with the way things are, say that.
> through political action (such as activism, lobbying and campaigning), societies should continuously reevaluate what topics are within the political sphere.
This difference is important since the discourse is in itself not framed by any material boundaries. This difference also answers your question on whether political action deciding on the scope of politics might be incoherent.
> Claiming that bedrooms "aren't" [political] is naive. There are still absolutely exist people who have and are and will continue to try and control what people can do in their bedrooms.
A shared understanding of what is political does not require every single person to agree on the scope of politics. In the end it's all about relative stability, not unanimity or majority or something like that.
> Just because one side ... won the argument ... doesn't mean that things are finished.
There I agree. I don't think the concept of "finished" exists in any human context.
> Who decided that bedrooms were off limits but uteruses weren't? How? Why? Can I change that? Those are all political questions.
This question on who specifically might make a specific decision seems to be a reoccurring theme in our dialogue. In modern societies that's usually a multitude of interlinked processes. Very rarely there's an isolationable agent/action relation relationship. ...and that's, of course, a good thing.
> ... this isn't even a discussion, you're not allowed to bring up this complaint ...
Who forbade you anything, by the way? I don't get why this conversation should be so confrontational or accusatory.
I have no strong feelings on any of the many crossroads in debating social science epistemology or democratic theory in general.
Politics is how groups make decisions (literally that's the definition). Discourse with the intent to influence how a group makes a decision is political discourse.
> Who forbade you anything, by the way? I don't get why this conversation should be so confrontational or accusatory.
You've said that certain topics are not acceptable. Presumably this means one can't discuss them. Maybe you don't intend to enforce this beyond the force of your moral condemnation, but you're still saying "you're a bad person if you bring up this topic because it's not part of the political discourse and we're only discussing political stuff".
Politics is many different things depending on who you ask. Obviously. Luhmann wouldn't agree with Foucault who wouldn't agree with Rousseau who wouldn't agree with Arendt, etc.
In our previous conversation I'd argue that politics as power relations or as a specific set of societal institutions might be the most productive definitions just because both are compatible with our main argument.
Nobody said they can't discuss something. It's a good example though:
You might believe that someone who argues that something does not belong in the sphere of politics does not want to or is unable to discuss something at all primarily because you already very strongly believe that politics necessary includes everything.
If you were to step back from that premise for a second you would see that there might be other human endeavors, think science, philosophy, math .. and that those are discussed by people completely without any connection to politics (..or as you would probably argue: they're willfully ignorant of the political dimension of their actions and might even be motivated by subversive, ultraconservative intentions.)
I just of course can't make you realize that this is only one very specific worldview out of many. ..which might have its place and usefulness but probably wasn't meant to act inhibiting on its enthusiasts.
Some do believe that every action needs to be reflected according to its compliance with some religious dogma. For them, ignoring the religious dimension in any action is very suspicious, because they are able to see a religious component in any action. Surely others must appear as stupid or willfully ignorant to them.
They're driven by a specific set of religious premises and that's completely okay. We just wouldn't want them to be literally unable to understand that there are other worldviews out there with their own premises.
A strong conviction is born through the understanding of its opposing ideas.
> You've said that certain topics are not acceptable. [...] you're still saying "you're a bad person
Oh dear goodness, where? Would you mind to quote me on that?
You seem to agree with me despite denying it. Everything is political, there are complex interrelated systems by which decisions get made and people hold power. Arguing that some things aren't within the sphere of acceptable political discourse is naive and pointless since you can't actually enforce it at all.
> that's one of those "you're either with us or against us" type of deal
And as the saying goes, if I'm either with you or against you, then I'm against you. It doesn't matter what your object-level goals or values are, because you have clearly stated that you care more about using those goals as a pretence to attack anyone who isn't willing to subordinate themselves to your particular movement than about actually achieving said object-level goals.
As an example: I strongly oppose oil pipelines, but a couple of years ago I had to assist with emergency network maintenance on a very large, very controversial pipeline that I do not like at all. My job required me to do what I was hired to do, and I didn't let my politics get into the way. The issue was resolved in a couple of hours, and I returned back to the projects I was working on for other customers.
But we still had a conversation at our company about what it means to support customers that we were uncomfortable with, and we ultimately decided that the views of employees should help guide how we conduct ourselves as a business. That if we noticed that our customers are doing harm, and we believe ourselves to be contributing to the harm, we should voice our concern and decide if we are operating morally and ethically.
The pipeline was whitelisted, because we don't actually help build it on native land, and we don't help drill the oil out of the Earth. We only help keep the sensors working, and those ultimately exist to keep the pipeline from failing and doing damage.
But we have preemptively decided that there are certain businesses that could use our services to contribute to harm, and so we have a process for keeping ourselves in check.
I worry about "apolitical" companies, as they have decided that they no longer care about judging the moral or ethical issues surrounding their business decisions, and have instead decided to operate entirely based on what is legal.
And it goes without saying that acting in accordance with the law is not the same as acting morally and ethically.
I think the issue is “How do you decide what is political and what isn't?” e.g. if you're a communist, then the existence is shareholders is political support for capitalism. So how do you remain “apolitical” then?
Outside of your job, you can be as politically active as you wish. Nobody is saying you should stop all political activism.
But if i walk into a store intending to buy something, i don't want to be blasted with any political message or be asked to sign up for a rally or donate to some cause i don't care about.
And an employee should work on the job they are being hired to do, not spend work time undertaking political activism unless explicitly allowed by their boss (for example, your company may allow you time off for charity or such activities).
If, for example, your political view is that of communism, then you will have to suffer in silence in the USA while working for shareholders/owners of property. Or quit your job if you cannot stand it. What you can't do is use your job as a resource to push that view further than you could on your own.
collective bargaining starts at the level of government - not within the workplace. It would obviously be in the interest of the employer to stop it from starting up.
So you take this political stance outside of work. If enough people can be convinced that collective bargaining is a good idea, it will get enshrined into law. Employers will have to comply.
On the other hand, organising during work time (which is being paid for by your employer) is unethical - and regardless of my feelings of the idea of collective bargaining, it should not be done on someone else's dime.
> collective bargaining starts at the level of government - not within the workplace. It would obviously be in the interest of the employer to stop it from starting up.
I dunno where you live, but organizing at work is a protected right that workers have in the US and Canada (and other jurisdictions, but that's where I've been employed). An employer forbidding that is actually a violation of labor law.
> the existence is shareholders is political support for capitalism
You are only political when you try to change the minds of others. Just existing is never political support for anything. If the communist argues that the shareholders shouldn't exist then he is political. If the company fires the communist for thinking that shareholders shouldn't exist (lets say he said that on his own time, so he wasn't political at company time) then they are political. If the company allows pro capitalist opinions but not pro communist opinions they are also political.
> I (and many others) are of the opinion that you can’t truly be apolitical; claiming to be so is its own form of politics (and generally one that supports the status quo).
If someone just does their job with people no matter who they are then they are not political. Being gay is not political. Being trans is not political. Being black is not political. Saying that gays/trans/black people shouldn't exist or doesn't belong is political. Saying that everyone needs to care about gay/trans/black rights is political. A trans person and a fundamental Christian who works well together without bringing up either political stance are not political. If the fundamental Christian makes a fuzz then he is political and should be reprimanded. If the trans person digs into the Christians opinions until they find something to get angry about and then get angry they are political.
I don't see why this is concept would be so hard to understand.
> If someone just does their job with people no matter who they are then they are not political.
And what happens when it's not the case? When people don't just treat people of foo group normally, and it's happening throughout the company? What should foo group do?
Ask the company to get to an apolitical state where they can just do their job? Let people in the company know that it's going on? By you definition, that's political and wrong. Or do they just bear the cost of it while others continue doing what they're doing?
> I don't see why this is concept would be so hard to understand
Because (In my opinion) you're starting with a fundamentally flawed premise that there isn't already politics in the work place. There always has been. The important difference is that the only thing that gets branded as "politics" is anything different from the status quo. If it's politics aligned with the status quo it's not seen as politics even when it it.
A similar example. I'm not taking a stand on it in any way here, but kneeling during the national anthem before a football game was considered a political act (which it is). One response was "keep politics out of football" (parallel to our discussion here). But again similar to our discussion here it was glossing over the fact that playing the national anthem before a sporting event is an extremely political action to begin with (ex. Should we play the national anthem before a game of Jeopardy?).
Saying there wasn't politics before / by default, is just turning a blind eye to the existing politics because it's the status quo.
What that person can do in order of difficulty is talk to the person/group that they are made uncomfortable by, approach their manager about the issue, take the issue to human resources, leave for a competitor that will likely win in the long run with a better work environment, or ultimately sue for being discriminated based on a protected class.
None of these options require a company to adopt a political platform.
> playing the national anthem before a sporting event is an extremely political action to begin with
no that's not a political action, because the intent of the song is not to display some political message, but to display a sign of respect to the nation that has enabled the game to exist.
Is it a political action if the happy birthday song is played at McDonalds for a birthday party? It only becomes political when an action has intent behind it to display a message that furthers a political agenda.
The kneeling at a football game is political, because those people who kneel knows that their kneeling is going to be seen by millions, and thus they can leverage their visibility (due to their position as players or at least is on camera). Therefore, it's highly political - they want to send a message out there to as many people as they could that they support a particular cause (and implicitly want an outsider that also happen to be watching the game to also support). Would you declare that it's OK for the same group of people to perform a nazi salute under the same circumstances? If you're OK with that, then I would be OK with "political" actions in my football game.
The problem in this discussion here is that many are unable to separate their own political leaning with the general idea of political expression in non-political settings (such as a football game or place of business). I keep hearing that apolitical stance is not possible - but then if there are politiking that they do not like, then it's not allowed (aka, if a company "forced" their employees to engage in white-nationalist politics).
That's why I take the stance of apolitical neutrality in public places where politics isn't expected (e.g., in a place of business).
My sister's husband is a software engineer at a bank, and the health insurance plan they use specifies that men can have their wife covered under the plan, rather than a gender-neutral spouse and it doesn't count civil unions. Now this has worked out fine for them, but the choice for the bank to use this healthcare plan means that same-sex couples don't have equal access. So just existing as a gay person can be political.
You don't have closed off bathrooms? Anyway, denying them a bathroom to go to probably breaks some workplace laws. I agree that we need workplace laws, and if a company can refuse to accommodate the basic needs of a worker without breaking any laws then the laws needs to change, which of course is politics.
> ... and if a company can refuse to accommodate the basic needs of a worker without breaking any laws then the laws needs to change, which of course is politics.
