This is just one more step in that direction.
Funnily enough, I think it has been extrapolated by Neal Stephenson in Diamond Age. We will end up having parallel societies which define themselves not by geographic boundaries, but by affiliation. A North Korean community could be your neighbour.
I'm curious what your definition of political is, because my gut feeling is that (Almost) nothing is political.
How do you believe Coinbase, a cryptocurrency corporation, will remain "a political" in the design of their systems given the changing political climate around crypto? Does that just mean bowing down to whatever the administration says? Do you believe Coinbase will remain "apolitical" is the US begins to enact policy that causes Coinbase users to find alternatives?
Do you believe Coinbase employees will have no opinion on the way the justice department handles cryptocurrency?
But if it's unrelated to the business, then the business is no place to undertake such activism.
Politics is more than just the rituals of government officials or what gets written about in the politics section of the newspaper:
> Politics (from Greek: Πολιτικά, politiká, 'affairs of the cities') is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations between individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics)
For instance, this effort to create an "apolitical workplace" could probably be understood as political project to stamp out elements of bottom-up democratic political culture in favor of a more autocratic political culture. At work we keep our heads down and follow the edicts (mission) of our leaders.
1. relating to the government or public affairs of a country.
Not the one the parent probably means:
2. (DEROGATORY) done or acting in the interests of status or power within an organization rather than as a matter of principle.
Whatever a company does, it relates in some way to the public affairs of a country. Either in what you offer, or what you need to produce your offer. Your company is hopefully affecting the public affairs of your country in more than one way. And that I think had very much a place at work.
The delineation between public affair and private matter seems to be quite arbitrary at times.
I would say abortion is a private matter, or who you marry or which combination of sex chromosomes you have, but all those things are very high on the list of things being discussed.
Here I have to say, I'm more likely to give the point, that those topics are not professionally relevant, but neither is sports.
Arguments like "abortion is highly related to site reliability engineering" are pretty overtly disingenuous in a very clear-cut fashion.
> Here I have to say, I'm more likely to give the point, that those topics are not professionally relevant, but neither is sports.
Sports don't cause the same degree of strife in the workplace. No one is demanding anyone's termination because they like a different sports team or because they were caught in a photograph gesturing in a way that looks vaguely like the hook 'em horns gesture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hook_%27em_Horns).
All of these actions can be viewed as political statements. Everything is political.
Coinbase is intrinsically political. They're a financial institution. Their product is subject to both laws and public scrutiny.
Fundamentally, this is our disagreement.
One clever way to deeply entrench a political decision is to convince others that it's not a political decision at all. If you're successful, you've erected a barrier against your opponents by interfering with their ability to even conceive opposition to your position. It's sort of like the concept of Newspeak.
Which is better for a gay man in Saudi Arabia? A company where people only talk about work, or a company where everybody is expected to take a stance on homosexuality?
> Which is better for a gay man in Saudi Arabia? A company where people only talk about work, or a company where everybody is expected to take a stance on homosexuality?
You're talking about something completely different. What I'm talking about is basically falsely depoliticizing a political decision, so people think it's something that cannot be changed, like nature or something. The reference to Newspeak, which was imagined as a way of dismantling the mental machinery of political opposition, should have made that clear. That you missed it is ironic given your username.
If you want to map the experience of a gay man in Saudi Arabia onto what I was talking about, he would marry a woman and not even think things could be any different.
Your appeal to newspeak is pretty pointless, as it applies only inasmuch as it does to anyone who might claim that something is its opposite, for example the slogans "the personal is political" and "silence is violence".
Sure, if you accept lies like that, you may lose the ability to think about the true nature of those things.
But you haven't really contributed anything to the conversation. You're just saying "ah, but what if they're /lying/! To /trick us/!"
You're still not really getting what I was saying. Directly claiming something is apolitical won't actually create the state I was talking about. To do that you actually have to get a bunch of influential people to talk about some political idea like it was obviously some kind of natural or social law or something.
Not everything is political, but many people are ignorant of the political nature of many things.
> Your appeal to newspeak is pretty pointless, as it applies only inasmuch as it does to anyone who might claim that something is its opposite, for example the slogans "the personal is political" and "silence is violence".
You're thinking about the slogans like "freedom is slavery," which weren't Newspeak and would have been unexpressible in it.
> But you haven't really contributed anything to the conversation. You're just saying "ah, but what if they're /lying/! To /trick us/!"