Voila :)
Now, to take another example - paternity leave in the United States - should there be a workplace law requiring more of it, like many other countries?
> I (and many others) are of the opinion that you can’t truly be apolitical; claiming to be so is its own form of politics
This seems like a fallacy. X may be undesirable, but it's impossible to completely rid ourselves of X. Therefore it's pointless to even worry about reducing X. Thermodynamics tells us that we can't ever reach absolute zero. Therefore I don't have to put the groceries away in the refrigerator.
No person or organization can be completely apolitical, but they can aim to be minimally political. And that difference is substantial. Only a maximal postmodernist would dispute that the NRA is orders of magnitude more political than the IETF.
Similarly we strive for our courts to be free of bias. However jurists are flesh and blood. They'll get hungry or sleep and that will affect their mood. Yet we'd all be horrified if a judge openly declared "Ya know what? I hate Dutch-Americans and plan to rule against them in every case regardless of the facts"
First - the neutrality of a judge is political. It is an expression of their support of the law of the land - namely the system of justice. Judicial neutrality, is in fact, special.
> This seems like a fallacy. X may be undesirable, but it's impossible to completely rid ourselves of X. Therefore it's pointless to even worry about reducing X.
No one said anything about it being pointless.
And, no one said undesirable. Politics isn’t good or bad. It’s just part of life. In the sense that people are inherently social and will always be discussing, civilly or not, how things should be done.
To me, if I live in a democracy, what would be undesirable is a citizen who is not, in some form or fashion, active in the body politic since a democracy depends on an active (and educated) citizenry in order to function! :).
I think the analogy works the other way. Thermodynamics, like politics, is a thing we can't be rid of. Therefore, even if you don't care about the exact temperature of your groceries, put them in the fridge. If you have a bag of fresh bread, milk, and frozen meat, it's a lot better to stick the whole bag in the fridge than leave the whole bag in the counter. Obviously it would be even better to put them away properly, but if you want to not care as much as possible, you still have to care a little bit. There's no way to avoid it completely, and ignoring it doesn't make it go away and is certainly not meritorious.
The NRA is "more political" in the sense of their daily activities, of course, but I think you could construct a great argument that the IETF has more impact on world politics (or, let's say, the governments of the world) than the NRA. Everyone knows the NRA is taking an absolutist give-everyone-an-AR-15 stance; they work very hard on it, but at this point they're almost an anchor. Some parts of the US give easy access to guns, and they're going to do so regardless. Other parts (NYC, where I live) make it very hard to access guns, and the NRA isn't able to do much more. And the rest of the world doesn't care. Meanwhile, the IETF, in how it chooses to distribute power to network operators vs. service providers vs. end users, which protocols it facilitates standardization work on, who is in the room, what sorts of threats cryptographic protocols protect against, etc., has a lot of influence on who has power over digital communications.
I think I'd even argue that it's more important for someone at the IETF to be aware of the political implications of their work than someone at the NRA. The NRA has an obviously political mission; whether you choose to pay attention to it in how you do your job and what you prioritize or not, you're going to further that mission. (Imagine, for instance, being a gun-control advocate at the NRA and see how much impact you'll have.) The IETF's mission is more open-ended, which means you can develop protocols to facilitate government surveillance or to subvert it, depending on what you think is more important.
Politics is too personal and can only lead to discord among employees. There is little upside to politics being in the open in an established company. It may be useful in attracting talent at some point, but at another point it becomes a liability, unless your company is a PAC or something of the sort. If you serve a wide audience or have a wide workforce, it’s less headache if workers separate their politics from their work unless the employer is paying you to be political.
Yes, and choosing to have such a policy about political discussion is a political act that supports the status quo by quashing dissent. Therefore, many people who are not happy with the status quo are upset by companies that do this.
I don’t want to have to manoeuver and tiptoe around shit all day long. I don’t want to have to think about whom I might unwittingly offend today because of something that happened yesterday that I’m unawares of today. I’m not seeking to offend anyone, but I also don’t want have keep a twitterpulse of what’s woke today vs yesterday.
I want a predictable workplace where people understand we’re not perfect and sometimes make untacful remarks without meaning to hurt. I want a forgiving workplace one where minor peccadilloes aren’t picked apart by vultures looking to score points.
There are big issues we can agree on. Energy, climate, crime, justice, etc., from a big picture perspective rather than an activist perspective. Activism is tiring. People get exhausted. Long term, people just want to make a living and be left alone if they are not being negative. You can’t live in a world where activism is a way of life like Cuba. Listen to the “Commandant” brother no 1. We have to up bread production right after we recite the revolutionary manifesto one more time before we join hands in community work for the revolution”. No, let me be in peace.
Some of your coworkers might want to drive to work without fearing that they'll be profiled, pulled over, and arrested or shot. They'd also like to be in peace.
Let’s take something like Tibet or Xinjiang or Crimea, etc. All have good grounding for people to see where things might be wrong. I still don’t think that discussion should happen in the workplace agitating management to be active and organizing coworkers into friends and foes. If you have a political interest in that thing do it outside of work —it may involve like minded coworkers but don’t bring this to work. Exception is Union organizing, that necessarily involves workers and management.
>I want a predictable workplace where people understand we’re not perfect and sometimes make untacful remarks without meaning to hurt. I want a forgiving workplace one where minor peccadilloes aren’t picked apart by vultures looking to score points.
Just going off this one statement, if you want a forgiving workplace, does that mean you have to own your mistakes and ask for forgiveness when you make an "untactful remark"? It sounds like seeking forgiveness will require you to do things like "think[ing] about whom I might unwittingly offend today because of something that happened yesterday that I’m unawares of today."
I want people to understand we all come with flaws. That PC policing is toxic and it’s better to give people the benefit of doubt rather than going all in on them being “bad”. Take compliments for example. Most often they are just nice things people say to each other. But in the wrong environments they can be taken (interpreted) as offensive as well as they can also be intimidating (unwanted). But in some circles by default (rather than exception) they are considered risky.
>I want people to understand we all come with flaws.
I feel like the best way to make room for people to understand that is to acknowledge your own flaws
For instance when you make an inappropriate comment, owning up to it by letting everyone know that you made an inappropriate comment and are making an effort to stop saying inappropriate things.
The problem is that people can't have political discussion without taking things personally. Many people thought that the James Damore memo was objective, but other people found it offensive. In the end, neither side really "won" and in the end, it just made the work environment more toxic. Even if you believe that Damore is sexist, people like him are inevitably going to exist at a company of hundreds of thousands, so it's best if everyone stayed quiet.
Most tax collection is completed without violence in practical sense. But taxes are backed by the threat of violence. If you don't pay them, you can be charged with a crime and ultimately imprisoned. And if you try to resist imprisonment that is enforced with armed agents of the state who will use force to compel you. Taxes aren't voluntary.
This is an old libertarian argument, which when taken to its narrow logical conclusion says all taxes are fundamentally theft and immoral. The primary counter-argument is to suggest that the property or wages being taxed aren't "fully" the possessions of the taxed individual or entity. If you are receiving wages in part because of the state apparatus, then the wages weren't fully yours to begin with. Various forms of social contract theory are used to justify taxes.
The other main argument is probably more utilitarian. Your right to property only extends to the extent that it is socially valuable in comparison to other rights and responsibilities. Property is this model isn't a fundamental right, but one mechanism used in combinations with others to maximize human welfare.
The original post specifically said they would be involved in things directly related to their mission. So conceivably they would be involved in privacy, currency, etc. What I think they are opting out of is the pressure on businesses and individuals to support every cause du jur or denounce the latest fad outrage.
While you can't be apolitical, you can be measured, polite, balanced, and recognize there is an appropriate time and place for everything. You can recognize that there is only time and energy for so many things. You can also recognize that much of politics is manufactured outrage and theater. Opting out of all of the daily outrage cycle as a business or individual in favor of contemplative attention to things that truly matter to you on a 10 to 15 year scale seems like a very reasonable approach to me.
Claiming that people doing so "support the status quo" or "if you're not with us you're against us" is groupthink and coercive at best, and a mob mentality at worst.
I know I posted it recently and it was poorly received, but it needs to be repeated because people forget.
> Politics:
> the activities associated with the governance of a country or other area, especially the debate or conflict among individuals or parties having or hoping to achieve power.
If you think it means:
> how we engage and collaborate with each other as a society
You're biting at a hook baited with identity politics. That's a curated opinion that politicians are glad you've accepted because it's choked you from imagining that apolitical positions exist.
It's absolutely possible to be apolitical. It may be hard to do so. It may be possible to claim to be "apolitical" in a way that gains political leverage. That's dishonesty and it's a different topic.
> I (and many others) are of the opinion that you can’t truly be apolitical; claiming to be so is its own form of politics (and generally one that supports the status quo).
This is a fairly untenable position. Suppose there is an alien civilization somewhere with a similarly complex organization as our own society. You have no stake or opinions in the outcomes of what they do. You might even have beliefs that might give rise to politics ("I don't want earth destroyed," for instance), but in a real sense, you are apolitical with respect to that civilization. That doesn't make you in favor of the status quo, it just means that you don't know or care what's going on there.
Bringing it closer to home, you'll realize that you have similar apolitical beliefs with respect to a small town in a neighboring country, or maybe the government policy of the Central African Republic.
You might object that in these cases, a person is by construction unaware of the goings-on in distant places; however, I think the contrary argument is more absurd. The contrary argument is that as soon as someone merely knows about a political issue, she is then forced to choose, without her consent, that she is in favor of the status quo. That's not a tenable way to treat people with respect, not to mention organize society. And loads of people intentionally ignore the goings-on in politics.
So then, if people can be apolitical about certain or even most issues, certainly someone could be apolitical about all but the most mundane issues (like the governance of a family).
Further, the status quo is not a political issue; it's the condition of living in some reality. Human collective action is only one component that shapes our status quo. Many are beyond human control. So the mere existence of a status quo does not imply that anyone "chooses" it.
That I think is the error. A person can have no opinion and withdraw from politics. That is apolitical. Constructing the concept in such a way that forces them to pick a side of a line in the sand excludes the middle ground, and is also profoundly disrespectful and unfair.
> How can they truly be neutral on all of these issues that are directly relevant to the business they do?
I can see why a company might want to engage in a little bit of politics, particularly when it is tied to its very own existence. But that doesn't mean it should be engaging in all kinds of politics at all the times. So we are talking about "truly apolitical" vs "mostly apolitical" vs "not at all apolitical".
It seems Coinbase wants to be "mostly apolitical" here.
> How can they truly be neutral on all these issues that are directly relevant to the business they do?
They most definitely will not be neutral on policy decisions that affect their business, and if you go read their blog post they said exactly that:
> If there is a bill introduced around crypto, we may engage here, but we normally wouldn’t engage in policy decisions around healthcare or education for example.
certain roles require you to be apolitical, i'm thinking of employees of a national civil service whose role is to implement policy not decide it. If you had to quit when a party you didnt support was in power it would cause huge problems for continuity of services. Essentially then the civil service becomes political, which is really what it should not be.
> claiming to be so is its own form of politics (and generally one that supports the status quo).
sure if someone says that they believe drug use should not be criminalized but also claim to be apolitical and do nothing to help make drug use legal, it follows that they are supporting the status quo of actually keeping drug use illegal.
However if that status quo is changed by the actions of others who do want drug use to be legalized and the apolitical person does nothing to try to oppose this new status quo it can be reasonably assumed that they were in fact apolitical.
Then you might say that their politics is to support the Status quo, but that is probably only in regards to the things they don't care strongly enough about to do anything about one way or another. Which is the case with most people.
Most people throughout history have been apolitical in this way - if you give them something to decide regarding an issue they have no strong opinions on they will most
likely do nothing and let the status quo prevail.
Apolitical doesn't just mean "supporting the status quo". It can mean "improving the world along a particular dimension with a coalition that cuts across historic factions". That's what Coinbase is trying to do, and (for example) open source has historically been.
Making a workplace political means excluding people who believe in the mission but don't share your views on things irrelevant to that mission. This is dumb for a couple reasons:
* you've now hamstrung the mission your organization was ostensibly about
* the people you excluded are still out there. Even if you no longer have to work with them, you do have to share a society with them. And now they're going to form their own organizations and become more polarized.
It may be a cost worth bearing in some circumstances, but generally you want to keep the number of people excluded in this manner to a minimum.
This is a blog about the company's direction, not about whether it will perfectly conform to the ideals laid out. The CEO is not claiming that they are apolitical, but that that is their goal.
>Politics is ultimately about how we engage and collaborate with each other as a society,
An organization can be apolitical in which clients it takes, how it applies its agreements and rules, and its involvement in the campaign process.
>How can they truly be neutral on all of these issues that are directly relevant to the business they do?
They do not need to take a stance on law circumvention or the right to privacy other than to uphold the law and maximize customer value.
> They do not need to take a stance on law circumvention or the right to privacy other than to uphold the law and maximize customer value.
The products and tools and services they sell are specifically designed to permit the circumvention of the law.
They are no different than people who make lockpicks in that respect. Technically the company couldn't care less what you do with the lockpicks. Maybe you're a hobbyist, or a locksmith. Maybe.
Some of their employees may be okay looking the other way, but not all of them will be. Based on the way this is going down it sounds like there was some internal drama about this, and they feel like it's best to part ways with the pro-law crowd.
All these arguments just feel like people wanting the benefits of owning a company without doing the work or taking the risk.
When you accept employment at a company, you do so on their terms -- including whether political activism on the job is permitted.
If you want to set the terms of employment, start or buy a company. Or, I guess, get laws passed that outlaw companies from having a policy you disagree with.
Whether being apolitical is itself political or not is a circular argument -- for some it is, for some it isn't. And that difference is itself a difference of political opinion of the same kind as the others.
When companies say they are being apolitical they mean more narrowly political - ignoring as much as possible the things that do not affect their core business. Does coinbase have to have a declared position for whether there should be a Mexico wall, or gun rights, or abortion - not really. What about BLM or gay rights? They probably have to have some minimal position like "we treat everyone equally", but that's also different than donating to the protests or conversely declaring support for the police union, etc.
> How can they truly be neutral on all of these issues that are directly relevant to the business they do?
Coinbase didn't say they would be neutral about all issues, just issues that aren't related to their business. Obviously if the government wants to ban cryptocurrency, they're going to lobby against it.
"Don't say he's hypocritical, say rather that he's apolitical. 'Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down, that's not my department', says Wernher von Braun."
If you don't know how to separate social issues from politics, well shit, that's the whole problem isn't it. Figure it out or continue being a moron dragging civilization back into the dark ages.
it's correct that crypto is against all politics, and thus coinbase is de facto far-libertarian, or anarchocapitalist. That doesn't prevent it from creating "an apolitical culture" in their workplace. Just like how , today , a libertarian might work for the Fed or something. I thought their point is that the politics of individual workers won't distract from the company's "mission" (whatever that is, i assume it's the product).
that said i think it's wrong to ascribe political motives to every move and claim that nobody can be a-political in public. Political belongs to the public sphere and not everyone wants to live in there.
>I (and many others) are of the opinion that you can’t truly be apolitical; claiming to be so is its own form of politics (and generally one that supports the status quo).
The Far Left and the Far Right, and college activists everywhere, tend to agree with this statement.
Everyone else finds the idea of a forced battle, which is what you said entails, to be the beginnings of authoritarianism (or bullying if taken at an individual level).
You are confusing people with companies. A person is political, a company should not. Otherwise, you are siding with totalitarian regimes that decide which services or rights you have based on what you think or believe. It was tried in the past, good luck for that.
The West Coast and its inhabitants live in a bit of a unique bubble and assume that the rest of the world see things in the very progressive manner they do, and expect that companies will march in lockstep with this sort of unique bubble. It's a very internalized unrecognized sort of expectation, but that's because so many companies have accepted these expectations completely. The rest of the country doesn't really care about this stuff, but media and tech related companies are disproportionately west coast so it gives an inaccurate picture as to what is going on.
I work remotely from the midwest for a CA tech company.
I was surprised that other people were surprised that there's a confederate flag spray-painted on a car-sized piece of corrugated steel that's been beside the interstate (on private property) for years now that I see every time I drive between two cities.
Similarly the number of confederate flag shirts and, recently facemasks.
> "The West Coast and its inhabitants live in a bit of a unique bubble and assume that the rest of the world see things in the very progressive manner they do."
That's tarring with rather a broad brush. There are a lot of old school liberals on the west coast who strongly disapprove of the progressives and their behavior, including myself. The progressives' "You are either with us or against us" rhetoric is diametrically opposed to the liberal "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." philosophy.
It's kind of funny to hear DLC/Clintonian Third Wayists described as “old-school liberals”, since when they rose to dominance “liberal” in American politics meant about what “progressive” is used for now and they were very much associated with the conservative wing of the Democratic Party, with an economic policy that synced up so well with that of the Republican Party that the period between their rise and the sharp rightward jump of the Republican Party that was a response to the resulting shift of the left edge of the Overton Window became known as the “neoliberal consensus” period in economic policy.
The real old-school liberals are the progressives.
Yes and every year those old school liberals get less and less, especially on the West Coast, because they are seen as being right wing as you can tell by the many new normal West Coasters in this thread.
* Companies, like the rest of the world, are now hyperconnected. We have slack and email and so on. This makes it a lot easier for similar interests to connect across a massive organization, which is a boon for special interest groups, like anime, or magic the gathering. Or politics.
* Companies muscle in on workers' identity. Workers respond to work over email/slack during their off hours. Workers pop open the laptop at home, even pre-covid. Companies try to justify this with a sense of pride, you should be PROUD to work for the great conglomerate XYZ. And guess what? If I'm proud to work for XYZ, as a worker I'm going to expect a consistent worldview that XYZ is aligned with my values. But my values are also tied up in my politics, so now I'm expecting my workplace's values to be consistent with my politics.
* The simple fact is that many companies are overwhelmingly a monoculture in terms of politics. It's easier to make your workplace political when 90% or 85% of employees are liberal anyways, as opposed to say 60%. This is largely a demographic thing, at many companies the target demographic for hiring is a strong overlap with certain political ideology (You are looking to hire a young, 25 year old computer scientist living in a big blue city who graduated from PresigiousUniversity. What politics do you think this person likely subscribes to?).
> You are looking to hire a young, 25 year old computer scientist living in a big blue city who graduated from PresigiousUniversity. What politics do you think this person likely subscribes to?
I think people too readily assume that these people are blue, but you have to remember that academia (and tech in general) tends to have strong social pressure to either be blue or hide your political beliefs. There is likely a very large contingent of closet republicans.
And we have to remember that even the categories here are highly artificial; even people who'd never describe themselves as closet Republicans don't necessarily agree with whatever specific aspect of politics a company might try to target. There are a couple of California ballot propositions I have in mind where polling is very divergent from what you'd expect reading any kind of public discussion about them.
I don't assume anything about any particular person, but I was under the impression that, statistically speaking, someone with these demographics is much more likely to lean liberal. Perhaps I'm wrong about this.
> There is likely a very large contingent of closet republicans.
Whether the minority is outspoken or not, my point is just that it's a minority.
Cities and people with STEM jobs tend to be right wing in Europe though, since you vote right when you earn more and cities have more money. So if you intend to be a global company you will have a mix of right and left wing opinions. At local companies the Engineers I worked with were right wing, then when I worked for Google the local engineers were still mostly right wing but the company culture was very left. Felt very strange, especially since so many concepts people take for granted in USA are very different here.
I worked at a media company with a reach of 400 million ADI. We had internal meetings more or less instructing employees how to vote. Our hand curated content intentionally catered to this same narrative.
It was completely politically biased. I was hired when the company was neutral but over the years the extreme left narrative settled in and we tended to only hire people with the same ideologies.
Executive discussions revealed it was an intentional culture shift to attract candidates.
So what does the future hold? Will there be left-leaning companies and right-leaning companies? What if I am centrist? So when I apply for a job, do I have to make sure my political leaning fits with the employer? Brave, brave new world.
I wouldn't worry about it. The issue will burn itself out. Courting a culture of loud, demanding people with an axe to grind is a much better short-term strategy than long.
> Why is a company wanting to be apolitical is controversial?
It's wild. That was standard not long ago. Most companies, even in tech, were apolitical. Maybe there would be some watercooler chat near the election with that one coworker who was really into politics, but that was about it. People mostly didn't know or care what the politics of their coworkers were. If they did, it wasn't a big deal and would still be friendly regardless.
But now many are convinced they are warriors in a never-ending existential war. Then it's hard to understand why someone isn't a warrior.
"We're about to die! What are you doing, not fighting? You must choose a side. You're with us or against us!"