I'm not sure I'm contributing the the conversion that you want to have, which makes it a little baffling why you're engaging with me and not one of "the others" who seem to be who you really want to engage with.
No, the distinction is not whether somebody _decides_ if a topic is political or not, but that the conversations' intension is to convert the other party that your point of view is correct for society. I.e., you have to undertake political activism towards something for the topic to be political.
It's like religion as a topic of conversation, vs religious conversion. Two people can be talking about religion, but if neither is trying to "convert" the other, then this is not a religious conversion.
But if one party is talking with the intent to convert the other party to said religion, then it's a religious conversion. And the argument is that this should not happen in the workplace.
If a coworker talks about his husband, is that a political statement? To some people, absolutely, right?
How about someone mentioning a concert that they've gone to, for an artist that's outspokenly political one way or another? Just a concert, right?
What about talking about a great movie or TV show, if those are, I don't know, "Sorry to Bother You" or "Lovecraft Country"?
Can you mention that you went to a gun show, or a shooting range?
Can you recommend a Jordan Peterson book?
Can you put an NRA logo on your car?
What about a BLM logo?
What about on your T-shirt?
If a coworker goes through a gender transition, how does that get handled in a way that everyone, across the board, considers apolitical? Good luck with that: the very act of transitioning is, to a significant portion of the population, itself political.
So, I mean, sure, not literally everything is political, but if you give the statement a bit more of a generous reading than "Come on, are you saying ice cream is political? Harrumph!", you can see the point being made.
(Also, re: ice cream: what about Ben & Jerry's?)
Or are they taking action not for such purposes? For example, a gay person talking about their spouse to a colleague without the intent to change any political beliefs of anyone around them?
But, this doesn't mean an organization has to take a position on every hot-button political issue. Even the Biden campaign, a a political organization if there ever was one, needs to focus on getting their candidate elected, and not on things that divide Democrats.
To agree on a mission doesn't mean people on the organization need to agree on everything. Putting aside any differences on stuff not related to the mission is important in being able to work together as a team.
There are going to be political issues that involve Coinbase, and if they're deciding already to ignore any role they play in society, we need to be highly critical of every decision they make moving forward.
And that constitutes a much larger part of our lives than is traditionally acknowledged. Which is itself, also, a political matter, because designating a subset of actual politics as "officially politics", and then marginalizing that subset, is one way to slow down further political developments in that department.
No, its not.
"Everything must be directed by the coercive power of the state" is. The former does not imply the latter (the scope of the coercive power of the state is, itself, a political issue.)
Yes, actually it absolutely is. Putting everything up for grabs for state (or in modern day; the mob) control is literally totalitarianism. People who "don't understand" this are either abysmally stupid or are power mad imbeciles who are pretending not to understand for Machiavellian reasons.
If "everything is political" there is no room for private life, which is the only life that matters.
I agree that our divisiveness is caused by an unwillingness to listen to one another, but I don’t think avoiding discussion in the workplace is making us less willing to listen. People have lots of opportunities to listen to opposing views outside of the workplace, and yet many positively pride themselves on ignoring dissenting opinions—ostracizing one’s family for wrongthink is a veritable badge of honor in certain ideological communities. I don’t see how bringing that divisiveness into the workplace is going to soften those people.
If someone is deeply committed to ignorance and divisiveness, allowing them to proselytize at work doesn’t seem fruitful (everyone who is not committed to ignorance has likely already considered their views) and is very likely going to be harmful. On the other hand, there is a chance that by ignoring politics at work, people might have a chance to build relationships with reasonable people (who they otherwise would have written off or persecuted for heresy) which might have a deradicalizing effect (if you look up to someone who is charitable, honest, and open minded, you are probably more likely to emulate those qualities yourself).
Only in a world where words have no meaning.
I think the parent meant that the more you use the term "political" to refer to everything, the less meaning "political" has.
That only means the word "politics" has no meaning at the limit.
This is textbook pedantry. Obviously "don't discuss politics in the workplace" means "don't discuss divisive topics, especially when they're not particularly relevant to your work".
Of course everything is "technically political", but that's not how anyone uses "political" except when they're trying to argue in bad faith (specifically engaging in tautology).
The funny thing about politics is: a company doesn't get to choose what topics are divisive. People do. All it takes is one person to strongly hold a belief in the office to make it political.
Not like "we need to put gay marriage banners on our home page" is political.
I really think people should start respecting the difference.
> All it takes is one person to strongly hold a belief in the office to make it political.
No. It requires them to act on it. To engage in political activity.
It's not political to be a communist at work. It's political to use this belief to steer how the job is done or how the company should perform its mission, or indeed to try to change its mission.
Talking about one's wedding around the water cooler is not political, irrespective of the speaker's orientation OR the audience's opinions about gay marriage. Similarly, an argument in favoring or opposing gay marriage would be political irrespective of the speaker's sexuality or the audience's opinions. This seems perfectly straightforward to me. It seems like you're trying to make a problem where none exists.
Don't talk about your abortion and how it made your life better or worse.
Don't talk about your birth control.
Don't talk about how you were explicitly told by an authority figure you were not worthy of a job because of your sex/gender.
Easy for me to imagine someone being told not to talk about their gay marriage under similar circumstances.
I think commonly used phrases are "its not for polite company", "keep politics out of it", "don't bring your politics here", etc.
It is obviously selective enforcement of the rules, but that is a common and unfortunately often effective shield.
Luckily I have heard/see less of the above over the last 10 years than the 10 years before that.
I think the fact that there are two sides to US politics, and those two sides split cleanly along almost every controversial topic, is causing the confusion. Because it's both.
Abortions are controversial because some people believe they should not be allowed to happen, while others belive women should be in control of their own bodies. Abortions are political because the Republican party has a publicly-stated policy of wanting to legislate against abortion. The Democratic party has a publicly-stated policy of wanting to maintain women's ability to get an abortion if they need one.
Thus a controversial topic is also political. Any discussion of the topic will inevitably reduce to a political discussion because the two political parties are so closely aligned with the two sides of the conversation.
Because of the way that US politics has been so data-driven, focus-group informed, every controversial topic is being used as a method of creating political traction. So everything controversial is becoming political. Even something as banal as wearing a mask during a pandemic is turned into a political statement.
I didn’t claim otherwise. I believe that people are told not to talk about their abortion because it’s controversial, but not because it’s political barring perhaps a few people who aren’t educated enough to understand the distinction.
> Abortions are political because the Republican party has a publicly-stated policy of wanting to legislate against abortion.
The Republican party’s political advocacy is obviously political, but it doesn’t follow that any given account of an abortion is political. Both are controversial, however.
> So everything controversial is becoming political.
Controversial things frequently are political, but that doesn’t mean any particular speech about a controversial topic is political speech. You seem to be confusing a prohibition about politics with a prohibition against any topic that has a political aspect. So at coinbase, a gay man could talk about his marriage despite that gay marriage is also a political subject (and also a controversial topic in some spheres, albeit probably not the SV spheres), but he (and any employee for that matter) couldn’t advocate for or against gay marriage policy or norms.
So if people live their life having people around them using the word politics like in my phrases above they will also start using the word that way. A way that does not match up with your definitions.
> You’re confusing “controversial” with “political”.
So when you say things like the above it comes off to me as unreasonable/uncharitable. Since the people you are talking to are using a set of definitions that are relatively common in my experience.
edit: unreasonable -> unreasonable/uncharitable
---
> I’ve never heard anyone told not to talk about those things because they’re political, but I could believe they were told not to talk about them because they’re controversial.
Knowledge and understanding of a topic is required before reasoned action is taken. If you can not talk about abortion, birth control, sexual/gender discrimination, gay marriage, and more because it is controversial then we might be getting in to an area where speech is so restricted that it impedes knowledge transfer and understanding on those topics.
In order to have an informed populace then need to be exposed to things, sometime controversial. If you remove a reasonably large mechanism for that, conversation at work, it will have political consequences.
And you can research and discuss those topics outside of work.
You're not being paid to show up to work and form PACs. You're not being paid to show up to work to virtue signal about the most fashionable wedge issue of the day. You're not being paid to show up to work and sow discord by assuming moral high ground and vilifying the other side. etc., etc.
>In order to have an informed populace then need to be exposed to things, sometime controversial.
The political culture status quo at Bay Area companies is that this is an alt-right talking point.
>If you remove a reasonably large mechanism for that, conversation at work, it will have political consequences.
Conversation at work absolutely should not be a large mechanism for political discussion. It's work. If there are political consequences because workers are no longer allow to virtue signal all day, then that speaks more about their weak mental state than it does about politics.
In my experience in the USA it is common for conversations at work to be about family, kids, life experiences(good and bad), current events, etc. It is something people bond over and use to help form a common company culture.