Normally this happened on a 4 year cadence[1]. Locusts would descend to rally the troops, warn of impending doom, have the battle (vote), and then go hibernate for a few years. But now it's non-stop. The war just never ends. It bleeds into everything. Those who choose to not participate in the war or don't engage in the approved way are looked at with suspicion, accused of being the enemy.
I agree that it is wild that wanting to be "apolitical" is controversial.
Sadly though, I think that it has become almost impossible to be "apolitical" due to how politics has creeped into every facet of life.
What is more wild to me is that statements like "black lives matter", "climate change is real and a problem", and "the coronavirus pandemic is real" are political. These seem like they should be commonly agreed upon facts.
If those statements are political then it is much harder to be apolitical.
>Why is a company wanting to be apolitical is controversial?
It depends on how extreme the politics of the society are. It only sounds like there's an obviously "right" answer to you because you're used to living your entire life in a society where politics aren't that extreme yet from your point of view. But for many other people, the line was crossed in recent years.
> It depends on how extreme the politics of the society are.
I live in Northern Ireland the politics of my society are very extreme when its allowed in the workplace, group A kills group B and vice versa.
Calling out the extremists and forcing them to apolitical in the work place is necessary to stop them from killing every one.
You can argue that this is a call for centrism and the status quo and it is, but it makes sense for this to be the status quo simply because extremists like to kill anyone that doesn't agree with their politics, this is true across history, country and race.
There is an obvious right answer because I have seen what happens when extremism is made the status quo.
I think all of the people (in this thread, and at Coinbase, and at Amazon, etc.) could use a reminder that opening the door to politics in the workplace includes open support for, say, Donald Trump, too.
I read the original post from Brian as; you can, but at work one should work. Coinbase isn't paying folks to debate politics, they're paying someone to further the company mission.
this is undoubtedly true, but also undoubtedly easier said than done. we don't seem to be wired as a species to have difficult conversations without feeling emotions amd having those emotions affect our relationships.
That is not the definition of conservatism, and a limit on discussion is not implicitly for anything. It's your own subjective interpretation if you think it's for the status quo.
This isn't complicated. For example: People may be on both sides of climate change, but not discussing it in the workplace doesn't mean the company is for or against anything. Apply this to any other topic that has nothing to do with the business.
Sure, the company provides services that help others comply with regulations and thus favors those regulations. Just like any other corporation that prefers regulations that help drive it's business.
Our workplace is still neutral though, and we don't discuss politics. To be extra clear: Whether you're for or against privacy regulations is not relevant. Whether the law is changing and will increase our revenues is relevant. See the difference?
I see that you think there's a difference. But you've admitted that politics is a topic you discuss. In fact, lots of companies spend money to actively make said laws bend in their favor.
The difference is less straightforward than you make it out to be.
Since you consider everything to be political, then everything is politics and there is no discussion without it. It's a tautological inevitability.
However there is a difference in that we don't discuss personal opinions on politics. We talk about changes, and whether those changes are good for the business. That's a pretty clear line that you seem to be refusing to accept even though our team understands it perfectly.
> Since you consider everything to be political, then everything is politics and there is no discussion without it. It's a tautological inevitability.
but that's kind of the point. Pretty much any human discussion (or interaction for that matter) _can_ be viewed through a political lens by someone.
Thus by declaring to forbid political discussion, you are just declaring a blanket right to ban any discussions that inconvenience you by judging them political.
No, we don't constantly live with theoretical extremes in our day to day life and can operate without political discussion, like our company and many others do.
And yes, corporations can set the rules of the workplace they maintain. It is not about "inconvenience" but to avoid chaos and improve productivity. You are free to do as you wish outside of the workplace, including choosing a company that lets you say whatever you want. I applaud and encourage this freedom on both sides.
Corporations may be people to you but their rules are written by actual humans, using their existing political biases. And it usually the people at the top choosing them
You might think that a discussion you are having is not political because for you it's "common sense", "obvious" and "surely everyone reasonable agree" but that's not forcibly the case.
If an employee says a thing you don't agree with, for you it is a political statement and you shut it as such.
If you make a political statement an employee don't agree with they shut up and don't contradict you because they don't want to lose their job.
I never said this. What does this have to do with anything?
> "If an employee says a thing you don't agree with, for you it is a political statement and you shut it as such."
No. Disagreement on something doesn't not mean that it's political. Most reasonable people can easily figure out the difference: Talking about weather or our tech stack is not political. Talking about immigration policy is. So we discuss the former without the latter, just like millions of other people in many companies. It's not difficult.
> "If you make a political statement"
I don't. That's what no political discussion means and it applies to everyone. Why do you assume people can't follow their own rules?
Overall, if you don't like the rules of the workplace then leave. That's the whole point of this policy and exit package. You're not entitled to stay and discuss whatever you want, and thinking that you can is a very privileged expectation.
> I never said this. What does this have to do with anything?
You said "Corporations can set rules" and I wanted to punctuate the point that theses rules don't come from the nether.
> I don't. That's what no political discussion means and it applies to everyone. Why do you assume people can't follow their own rules?
I meant no insult to your character. The point is you think everyone agree with your list on what is political is political or not and I don't.
To give examples:
You might say "I arrived late again, I wish they would build a new highway" and I'm thinking it's political because really they should build more subway
I might say "I have a cat it's nice, I recommend it to everyone" and you might think it's political because you think cats are decimating the bird wild life and should be banned"
> Talking about weather
Not the example I would have used in your place with climate change...
> or our tech stack
Open source/ closed source is a political debate for example. But they are also some who dismiss technologies based on their country of origin.
So again you might think you follow the rule because for you it's not a political statement but for me it might be and inversely.
None of those examples are political in so far as to be a problem. Reasonable people understand this. Maybe that's the major issue: the boundary of reasonable is being pushed to the extremes by those who are unwilling to accept anything else.
Again, why do you keep making this personal? It doesn't matter if it's a problem for me or not, if it's not relevant to the business then you don't discuss it. If a topic seems risky then you don't discuss it. This is fine for the vast majority of people and companies; because they're reasonable people working in inclusive and neutral companies.
Those who can't be reasonable and insist on irrelevant politics in the workplace should should leave. That's quite literally what this policy and exit package is for. I don't see the problem. In fact those creating such a problem with it are precisely those who the policy is referring to and they should find another employer more suited for them.
If people aren't proselyting their views on how the country should be run then it is apolitical. This is the norm. You must be very damaged if you think this is impossible.
I don't think "everything" is meant to be taken so /literally/.
It is your personal opinion on privacy that led to the founding of the company. It is most likely your employees' personal opinions that made them choose to work at your company vs Google or FB's ad divisions.
But let's discuss a more relevant political topic. Your name, manigandham, implies you are of Asian origin. The /political/ immigration laws determine your/parents' existence in the USA. If the company you/they worked for was serving/assisting organisations that would invalidate your legal residence, would you not be concerned? Or would you help the project succeed & accept your fate once ICE came knocking?
And yet we don't discuss opinions in the workplace. I don't see why that is so difficult to understand.
I caution against making this personal because it's a poor argument and unproductive. But since you asked: I was born in India, legally immigrated to the USA, and am now a naturalized US citizen. I have never feared ICE or any part of the US Government, and fully support legal immigration, strong borders, and proper law enforcement. Corporations do not affect my citizenship or residence, that's a matter of state and law. If I didn't like what a company was doing, I would simply not work for them. None of this requires discussing my political opinions at work.
Speech and action are not the same, and nobody is forcing you to work anywhere you don't want to. If you don't like the rules of limited discussion or anything else the company does, then leave. This Coinbase policy is specifically designed to give you a very comfortable exit. What's the problem?
This is a very personal topic, for the people that are being "political".
Claiming you no longer care about this, after becoming a naturalized citizen, is a prime example of the "I have mine" philosophy. You would not be able to quit a company while on an immigrant visa, to protest your company's problematic workings. This is not a fair view, and you know that.
1) The topic is political discussions at work. You made this thread personal by asking about my background instead of arguing the merits. What issues others are personally affected by has nothing to do with this.
2) What do you know about what I care about or my philosophy? I said I support strong borders and law enforcement. This does not stop others from becoming citizens, nor do I have any responsibility to anyone else.
3) You choose the company you work for, and you can always quit. That doesn't mean there are no consequences but that's life, and life isn't fair.
You're conflating several topics with random tangents and have attempted to personally attack me with assumptions, strawman scenarios and mischaracterizations. Nothing you've said is a reason to break the rules of the workplace and discuss whatever you want, especially when you have the alternative of leaving (and the company is offering a generous package to do so). The entitlement that you stay employed and yet break the rules and create disturbance is the very epitome of the privilege you claim exists in those that choose to actually follow those rules. This is precisely the attitude that this company (and many others) are trying to avoid. I'll end this thread here as there's nothing more to discuss.
I don't see this press release as forbidding debate. This is simply saying that the company won't be taking a stance. That shouldn't stop individual employees discussing political topics as long as they can act like adults and not create a hostile environment.
> Forbidding debate is taking an implicit stance in favor of the status quo.
If the reformists are winning outside the company then the status quo is in the reformists favor and thus forbidding debate is pro change. For example now, Biden is favored to win so status quo is Biden wins, so a company forbidding political debate is liberal.
For Coinbase specifically, all their US locations are in blue states, making the status quo Democrat no matter how you see it.
Edit: Anyway, your argument doesn't make sense, you aren't in favor of the status quo unless you fight to bring it back after things change or you fight to keep it from changing. Also you aren't pro the status quo just because you prevent people you pay money to waste time arguing with each other instead of doing their job.
The issue here is that the company HAD a political mission, and decided to change that. Some employees may have joined specifically because of the company's politics and now they can leave.
Church and state are separate because you don't get to choose your birth citizenship. But you do get to choose where you you seek employment. As long as the company is upfront about their politics when you take the job, it's up to you to decide to work there. ie, don't take a job at a christian bookstore if you aren't christian
You can’t operate in a liberal society (liberal in the sense that we favor human liberty and freedom) and demand that your employees suppress their opinions. It’s a contradiction.
Except that every company that's taken a political stance has demanded that their employees suppress their opinions, unless those opinions are extreme left-wing opinions.
Define "extreme left." Do you mean stalinism or maoism? Are these companies in favor of exterminating the aristocracy through lethal force? Do you mean marxism? Are these companies that are in favor of peacefully gifting their workers with the means of production, and equalizing pay for all employees? Show me these leftist corporations.
Or are you referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and subsequent Supreme Court rulings as the "extreme left"?
Or do you mean it in the Fox News sense, where any disagreement with the president is "extreme left"?