Different companies vary what is allowed and or encouraged and experience different benefits and consequences.
> You're not being paid to show up to work and form PACs. You're not being paid to show up to work to virtue signal about the most fashionable wedge issue of the day. You're not being paid to show up to work and sow discord by assuming moral high ground and vilifying the other side. etc., etc.
I do not see anyone in this thread advocating for anything that extreme.
>>In order to have an informed populace then need to be exposed to things, sometime controversial.
> The political culture status quo at Bay Area companies is that this is an alt-right talking point.
I am not in the know about bay area culture but that does not match my limited view from the outside.
> Conversation at work absolutely should not be a large mechanism for political discussion. It's work. If there are political consequences because workers are no longer allow to virtue signal all day, then that speaks more about their weak mental state than it does about politics.
My focus on for this comment was not politic conversation in the work place but on how removing a large mechanism of knowledge and understanding transferal in the work place would have political consequences for society.
None of which are politics, so we agree.
>I do not see anyone in this thread advocating for anything that extreme.
Did you by chance not RTFA? Employees are literally planning virtual walkouts because they felt that Coinbase didn't virtue signal enough.
>I am not in the know about bay area culture but that does not match my limited view from the outside.
Your limited view is in total contrast to reality. I've lived in the Bay Area for the past 8 years, and attempting to consider outside viewpoints that may be controversial might as well make you a Nazi sympathizer. https://www.cnn.com/2017/09/14/us/berkeley-ben-shapiro-speec...
>My focus on for this comment was not politic conversation in the work place but on how removing a large mechanism of knowledge and understanding transferal in the work place would have political consequences for society.
This is a non sequitur. No one is suggesting removing knowledge transfer and communication at work. People are suggesting limiting the amount of political activism at work that's outside of the scope of what you were paid to do (the company's general mission).
I did not suggest anyone here was advocated for that in this thread. I provided examples above where people are told not to talk about, abortion, contraceptives, discrimination based on gender/sex, conversations about a gay marriage because they are "politics". Hence why some people are objecting to removing political conversations from work.
It was part of back and forth conversation with throwaway894345.
And before anyone says anything, when religion informs lawmaking, it becomes political.
Of course, I'm asking rhetorically. They know perfectly what it means and they don't like it.
To answer your question, no I don't believe "gay man talking about his wedding" will fall under what's not allowed to be discussed around a water cooler at Coinbase.
Unless you are living in a post-scarcity, post-status, post-power anarchist society, populated entirely by The New Soviet Man (or some other fictional relative thereof), everything that's meaningful is, indeed, political.
You can draw a contrast between personal politics and organizational politics. An organization can be explicit that it engages in organizational politics, but bars personal politics. That is what Coinbase is currently doing[1]. That's the CEO's, and the board's prerogative.
[1] It does, however, falsely claim that its organizational political activity is somehow apolitical. It's not.
That's like saying every conversation is about syntax and semantics.
1. Deciding that a new table is a worthwhile use of resources (vs reuse, for example)
2. Deciding who to sell it to (if it's not for your own use)
3. Deciding what to make it out of (resource cost, ethical implications of the supply chain, concern about wood glue toxicity, ...)
And so on, and so forth. You might not consciously think about these as political, but.. that's also a political opinion.
> then "it's political" has no useful meaning.
Exactly.
Which is why Coinbase is saying specifically there are politics which are central to their mission that they still must naturally engage with.
I think any engineer who has a moral quandary about the work the are doing should absolutely take it up with management, up to including whistle-blowing or resigning. Professional Engineers put their license on the line with this, mere computer engineers may not have so much at stake professionally but are equally ethically bound.
let me reverse this, and present a different scenario. You are doing your job, but you feel strongly about a certain political movement (be it BLM or abortion rights, or whatnot). You tell your boss that you are going to spend some work time to talk to other employees and may be convince them to join your cause. What should the boss do? Let you work on it without bringing up their concern? Or fire you?
If I knew that they manufactured these land mine bears before I started, I wouldn’t be there anyway.
I definitely see the point of keeping a company focused on its task, though probably we have then the same discussion with different terms.
Serving coffee is not political. Planning the network installation is not political. Code reviews, cleaning your office, optimizing the VM, getting a bandwidth deal, negotiating the SaaS pricing, choosing ingredients for the new dish, figuring out how many loads of gravel are needed for the landfill, picking a guy to fix the fence ...
It's 99% not political.
Google search is barely political, ads are a little bit.
Social Media is political and not that-that much more.
It's 100% fine for you to 'work on something consistent with your political views' but at the same time just 'pick the place' instead of 'making the place' inherently political.
In 2020, the answer that google search gives to the query "Do masks protect you from COVID" is political.
Whether or not google search even works in, say, Russia... Or Australia is political.
Could it be that it's actually not that political, it's just that these companies are filled by extremely left wing west coast people who want to make it political?
You obviously have an axe to grind against a particular political spectrum, so I will pose a more direct example that does not involve it.
Is Russia Today political? Is choosing to display it prominently in a search result political? Is choosing to display a 'this is state sponsored news' tag on it political? Is not choosing to display that tag on a link to the CBC, or NPR not a political decision?
If you don't think RT is political, I can go down the list until we find something that is. Zero hedge? QAnon? The International Council of Communism? The newsletter published by your local KKK chapter? BLM?
The reason the work of tech companies is political is because they've installed themselves as gatekeepers of political information. If they were dumb pipes, this wouldn't be an issue. They aren't, though.
Would you consider it possible I'm a liberal myself? And that my liberalismi is exactly the reason it's difficult for me to accept this sort of behavior?
Google is making everything political with its "Machine Learning Fairness" initiative. Like when you google image search "european art" or "white men".
You'd think European art was 50% black person portraits and that 50% of white men were criminals or black.
But the point I trying to make is, that "apolitical" is not the absence of political. It is a political choice. Here a definition of apolitical: "not interested or involved in politics"
> Serving coffee is not political.
Which coffee do you serve? If you don't care, you are apolitical, but you can either serve coffee with child labour or not.
> Planning the network installation is not political.
So, it will include equipment from Huawei? Or Cisco?
> Code reviews,
If someone puts in there a "joke", do you address it? Should you?
> cleaning your office, optimizing the VM,
Yeah, probably not.
> getting a bandwidth deal, negotiating the SaaS pricing, choosing ingredients for the new dish,
To which standard do you hold your suppliers? Are they subscribing to any social corporate responsibility standard? Are you? Are you trying to make a vegan dish or not? (Not that I care, I am apolitical there, but I do not think, it is not political)
> figuring out how many loads of gravel are needed for the landfill,
Probably not.
> picking a guy to fix the fence ..
Are you rejecting the guy who has a MAGA bumper on his truck?
> Google search is barely political,
Really? There was just recently a case of republicans complaining about how they are ranked. What about Google in China? Or Hong Kong?
> It's 100% fine for you to 'work on something consistent with your political views' but at the same time just 'pick the place' instead of 'making the place' inherently political.
Here I think, I can understand that you want to say, that all the points I just made, are likely to be unproductive to be discussed at the workplace. And I would agree. You may say, you are tired of hearing those issues, and I can understand.
But I would say, one doesn't make a place inherently political, it is. Being apolitical doesn't make it go away, that decisions have an impact on the public affairs of a country. In a small and intangible way probably, but so does a vote.
Choosing coffee is not child labour, bad jokes can happen anywhere, Huawei/Not Huawei is a security choice not a political one ... and for god's sakes we're picking our caprenters based in their bumpers stickers? No. I don't care what bumper stickers my carpenter has, and although I personally hate Trump, I don't care one bit that he has such a bumper sticker, and nobody else should either.
99.99% of Google content is mundane and not political.
They're not banning a lot from Google search other than really illegal stuff.
'Choosing the SaaS vendor based on price' is not just 'going with the status quo.
I get what you are trying to say, I just don't agree.
I don't even think that workplaces embracing popular social issues directly that much, what matters is addressing the social issues directly, not as a matter of populism.
Saying "our company doesn't hire black people, that doesn't seem fair, can we think about that" is 100% reasonable, but making public statements about BLM etc. is more political, less pragmatic.
For some reason it's just the west coast tech companies where information or search is political, but with traditional media it's not?
Search for "american mathematician" on Google and the first six images that come back with the search results are of black mathematicians, 3 of them women.
That is political.
Nothing wrong with female or black mathematicians, the more the better, but that's not how it went down.
If I worked at Google and they asked me to code that, I would have said, "Sure, I can do that", which would be a non-political decision, but whoever decided on how that should be implemented was making a political decision.
99.99% of searches are just searches, and that's it.
And why do they get to decide that?