Europe is a pretty diverse legal landscape, but it looks like quite a few countries there have had affirmative action for over a decade. Is California extreme or is it somewhat more progressive? Because I consider Stalin, Mao, etc. to be the extreme left and California to be extremely conservative by comparison.
There are different kinds of left. California is not economically extreme left.
Edit: About Europe, we almost never practice affirmative action the same way as US does. It mostly is "If two applicants has equal merit you are free to choose the disadvantaged one". See this court case for example:
> There are different kinds of left. California is not economically extreme left.
I see. This is a confusion of the economic "left/right" axis with the social "progressive/regressive" axis. Mainstream media does tend to collapse those axes, along with the "authoritarian/libertarian" axis, but this is intellectual laziness that doesn't even represent american bipartisan politics faithfully. We can do better.
Personally I am economically left of California and socially right of them. I prefer higher taxes, spend those taxes to help the poor get better opportunities, and then evaluate based on merit. California instead prefer to do lower taxes, let poor suffer and then give them bonus points in selection processes.
The replies to your comment exemplify Coinbase’s delicate position, or more specifically why you can’t be apolitical while physically located in a monoculture like the Bay Area.
Outside of the monoculture, it’s actually extremely easy to be apolitical at work and people seem to get along despite extremely different personal views of each other (for example, being non-Mormon in Salt Lake City).
This doesn't sound like an apolitical mission to me, in fact it sounds like quite the opposite. They're doing their absolute best to eliminate potential traitors.
Because running a business is a way we participate in society, and society is run by politics, so being "apolitical" as a company feels like a willful ignoring of the social consequences of your business practices.
You cannot separate the business practices of a financial institution from politics. It simply isn't possible. To attempt to do so is a political statement in an of itself, and quite frankly, it isn't a good one.
> If you offer web-hosting to a group of white nationalists, this is a political action.
no it's not - you're just offering a service for a fee. As long as the service is not illegal, and you're not under-charging (which can be considered a political donation), then it's apolitical.
Deliberately choosing not to conduct business with a certain group because of their political ideology, on the other hand, _is_ a political action.
I don't agree. Selling a gun to a hunter is not the same as selling a gun to a known child murderer. Both is "just" selling a gun but they are very different in practice.
You can't take responsibility for what someone will do with your product. This is insane. If someone buy your car, how can you make sure he will not use for kidnap someone?
Yes. The environment and time is controlled by your employer to maximize productivity for the business. You're free to do whatever you want on personal time, including not working for a company you don't like.
Usually people making your argument also say that private corporations can and should moderate speech. Do you support that? If so, then why do you disagree with workplaces banning topics?
You're misunderstanding the concept. Individual freedom means you're free to make your own choices and then take responsibility for those choices. This freedom is protected by your rights granted by the state.
Corporations setting workplace rules have no impact on your freedoms. You're free to work there or quit, or suffer the consequences of breaking their rules.
People make dumb things like smoking. We already know that prohibition doesn't work. Putting warnings in the cigarets doesn't work either. So, the next thing would be the seller give a speech about how bad cigarets its for each sale?
Yes you can, and this is why know-your-customer laws exist. This isnt black and white, and depends on the kind of transaction. But if I’m selling cars, and someone comes in looking shifty, and says they want a big SUV to mow people down with, then claiming “I’m just a merchant with no responsibility on end use” is honestly weak bullshit.
If seller offers guns to general public (e.g. gun shop) and child murderer does not have restriction on gun ownership as a part of their sentence, then not selling gun is not a political action, it is an extra-judicial punishment.
Deliberately choosing to not not conduct business with certain groups on the basis of their political ideologies is a political action. It implies a disposition toward trade and exchange that is itself political.
Consider the fact that you cannot legally offer a service or a fee to terrorist groups (however that may be defined), money launderers, industries from countries under sanctions... the list goes on.
These limitations are political in nature and could be revised, expanded, or eschewed via political action. But even if they were all eliminated, this would not constitute a "depoliticization" of trade: such an action could be characterized variously as libertarian, free-market, laissez-faire, or something of that nature but it would nevertheless be explicitly political.
> using the website to display anti-black ideology and actively plan rallies to remove my rights.
When it's not a crime and it's completely based on your subjective view: you're kidding yourself if you think that process is going to be a just measure. Likely, it's just going to be a free for all, whoever gets offended at what.
Let me add another colleague to your mix.
Asian guy: I don't agree on these statements. I'm quitting if we remove this content.
What would you say if these grassroots movement talked webshots into taking down all BLM sites for promoting an officially recognized terrorist organization? Would you still be in favor of workplace politics?
Currently you are privileged since the side you like has the power. If you aren't fine with the situation if you lose that privilege then you aren't fine with workplace politics.
I don't think the BLM movement is "in power". That seems woefully misinformed.
Moreover, BLM and such movements aim to overcome white privilege to enable the equal treatment of colored people. I can see why this may feel aggressive to a white person, and your argument about sides confirms that.
> I don't think the BLM movement is "in power". That seems woefully misinformed.
Then why aren't their webpages being taken down while pages from some of the opposite sides are? So to me it is pretty obvious that people supporting BLM have more power than the people supporting white nationalism.
> Moreover, BLM and such movements aim to overcome white privilege to enable the equal treatment of colored people. I can see why this may feel aggressive to a white person, and your argument about sides confirms that.
I don't even live in the US, nothing the BLM movement does affects me. I do know that Trump made it an official terrorist organization though, so it would be fairly easy to argue for takedown of their sites if you don't like them.
Yes, which is why we shouldn't let companies take down websites just based on workers political views, since then the BLM sites would likely get taken down if the views of their workers were right wing.
You could just as easily write an example where someone of a particular religion (pick any one, they all have a list of things they find immoral) doesn't like it when the web host takes the money of some group that furthers something the religion objects to. Everyone has to hold their nose sometimes.
I see no proof the unbounded political activism is making the world a better place. For example, crowds running up onto people’s dinner and demanding fists raised in solidarity. I think videos circulating of that kind of stuff has somewhat tragically introduced regression. It definitely doesn’t belong in most workplaces.
This is not a mainstream view. Maybe it's a 2020-american thing that every action and company and invention is judged by its political potential, but most people wont agree that Gutenberg is to be blamed for what politicians did.
This is not an opinion, politics is the exercise of power. If you are making decisions, you are exercising political power. Apolitical means “We’re going to make political decisions but we are not going to engage with any debate or discussion about them and you are not allowed to either.”
people make decisions, companies don't. That's the problem, people see the company as a political vehicle, akin to a political party. That's wrong on so many levels, primarily on the level that it's a well-funded for-profit organization with the means to cause undemocratic, arbitrary political damage. Blame individuals as much as you want for their politics, don't use the overfunded big tech as a trojan horse to destroy democratic balances.
But not to JUST that group. You are also providing "material aid" to every other group that uses your service which is what makes it apolitical.
We have a system for resolving political differences in America. It's called elections. There is no reason why every business transaction needs to evaluated on political grounds. In fact tolerance and commerce have historically been key to maintaining a peaceful democracy.
By offering I understand selling it the same way like selling it to everyone else. If by "aid" and by "offering" you mean giving it away as a gift or similar then yes - definitely political.
I see a case where it can be political, like creating a mechanism to protect specific group from the others however simply doing business is not a political action by itself.
There's also possibility to be a political action where it's widespread to deny services to certain groups but even that is a stretch because it can also be a good business opportunity.
> Because there's really no such thing as, "apolitical."
This a thousand times.
I've tried to be apolitical in a "least damage" way, but it is not possible. You are supporting someone who is doing something abhorrent either explicitly or implicitly.
In tech we are huge enablers, and when we support implicitly we need to accept that we are enabling behaviour that all employees would find unacceptable. Whether it is individuals, management, directors, the board - the accountability for that is at all levels but definitely starts and stops at the top.
That employees are left to fight this shows a lack of accountability at the other levels - but it isn't apolitical of the company, no... now the company has chosen to go from implicitly supporting behaviour enabled by them to explicitly supporting that behaviour.
> You are supporting someone who is doing something abhorrent either explicitly or implicitly.
This comment might make somebody have an idea which will then change the world for the worse. Have you supported that idea implicitly? I'd argue no, but if you look at it purely from an consequentialist perspective, then sure, you did.
> That employees are left to fight this
But they aren't "left to fight" anything. They're asked not to try to use the company to further their personal political goals.
All I see here is that you shouldn’t use Grafana if you don’t want to have your service arbitrarily terminated because of a random news article or a couple calls by activists.
> Why is a company wanting to be apolitical is controversial?
The fact that a company can emancipate itself from the political scene is nothing but a libertarian fantasy. And the fact that professional lobbyists exist show that they do influence the political life of a country.
If a person refuses to be political (e.g. vote), that's stygmatized, because it's irresponsible. The same should hold for a group of people (like a company).
The separation between government and church in the US is about 0.001inch or basically no centimeter... You'd be lucky if the president doesnt talk about god daily
> I would expect a government to have proper separation from church and state, so why is it weird to want a company to separate politics and mission
Because this is a non sequitur? You’re making appeals to protections enshrined in law to prevent the government from limiting the freedom and rights of individuals, when almost no such protections exist in the workplace. Why do people organize in their workplace? Because there exists no bill of rights for workers to prevent equivalent abuses of corporate power and hierarchy that are ostensibly so tyrannical when done by the government.
A better question would be why America has a two-track system of rights, where one must constantly defend their violation from the government, but also completely abandon them the moment they walk into their workplace.
> A better question would be why America has a two-track system of rights, where one must constantly defend their violation from the government, but also completely abandon them the moment they walk into their workplace.
One argument could be that it's much easier to change jobs than to change citizenship.
This argument doesn’t address the discrepancy. “I can move from one job, where my boss can fire me for anything I do or say arbitrarily to another where my boss can for me for anything I do or say arbitrarily” does not explain why protection of speech is so important in one context, but not the other. The vast majority of people don’t rely on the government for their immediate material needs, so why should they need so much protection from the government as opposed to the bosses who have this leverage over them?
Coinbase is a deeply political company already. Here are some political claims that they support that are not universally agreed upon:
- Cryptocurrencies are good and should be legal.
- Private ownership of unrestricted amounts of capital is good.
- Central banks controlling the money supply are bad.
- The ability to send and receive money across borders and avoid capital controls is, in general, good.
- The existence of corporations is good.
- Venture capital is good, as is making money for the stock exchange.
- Reporting large amounts of customer information to federal tax agencies is bad and should be fought in court.
- Spying on individuals on behalf of governments with poor human rights records is bad, and moreover, having supported this work makes you ineligible to be an employee. (This is new as of March 2019; previously, the company did not have a position here.)
Now, these are entirely reasonable positions to take (in the sense that they're well within the Overton window, at least in the US), but they're absolutely political positions! (If it helps, note that the negation of all of these is a political claim.)
I'd understand the argument if it's something like "I don't want my company to mandate that I support expanded bike lanes on Market St." or whatever, but it's very silly to pretend that a company doesn't have a mission in the world or that its mission doesn't have political aspects. If you don't agree that cryptocurrency is making a positive difference in the world, why are you even there?
(And even so, I think it would be entirely rational for the company to say, "It's okay if individual employees disagree, but as a company, expanded bike lanes on Market St. is important to our business because it's how half the company commutes to work.")
Something I've found about recent "activism" (not sure if that's the best word) is that the supporters act like it's not enough to acknowledge and agree with the activists aims, but that these aims must in fact be the most important issue the world faces, and if you're not 100% committed you are against them.
I think this 'My cause is "the" cause' has arisen as an escalation in the fight for attention. And I think it's a big element in peoples view that not taking sides is controversial - "if you're not choosing to focus all your attention on my pet cause, you don't care about X"
Thanks – this explanation ("the attention economy causes aggressive activism") resonates and somehow makes me feel better about the situation.
It can be disheartening to see friends and movements I agree with turn to aggressive rhetoric and evangelism. But the fact that it's yet another symptom of a broken (social) media environment is a nice reminder that it's not their fault so much as it is an expected result of a bad system.
Of course, it's equally sad/disheartening that our modes of societal discourse and decision-making have gotten this bad, but it's a theoretically solvable problem (eg; legislation and a good facebook competitor) and it doesn't involve me feeling bad about people I like.
It’s a very evangelical phenomenon. These “activists” are no different than religious proselytizers. Maybe this is a very American thing due to the strong historical presence of the evangelical church.
Religious groups did this forever, it's thinkable other serious people watched the resulting loyalty and borrowed the tools. Peer pressure is literally how indoctrination worked since prehistoric time, it's simply generalized to any idea now.
Or also you can be for the cause, but if you are not for every single thing done in the name of that cause, you are against them. Or worse, with "the other side" (as if all issues only have a binary choice)
It really does remind me of the "family values" religious conservatives of the past. Proving how pure and wholesome they are and competing on it by doing more and more things that aren't just living a good honest life, but are trying to infringe on the lives of others. All to show your circle of other supposedly pure friends how godly you are. So it takes a noble cause which is to live an honest and good life and perverts it into a strange contest of virtue.
I have a theory this is a consequence of tech companies wanting to move things online and become 'platform owners', leasing and ad-supporting everything rather than selling it.
After all, nobody would complain if the KKK had brought Microsoft Office licenses, any more than they'd complain if the KKK had brought food at wal-mart.
But many tech companies have realised how profitable it is to be Facebook or Github. They own the domain, their name's in the banner at the top of the page and the name of the native app, they pay all the hosting costs and make all the ad money, and they've put themselves in the situation where they can censor users.
When we in tech moved away from "we just sell the stuff, none of our business what you do with it" and made "what you do with it" the core of our businesses, we were walking into the realm of politics whether we realised it at the time or not.
> After all, nobody would complain if the KKK had brought Microsoft Office licenses, any more than they'd complain if the KKK had brought food at wal-mart.
Oh yes they would. Selling to the KKK would make Microsoft and Walmart KKK supporters.
Wal-mart doesn't know if that shopper is on their way to the KKK cook-out. If you've heard someone proposing wal-mart should start IDing shoppers to check them against a blacklist of undesirables, they were trolling you.
> without a clear indicator of the author's intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied.
It's only controversial among the people who think that not wanting to fight whatever particular battle is in question that minute is an endorsement of the status quo.
I don't understand this "us against them" mentality because it leaves no room for nuance.
I strongly believe in PG's top of mind theory [1], and I don't see how you can achieve anything if you're constantly fighting for or against the status quo.
Don't you believe it's possible to agree with certain viewpoints but not act on them?
You also don't have to parade around your support during every waking moment, which is basically what Brian asked his employees not to do.
> I don't understand this "us against them" mentality because it leaves no room for nuance.
IMO it is just a rhetorical trick / social manipulation tool. On a landscape of political positions, there is a status quo area X. Who is against status quo is in non-X (complement to X). There is a side who wants to change status quo to position Y, which is a small and specific subset of non-X (which is necessary, because 'away from X' is not consistent position / direction).
The fair approach would be to negotiate with other members of non-X (and perhaps some border members of X) for political support and get some compromise position with majority support.
The "us against them" is just a way to manipulate (by guilt trip or other ways) members of non-X to support position Y, without giving any consessions for them and their positions. It may help for that goal if position Y is not explicitly stated, and the side is just marked / marketed as non-X.
I agree with the basic premise: productive people do not have time to engage in petty fights.
On the other hand, there are many situations where there is a silent majority of productive people who would literally need to speak up only once to topple an unfair system.
The unfair system can be an open source project that has been hijacked by a small group of ideologists, it can be bad working conditions in ware houses.
Certainly in the case of the open source project it would require just on mail per silent majority member to express dissent and shut down the bureaucrats.
Yet, even in the simplest case it does not happen. So there seem to be more powerful forces at play than just lack of time: Lethargy, craving irrational authority, prisoner's dilemma (who speaks up first).
I have a theory that for worse or for better, the silent majority of productive people are more inclined to work with what they've got than attempt to change the system because attempting to change the system is generally unproductive.
> Don't you believe it's possible to agree with certain viewpoints but not act on them?
Obviously you can choose to agree on something is not good and at the same time to not collaborate in changing it.
But then you should acknowledge that you are helping the status quo with your attitude, and helping the status quo is also a political action (like most human actions, since we are a society).
I can think the status quo sucks and that proposed attitudes and alternatives suck too.
Seeing a lack of acceptable options doesn't mean I am supporting any of them. That is a false choice.
And, besides, maybe I am addressing the same problems in another way, it's just not apparent given the false choice framing. For instance, maybe I think fighting racism through political confrontation and segregation is a dead end, so I am fighting racism on a local or personal level. And maybe it's none of your business how that's going so far.
I agree ... but the problem is that this discourse isn't operating in the context of a common meta-ethical framework. It isn't just that we just disagree about the empirical evidence of a few (important) policies or disagree about about a few key moral values (or tradeoffs between values) it is that we are no working from the same moral frameworks. We are finally seeing the legacy of postmodernism becoming mainstream and it doesn't operate from the same assumptions that were crafted in the enlightenment. Luckily enlightenment values still dominate background presumptions for meta-ethical discussions, but this is why you see references to religion in this thread, the aesthetics of the discourse have many similarities.
> For instance, maybe I think fighting racism through political confrontation and segregation is a dead end, so I am fighting racism on a local or personal level.
... that would mean you found an acceptable option.
Whereas if you were against racism, but never bothered to do anything about it, then you would be implicitly supporting the status quo.
Support goes beyond simple ideology. It includes social pressure, enforcing or reinforcing cultural norms and systems of privilege, even where and how you spend your money.
> In what way does inaction support the status quo? Someone living in their parents basement is not really affecting things either way, for example.
Yes, if you want to be pedantic, there exist possible states of being in which a person may have little to no effect on their environment by virtue of being physically isolated from it. Someone stranded on a desert island, or someone in a coma. A literal brain in a jar screaming into the void.
But that's not what this discussion is about. "Inaction" in the context of this discussion refers to expressing a stance of political neutrality, not to literal physical inaction. The (apparently controversial) question is whether political neutrality is truly neutral.
Neutral is still neutral by the definition of the word. Your logical conflict comes from your metaphorical misuse of the word "support", which literally means to apply force to hold something in place. There an important distinction between someone applying such force and someone not doing so, just as between that person and someone applying force to topple the status quo. A person refusing to take sides is not applying force either way. I'm not "supporting" a scaffold if I don't help you cut it down. The fight remains only between you and the ropes.
It's just the trolley problem. Inaction often carries consequence. You're not supporting the scaffold but you are not concerned about the consequences of it remaining in place. And if we're talking about systems the difference between supporting the system and ignoring the consequences of the system are so small as to not be apparent.
You are free to criticize a neutral person for their inaction. That doesn't make it right to twist meanings and try to hurt them over it with a worse charge they are not guilty of.
As for your last sentence, maybe those opposing "the system" were about to win, and by intervening against them I would prevent that. Now neutrality is apparently the same as supporting the opposition. Or we can just be accurate from the start and call me neutral.
I don't think meanings are really being twisted it's just colloquial discourse with a smidge of rhetoric. If inaction leads to 'the opposition' gaining an advantage it's easy to see why people might see that as defacto support and describe it as such even if that support is quite passive. I can also appreciate you don't enjoy being characterised this way and can definitely see causing that discomfort as being part of the point.
Well a half-truth is half true, but then of course it's also half false.
I've been thinking politics is increasingly just people lying about each other. Someone's behavior can be over-simplified and then pattern-matched to be a tiny bit like that of a literal socialist/racist/whatever. So you "round up" and throw the worst possible charge at them which can fit your evidence, intentionally creating what is almost certainly a false positive due to a terrible classification process. The lie (i.e. the degree to which their statement was rounded up beyond the evidence they have) is the part that damages the target. So people make it as big as possible. The worst possible names are always immediately diluted by overuse.
Same thing going on here. Not helping is partially like helping the other side, so stop thinking there and start rounding off information to make a lie that can hart them.
> I'm not "supporting" a scaffold if I don't help you cut it down.
Except that, in the case of society and politics, you and I are both the worker and the scaffold. You support my cutting down the scaffold by choosing to fall with it.
No, what he said is that no issue is big enough to distract him and Coinbase from making as much money as possible (setting aside how truthful he was).
It's also not a question of us against them. What we decide to do or not do all has a meaning, even just standing on the side. It is certainly possible to agree with viewpoints without acting on them, but it's not possible to support them.
> No, what he said is that no issue is big enough to distract him and Coinbase from making as much money as possible (setting aside how truthful he was)
Even if we take his words cynically, is this the wrong thing to do if that is the path he's chosen?
Context switching is very hard for an individual let alone an organization, and no one will ever agree what the most important issue(s) is/are (Racism, poverty, climate change, etc).