If it cannot be disjoint, then it seems like it has become a requirement for it to be aligned in only one acceptable direction - hence why Coinbase's move is apparently controversial. Failure to actively support the standardized and approved message is apparently not acceptable!
> This is just one more step in that direction.
One more misstep. The combination of this effect with polarization means it's only a matter of time before someone realizes there's actually going to be a market for legitimately countercultural companies that reach out to those who don't walk the new party line. Since there's enough of them to elect a president, it's probably high time for some brave company to take you up on your suggestion that everything be political.
Money is money, and the money of a jew, nazi, gay, christian, muslim or pedophile are all equally good. Anyone rejecting money because they don't agree with where it comes from is either lying or about to be eaten alive by someone who doesn't.
There is a reason why everyone in China is trying to escape to our system, while they have invented personal money - in the form of your social score.
I'll take a shot: - I think compelled activism is inappropriate. You know, the "silence is violence" stuff. - I think expecting to have power to set a company's political agenda and expressing anger when you don't get your way is inappropriate. That power belongs to the board. Employment and stock-options are not "fractions of board seats".
i agree that employment is not "fractions of board seats. But stock options (when converted to stock) holds voting power, and thus _do_ represent "factions of board seats". Very little amount, but an amount nonetheless.
I would argue that the board wouldn’t exist without the people that make up the company. I would also argue that with monied interests and lobbyists in Washington, one of the last places that people can really effect societal change is at the work place. Companies have become the power center in American politics, so of course activism is going to rise up there.
As far as compelled activism goes, I feel that silence _is_ violence.
“The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men Do Nothing” (JFK, Burke, Mill...)
The issue comes when some people are uncomfortable with work being done and others aren’t. Those who are uncomfortable are probably going to want to have discussions about it. If I was asked to contribute to a system that put people (any people) in to cages I would refuse. But that’s precisely what ICE is doing in the USA. If such a contract came up you can bet it’s something I’d want to talk about with my coworkers!
If you’re not going to take a stand now, when will you?
When I'm not at work.
When and where I stand is my business, but "when" is definitely not when I am at work and nobody is bullying anyone.
A company operates in a political environment, whether or not people want to acknowledge that. Workers have real power and can advance their goals whether or not management wants to accept it. Politics in the workplace isn’t something to shy from, but to embrace. Any company that tries to refute politics will find themselves behind the curve on something they should very much so try to stay ahead of.
Yes you could stretch any argument to categorize anything as what you want, but I think under a reasonable interpretation of 'politicized workplace', Twitter could institute a policy of adding warnings to content it deems misinformation without politicizing its workplace.
As for workers having power, yes, but the company has the right to dictate what the worker does in their capacity as workers, if they choose to stay employed at the company.
Maintaining a mission focused company that doesn't allow employees to turn the company into a vehicle to advance a political cause unrelated to that mission is good for productivity.
I'm trying to solve for how decision making power is allocated without making assumptions about which side is right or wrong. In other words, the argument that "The company must do XYZ because this political cause is simply on the RIGHT side of history!" is not acceptable to me, even though I often personally agree that the cause really _is_ right.
I never believed the whole "change the world" SV nonsense, and always knew it was nothing more than cynical marketing. But at least in places like Google the employees who were brought on that premise, fight to achieve it, and make it real.
Coinbase is still hypocritical, and I wouldn't expect much more.
But this whole, "you are only a serf and the whole of power morally belongs to the board" reveals an unsettling feudal mentality.
I don’t think it compares, even as a hyperbole, to Coinbase employees.
It certainly is.
But I like to believe, there is an underlying reasonable philosophy behind it. Every company tries to make a difference, that is its value proposition. If your value proposition has a negative social impact, it is not a sustainable business model. Legislation will eventually render your business untenable. (Even if it takes centuries or decades like tobacco, or fossil fuel).
So, considering your social impact makes business sense.
To quote Paul Drucker:
"Responsibility for social impacts is a management responsibility — not because it is a social responsibility, but because it is a business responsibility. The ideal is to make elimination of such an impact into a business opportunity. But wherever that cannot be done, the design of the appropriate regulation with the optimal trade-off balance—and public discussion of the problem and promotion of the best regulatory solution — is management’s job."
To be involved in any and all politics is just absurd.
Even personally if you want to change something you have to have a very narrow focus. You can’t change everything.
Perhaps less Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, and more Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe:
Typically the whole discussion around overly political workplaces revolves around west coast tech companies, which are a monoculture of liberalism. Republican views are definitely not heard or dealt with.
I think people are talking past each other with the word 'political'. Some may define it as the execution of governance, and others may define it as partisan gamesmanship, and of course lots around and in between.
I get that desire, I really do, but I think it's so important to recognize that your work is not apolitical. It doesn't matter what you're building. What you build does not exist in a vacuum, and the decisions you make around politics at work are themselves political decisions.
Everything you do does affect the environment around you. For example if you take a Bahamas trip, you are paying to generate tons of CO2. If you buy a diesel car, or just driving one, you're affecting the shared air as well.
I'm nearing the point of being aggressively dismissive towards this kind of attitude, because a lot of it doesn't even seem to be laid out in good faith. People are just addicted to being mad, addicted to being right, addicted to the idea that they can channel their anger through pop politics and get validation for it as a bonus.
I have an extremely low opinion of the people and groups who follow along with whatever pop social issue is trending today because they don't want to get in trouble, and IMHO those people aren't really worth interacting with because again, it's more about landing a spicy dunk on the bad guys (tm) and collecting heart icons than whatever issue they're using as a weapon today.
>your work is not apolitical. It doesn't matter what you're building
spare me.
Who is "we"?
The majority of people here don't work for FANG
But those political decisions are ones relevant to the mission of the company.
Coinbase probably shouldn't be involved in politics around police reform, fracking, climate change or the Second Amendment because they are orthogonal to its mission. Insert other topics as you see fit.
And hence its employees should leave their opinions of such matters at the door.
Coinbase should be focused on politics around global financial regulation. And its employees should focus their workplace political energy on those matters.
Also, it's generally just polite and respectful to your coworkers to provide a non-political, non-partisan workplace.
That's a very wrong way to understand what democracy means. If you're incompetent, you are still afforded a vote. And you sleep on the bed you make.
and in any case, the incompetence voter implies that they could be voting "wrong". This is a deep and insidious implication because implying something can be wrong also implies the other "competent" voters are "right". The very notion that one side is "right" is very anti-democratic.
Is it selfish? Probably, and I'm open and proud about that.
Individualism as a political philosophy would be smth like advocating for libertarianism/adjacent stuff, etc. The apolitical stance is the apolitical stance. I do not engage in politics unless it's a minimum-effort activity like the default mail-in voting (WA). Sure, I may know approximately what the best way to organize society is, and if aliens landed and put me in charge I'd become political; but as it is, I do not care, mostly because it's not productive, but in no small part because actively caring about how to organize society is heavily correlated with being very wrong (IMHO).
It's impossible to not involve yourself in politics that effect your employee's everyday lives.
But many things in the world that should not be politicized are, in fact, politicized. Perhaps Coinbase wants to hire a more diverse bunch of people, and starts an internal initiative to do so. Perhaps they do this not out of any political motivation, but because they genuinely believe (as they should!) that having a more diverse workforce will help them make better decisions about their product.
But of course there will be some (many?) who will decry this as Coinbase "being political". You just can't win, really.
"We should hire a more diverse workforce because diversity improves our collective judgment, thereby furthering our mission" is on its face a fine subject for discussion provided you're evaluating the claim on its merits and not sneaking in overtly political implications like "we have a moral responsibility to hire diverse candidates". One could envision a fruitful, dispassionate discussion about how much return on investment the company could expect from a diversity initiative, how that ROI stacks up against other opportunities, how to measure the ROI and make sure the initiative is meeting expectations, whether or not it runs afoul of anti-discrimination law, what kind of diversity (race, gender, viewpoint, etc) is most likely to yield the highest ROI, etc.
Of course, it's prudent to stay away from these kinds of charged topics altogether because it's very likely that you have employees that will take this as an opportunity to pollute a potentially productive conversation with their overtly political opinions.
That some things are easily abused by bad-faith employees doesn't mean that we should let bad faith employees have free reign.
Are you sure this isn't just an excuse to make things political in these west coast companies that are full of young, hot-headed, extremely left wing people?
that is the rights of ownership, and is a capitalist ideal. To change it is to strip these rights from ownership and give it to those who do not currently have ownership (and is basically what communism is).
Coinbase will have to make political decisions, and it's natural that people within the company will have differing opinions -- informed by their personal politics -- as to the course those decisions should take.
[1] https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?...
Their position is pretty straightforward and sensible, even if it is not entirely straightforward to implement in an even handed way.