The way I see it is that it's about picking your battles. It's impossible to support and act on every good cause out there. I don't understand what you expect people to do.
I think it is the wrong thing to choose, but he is obviously free to take it as we all are. I don't expect him to do anything though and I don't think my take was cynical either. If problems we are facing in 2020 are not big enough to distract him from his focus, then it is difficult to imagine what would.
I agree that you can't support every good cause you agree with, but choices we make do say something about our priorities. What none of us has a right to is that others will not judge us for them.
Supporting the status quo would mean that you actively oppose those who try to change it. Being neutral means that you help neither those who try to change it nor those who try to keep it the same as before. They are not the same.
Example: A person is being murdered near you. You flee. Did you support the persons murder by not engaging, and therefore letting it play out? No, you did not.
I think inconvenience of activism plays a role here. I don't have to endanger my life by stopping a murderer. I should however at least call an ambulance if I see somebody bleeding to death on the street.
Of course I didn't support the bleeding by not taking action to stop it, but I did have a responsibility to act. I think this responsibility to act is the issue here. If I was supporting anything or staying neutral are semantics that I don't see central to this issue.
Even if you're right, it's the "I'm remaining apolitical/status quo" types who are at least permitting you to hold opposing viewpoints even if they personally disagree. It's the activists who are trying to remove all dissent.
>it's the "I'm remaining apolitical/status quo" types who are at least permitting you to hold opposing viewpoints even if they personally disagree. It's the activists who are trying to remove all dissent.
No, that's just partisan hyperbole. No one is "permitting" me to hold an opposing viewpoint, nor is anyone trying to "remove all dissent."
Police biggest issue isn't racism. If it is then Mississippi has the least racist police and therefore the best police. Should all other police departments work to be more like Mississippi? I don't think so, their police kills a lot of people, just that they kill proportionally as many whites as they kill blacks. I think the New York police is doing an a lot better job even though they proportionally kill many times more blacks than whites.
The problem is that the American police kills a lot of people, not that it kills a lot of blacks. It kills a lot of whites as well compared to European police.
There is, however, very real controversy about whether and the extent to which various rights are included in the bundle of human rights; and some of those divide along US partisan lines.
It's not the amount of rights that's the issue, it's what is the source of rights.
Conservatives (and US declaration of independence) posit that rights are from God (i.e. preexist government, if you don't want to bring God into discussion), while democrats view government as the source of the same.
Depending which side you are on, your view on the role of government is very different (protect the rights vs. create the rights).
I think this perspective explains why e.g. Supreme Court Justice position is so highly contested. If your position is that government's role is to protect rights, then judge is just a person who reads the law or the case and tells you if it's aligned with the Constitution or not. If you're on the opposite side, judicial system is just another vehicle to create new rights and laws, bypassing less predictable (due to its representation model) Congress.
You gotta realize that millions, tens of millions, of Americans are white supremicists, look at black people getting shot by the police and think “they must be criminals they got what they deserved.”
We are having an (ongoing) argument in America as to who deserves what kinds of civil rights. Rights like marriage (which confers extensive legal rights), protection from being fired, fair treatment by the cops and legal system, and much more.
Fair question. I guess I was thinking that a civil war would be heralded (e.g. by all major news outlets) before long-term effects started happening (like currency changes), but who knows.
ITT: a bunch of people who think there is a distinction between life and politics and are privileged enough to be able to pretend the status quo is ok for everybody
I've always seen these attempts at "being apolitical" to be roundabout ways of discriminating against people who have left-leaning political beliefs. Despite claiming to be apolitical and neutral these kinds of places always seem to cater more to conservatives, neoliberals and white supremacists.
I applaud Coinbase’s CEO on his position of keeping politics out of work. Other tech companies have been overrun with employee activism, which just means one political side has weaponized those companies in favor of their ideology. It is disrespectful to all their customers that don’t align with those views, damaging societally when digital public squares (Facebook and Twitter) are corrupted by employee politics, and it is a distraction in a professional environment that could otherwise be operated apolitically. I hope other organizations follow Coinbase’s example.
To be fair though, keeping politics completely out of any aspect of life becomes increasingly hard when things like science and the definition of "truth" are being politicized. A statement like "I believe the 99% of climate scientists that say climate change is man-made" shouldn't be considered a political statement, yet here we are.
What is "it"? Things that are controversial? Where do we draw the line on that?
Most people would agree that talking about your flight "around" the world is OK, even if it takes a side in the somehow-controversial debate on the shape of the earth.
What about talking to your coworkers idly and you mention "Oh yeah I've been keeping my kids at home cause I'm worried about coronavirus". Controversial, some people think that's fake.
Talking about how you got married last month? If you're gay, that's suddenly controversial.
Talking to your manager about how you need to take time off because a family member died, they ask what happened, turns out they were shot by the police? Suddenly very controversial...
Politics isn't some weird abstract thing, it's life and the events that are happening around us every day. If we live in a world where literally the shape of the earth is a marker of political identity -- how do you expect people to avoid mentioning topics that people might find controversial? Or do you think it's possible to draw a stark dividing line somewhere between "shape of earth" and "police reform" that can be justified in an objective way?
If someone, say, brought up their gay partner to a colleague who is very religious, I'd expect the religious colleague to treat them courteously. I wouldn't expect them to tell them that they will burn in hell for all eternity.
Maybe the line to be drawn is one of policy vs people. As a policy decision, you could be against gay marriage but on a personal level still be happy for a gay colleague that got married. Or happy that they are happy.
There’s a difference between talking about things with colleagues and being an activist. I don’t think anyone minds water cooler conversations about things. But using the company you work for as a base of activism is different. Actively creating a sub-culture within a company that polarizes or coerces employees is hostile.
In what world is your work not impacted by climate change? How you use energy, what supplier you use, your carbon impact, the raw materials you use to make your products, etc.. This is all part of it. Even if you don't believe in it, the fact that you don't believe in it while other companies do will impact you! You can't just ignore all those things and pretend they don't exist, as a business owner it's just entirely impossible to ignore it.
Insisting that Facebook / Twitter workplace should be apolitical, is as persuasive as Wernher Von Braun and his rocket engineer colleagues insisting that their workplace was also apolitical.
If you are being told when to come to work and when to leave, what to work on, how and where to work on it, how to dress, corrected on even the most subtle things that you are doing "wrong" from the managements perspective and expected to do as told, what hope do you have to have any influence on the values of the company?
It's the norm that people in a workplace are primarily seen as cogs in the system, humans with needs and opinions as second. Any time the latter is perceived to potentially affect the former, you will be told to fall into line.
I don't know how long you've been out of the workforce, but I haven't had a job that told me when to arrive, when to leave, how or where to do my work, or what to wear, in almost 20 years.
In the IT industry there's this different type of subtle authority. "Yeah you can come as you please" But your daily meeting is at 10am and everyone must be there. Oh, and you must be present at least until X pm because there must be enough overlapping hours, so your wiggle room becomes even smaller. "You make your own hours, overtime is totally not expected" But people who take time off the least and do the most (sometimes unpaid) overtime get promoted etc. etc. If you take what they say literally, you say goodbye to any chance of promotion and might even get called out as a "non-teamplayer". They will wait until you realize you will never go forward in the company like this and either you start doing overtime or quit.
"Unlimited vacation days" is the biggest joke. Seriously, there's nothing stopping you from never showing up to work? In reality it's a way to make sure nobody ever takes time off if they want to have any chance of promotion.
Yes, but what's the reason to believe that Coinbase employees can impact the Coinbase culture more than McDonalds employees can? In the case we're discussing now, they tried, and the CEO told them "don't let the door hit you on your way out."
It's kinda interesting to see because the cryptocurrency space is surely one of the more political tech developments at the core - replacing fiat money, new financial instruments, self-governing contracts, ...?
Interesting definition, so if his crypto platform (hypothetical) is getting used by mafia and for 'tax minimisation' thats apolitical? And if I raise a stink about it, I am an activist?
Probably because none of these things exist in a vacuum. Simply because we give a title to an "area of political focus" doesn't mean that it exists in it's own silo, unimpaired by decisions in any other area of political focus.
What happens when your area of political focus crosses tracks with another area of political focus and you're faced with a trolley problem? Do you simply steam ahead regardless of the overall impact or do you consider the overall impact?
"That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen" [1] applies to all policies, not simply those undertaken by states.
For the record, I am pro sustainable fishing, sustainable foresty, tackling climate change, and eliminating malaria.
I think governments and dedicated organisations are best placed to do this: they can better enforce compliance, and have greater visibility on all of our pressing needs.
Yes, which can be interesting to both leftists, rightists, and whatever other directionist you might wish to delineate.
It isn't politically neutral technology, sure-- but it's largely orthogonal to many other political concerns. This is good too, because an alternative money isn't particularly valuable unless it's useful to a broad spectrum of people.
I could easily imagine a cryptocurrency org that didn't have a culture of leaving your politics/religion at home -- at least to the extent that they didn't directly interact with your work-- could quickly become an extremely toxic and unproductive place.
Cryptocurrency represents a kind of financial libertarianism, that people should be able to own their money and be their own bank. It doesn't have much to say about aspects of life outside of that. It is political because of vested interests.
This is an unpopular opinion on HN, and I'm not sure I agree with it, but I am delighted that you've made it here. It's something worth debating in this group.
Let's say you run a company and your government offers you, for some insane reason, a fat, juicy contract to boil kittens alive. If you accept it, does that make the company apolitical? Is that a good thing?
The world hashed the issue out pretty thoroughly in the postwar years. I don't know if enough has changed since to warrant revisiting it.
Until recently blacklivesmatter.com about section touted that the movement “(we) are trained marxists”. Sorry but you’re not racist if you not a marxist. This is straight up Bolshevist tactics. More companies should take an assertive stance against these regressive tactics.
That's completely detached from reality and pretty much signals that you probably don't interact with minorities much.
As a non white immigrant, I can tell you that in my experience most PoC are apolitical. Much more so than white males as you say. And that's not only true for first generation immigrants, but also for most of their children.
Afro-americans are the only minority group I can think of that are actually pretty politically involved. So unless "white" only means "non black" for you, I really think you need to talk and get to know more "non whites".
I guess I hang out with ‘wrong’ minorities. My group are parents with kids in sf unified (I would say 80% non white). I probably live in my own bubble.
I think SF in general is a bubble, which is not necessarily a bad thing. It also depends also on the the economic class you belong to. In SF, and in tech especially, I'd say people are much more financially comfortable than the average. That means less urgent things to worry about, less work and more time for activism and that's regardless of race. There's a reason why historically the petit bourgeois were the vectors of revolution, radicalism, etc. Remember, first generation immigrants have chosen and often sacrified so much to be able to get here, of course they don't have as much things that they dislike than white people who have almost no other experience to compare things with. That inherent satisfaction directly means less interest in politics.
So upper class second or third gen immigrants are much more into politics because... they are upper class. Not really because they aren't white. Because even then, I would still bet upper class white people are more politicized than PoC of the same economic class. Also, since I'd guess you are into politics, you are more likely to meet and bond with people who are into them too.
If anything most of what I'm seeing these days is white people ,with huge white savior complexes & using minorities to score points, calling out other white people for not doing the same. Imo, I'd much, much rather be around an apolitical white friend who is just chill all around rather than be around someone who constantly thinks of me, my person & my identity as being political things because he's "on my side". I'm not saying that what you are doint at all, what I'm saying is that politics can dehumanize even people you think you are on the side of. ;)
As a non-white immigrant, I think it's mostly the other way. Most of us don't care as much for the US-style identity politics, but somehow it's all the white liberal upper middle class types who are always political and woke.
Malcom X gave a great speech on the dangers of these people and their use and co-opting of black and fringe causes. It's crazy to think that he gave that speech almost 60 years ago, and it sounds like he is talking about modern politics.
Take a step back here, what are the widespread human rights abuses? Very few people are against human rights, that would be truly uncontroversial. The issue seems to be when what are labeled as human rights aren't actually human rights, or they are bundled together with divisive add-ons or an overall political stance.
There's something that makes me very uneasy about companies and individuals having to go on the record saying "Black Lives Matter" or being ostracized. It feels like a shibboleth, like kids reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, like the Parsley Massacre, like a kid twisting another kid's arm saying "Say uncle! Say uncle!"
That said, I don't think Armstrong's blog post made a strong argument against these kinds of mantras.
Well, the reason that's happening is that a lot of people benefit a lot from a widespread culture of white supremacy, and the systems, to use the popular terms, need to be actively dismantled, because they were actively designed and have been (and continue to be) actively maintained.
Disambiguating those who haven't thought much about it simply because it doesn't affect them from people who actively don't give a shit about human rights and would prefer things stay as they are is a critically important thing to happen in our society.
Additionally, in the cryptocurrency space, there are a lot of cryptoracists (i.e. from kryptos: "hidden") who are just sort of skating by, assumed to be decent. An analogous situation was when the POTUS was asked recently to commit to a peaceful transition of power following the election. Not saying anything, posed that question, is saying something quite loudly.
The very plain statement that sums up this situation nicely is:
> If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.
I think that's plainly true, and anyone who doesn't see a massive problem with the status quo is, at the very least, a little bit of a contributor to that problem.
Pretending that the way our world works is someone else's problem is not tenable whilst hiring and building things in that very world. You're moving in a direction, and the effects of that direction cannot be ignored as they exist within a moral and ethical framework.
This is a very low effort comment. Can you go through the effort of describing the viewpoints you find fiercely debated and why you think that, please?
The core assertion that there is an epidemic of police killings of Black men is contradicted by a study from a Black Harvard professor who claims that white and black men are killed at the same frequency by police, and that the real problems are 1) a disproportionate number of police engagements with black men and 2) an epidemic of police killings in general.
Can you link to the study if you're going to use it in your explanation please? What about other studies? Shouldn't we be using the scientific method for these things??
I have read the abstract but my point was not really about the paper itself. Imagine a group that made you say “the Earth is round!” or they’d throw a rock through your window. Frankly, I’d just say the earth is round. But I would still have a problem with this.
Yeah reality is a little more complicated than that, isn't it? Imagine a large group of people yelling that the earth is flat, and that's causing people to die on one side of the globe because so many people think that the earth is flat that they've decided to stop sailing to that side of the globe and can't get supplies there fast enough. We've got to get people to say that the earth is round because believing otherwise is dismissing the fact that their false information is literally killing people, and those people dying from this false information is their own fault and they should just pick themselves up by their bootstraps.
This is exactly it. People in this thread are saying "I don't understand why it's so crazy to say 'I'm not taking sides'"... Well because it clearly communicates that you still think there are "two sides", and that they're equivalent. That is clearly not the case, and if someone thinks otherwise, I don't even know how to have a conversation with them.
Absolutely not. You're just not explicitly endorsing one side, potentially having people from "the other side" boycott your business because of that. Or simply because it has no relevance to what you're actually doing.
Why is it that you NEED to explicitly pick a side? Especially if you are a business. In that case, everyone knows that your only interest is increasing revenue. That's it. Everything else is PR stunts in order to increase revenue.
I prefer "taking no sides" rather than plastering BLM or LGBT sponsors for the sole purpose to appeal to that crowd.
you can choose the status quo of widespread human rights abuses in the US, or you can choose to speak out against it. Those are the sides
No, there is a third side where actually the majority of people sit: you reject the premise.
There are no widespread human rights abuses in the USA. It is not a country that is constantly abusing people's human rights, a term which is worth observing, is vague and politically highly charged to begin with.
Even if you take BLM, the stats show that their beliefs are wrong. The American police are not systemically racist according to actual data, let alone the rest of society. If their beliefs are wrong then it isn't a question of whether you choose the "status quo" or to "speak out against it".
In theory, I would agree with the sentiment of not bringing politics to work, but this is 2020. We have Nazis marching in the streets. We have algorithms that don't "work" on brown people because they were built by and for white people. In practice, I've found that "no politics" at work means "let us be racist in peace".
I'm sorry to tell everyone but this entire premise is insincere.
Sure, 50 years ago MAYBE this would have been valid, but I'm doubtful.
Are we going to ignore that companies in Germany were profiting off of the Nazi regime? Lockheed-Martin, BAE, etc pushing us into infinite war. Oil and gas companies lying about climate change. Coinbase is taking the side of those types of companies.
Climate change has been hijacked as a political issue. Lobbyists from companies are constantly arguing in favor of more damaging and exploitive rules for society.
So, no you can't be apolitical. Armstrong is being selfish and privileged. He's signaling to employees that they need to shut up and make money. If I was working there, I'd be glad this was exposed now instead of later.
My buddy works at a FAANG that has a strong corporate position on BLM, LGBTQ rights, and climate change. In fact, all of the FAANGs do. Anyone kicked out of Coinbase that will pass the interviews will be welcomed with open arms, regardless of political positions.
I speculate that this is a way for Coinbase to carry out its first round of layoffs.
Being “apolitical” is of itself a political decision to uphold the status quo, which is a problem considering how racist, sexist, and classist the status quo is. I would 100% take the exit package, I wouldn’t want to work for a company that’s okay with the status quo. I got into tech to make people’s lives better, not to help oppressors oppress their victims more efficiently. But that’s just my opinion.
That it's being framed as politics is way off the mark. What's being discussed at the workplace isn't foreign policy; it's authoritarianism vs democracy. That's an existential threat. People are getting executed in the street by those supposed to serve and protect, and business leaders want employees to "just be apolitical"? Asking employees to ignore an existential threat is like asking humans to not experience emotion, to the tune of "Just ignore the chaos around you and do your job, peasant." It's wrong to enforce people to ignore the injustices that affect them.
> That it's being framed as politics is way off the mark
No, it's not, at all.
> What's being discussed at the workplace isn't foreign policy
Well, I mean, it often is, but clearly that's not what you are centrally focussed on.
> it's authoritarianism vs democracy
That's still politics even when it isn't foreign policy, but it's not a mutually exclusive category with foreign policy.
> People are getting executed in the street by those supposed to serve and protect
Domestic racial and political repression is, very much, politics.
As is asking people to shut up about it.
> Asking employees to ignore an existential threat is like asking humans to not experience emotion,
No, it's asking workers to not act out on their emotion and behave as the industrial tools and consumables (“human resources”) which is their use in capitalism.
The cool thing is that while Coinbase gets to use its inherent power/leverage over workers to get a certain outcome (capital is a form of power btw) workers can use their inherent power (withholding labor, negotiating as a unit, building consensus etc) to get their desired outcome and behavior from the company.
No one owes anyone anything and there are not really any rules here. Consequences and outcomes yes but no real rules.
So the people that work at Coinbase took some action (walkout) and the CEO is taking some action (blog post/policy/vision clarification/severance offers to leave). His job is to convince and use his power to get his desired outcome. But employees have a similar amount of power to change the vision and direction of the company too. They don’t often wield it well since it’s been in business owners best interest to convince workers they don’t have this power at all.
It will be interesting to see if the employees realize any of this and how they respond.
They are free to leave. No one is essential at any job, no matter how much mom and dad and the college admissions department told her she that she was.
You're missing the point. By choosing not to leave the employees can wield influence over the company. The employees also don't need Coinbase; there are other companies paying the same and working on the same problems.
I think perhaps Marco’s thread on this more clearly articulates what I was trying to get at. Maybe y’all disagree but it does not really matter... it only matters how the power is wielded and who benefits and how.
What's up with the 7 year exercise window? All contracts I've seen lately have adopted the modern 10 year window. Bonus to cover exercise + 83b is also now more common for non-execs now. 7 years sounds like they chose something less than the max intentionally.
Furthermore, 6 months severance is on the lighter side for 3yrs of service in cases where the company did something remotely controversial. Setting the aside the issue of allowing politics at the workplace or not, actual implementation of the policing invites all sorts of non-standard harassment and first amendment claims. Any of the lawyers in the Bay Area who helped Uber employees negotiate severance could likely get a deal like this doubled, especially if the employee is a manager or senior-level. While 6 months of salary is nothing to scoff at, there's a time and a place for major company ideology changes and COVID is not the time to make employees worry about their employment.
How would a lawyer negotiate this up? They aren't firing people, they're just offering people to option to leave. Do employees here have any legal leverage?
No leverage through the offer or blog post itself, but if they have evidence of harassment or other misconduct, and screenshots from Slack, then it's more likely for a potential claim to result in additional severance versus any sort of litigation, especially since Coinbase is now inviting departures and inevitable conflict.
Being an adversarial employee when working on an exit package certainly is FAR from necessary, but it's also not at all necessary to put people out of a job during COVID due to _culture changes_.
I'm not sure "major company ideology change" is accurate here. From what I've seen, it looks to me as if the CEO is doubling down on his previous stance after being pressured about changing it recently.
I don't know if the severance package is good or not, but it seems generous and it gives employees who aren't aligned with the company an easy way out.