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Comment by yokaze | Hacker News Reader

I see it the other way around. (Almost) everything is political. The mission of the company is not disjoint from the society it is embedded in. Things have become divisive by being able to ignore and blend out the opposing views. By not talking and listening to one another.

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.

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The mission of the company isn’t completely disjoint from the broader political context, but relevance isn’t a binary proposition. If Google’s mission is to make the world’s information more accessible, and it stopped everything and put all of its efforts toward (for example) minimizing unjust police killings, how much closer to its mission would it be than if it focused on making search better (even if we assume all Google employees have exactly the same idea about how to achieve it)? I would argue that investing in search is an astronomically better investment with respect to Google’s mission. Never mind how unproductive that effort would certainly be, considering how divisive this topic has become (to be clear, the division is about whether or not unjust police killings are strongly racially biased, not whether or not unjust police killings are ideal).

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).

I think a lot of governments would be much quicker to regulate companies like Google and Facebook if they weren't also fighting for these political issues. At the end of the day, these political stances help further the companies original mission.

This comment doesn't make much sense to me. I'm not sure if you're talking about political stances that are meaningfully related to the company's mission, and in either case how that would affect governments' willingness to regulate those companies. Are you simply arguing that governments would be more willing to regulate Google if Google didn't spend so much lobbying against regulation? In that case, obviously (this is pretty much tautologically true), but how does that relate to what we're discussing? If we're talking about political stances like "police shootings are unjustly biased against black people", then that's about as unrelated to Google's mission as one could imagine. It seems like mental gymnastics either way.

The parent comment is talking about how it is politically dangerous to be seen attempting to regulate companies that virtue signal.

I certainly agree that the mission of a company can (and preferably) be more than just for profit. However, "to be political" is still a pretty wide range of possible missions. Who calls the shots about what you're going to be political about, and which side you take? And when a group of employees disagree with the shots being called, what kinds of reactions are appropriate or not?

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".

Companies that have a mission "to change the world" attract employees on the basis of activisism in the world. Heck this company is trying to overhaul the entire monetary system. If succeeded this will effect the lives of billions of people. Recruiting people with this premise, and then telling them actually, you don't have any say in what the company actually does, and the ways it changes the world, that actually it was all a joke, and so just shut up and do what the board says because they own all the power and rights is pretty disappointing.

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.

Serfs are (were) bound to their feudal overlord. Their children were bound as well. They couldn’t quit. They’ve had no political power. In many places they were even denied access to courts — they were forced to arbitrage through their lord. There was nothing they could do to improve their or their children’s lives.

I don’t think it compares, even as a hyperbole, to Coinbase employees.

> I never believed the whole "change the world" SV nonsense, and always knew it was nothing more than cynical marketing.

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."

Actually in his original statement he said that they will be involved in politics that helps their mission.

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.

It would be entirely possible to 'change the world' just by transforming the monetary system though, would it not? Yes, that is in itself a goal with political undercurrents and ultimately would clearly involve political decisions, but they are not at that stage yet and therefore I think it's quite reasonable to want to stay apolitical, where possible.

They never said "make the world better" only "change the world". This wasn't a mistake.

> 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.

Stock options are mostly for common stock, which don't give you voting power anyways.

Generally common stock has voting power.

I’ll take a shot at responding:

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...)

It's the framing of everything in good vs evil, monochromatic terms that actually increases divisiveness and prevents deescalation of conflict. Forcing people to take one's side or else "be on the wrong side" in a multifaceted environment is not appropriate for a workplace, where people expect to be able to set aside differences to work together on work itself.

I agree. But that's not a problem inherent in bringing political issues to the work place. This is a whole different problem which exists regardless of the work place. It's the zeitgeist, it's the result of attention economy, and massive social media.

I mean it’s absolutely appropriate to take a side on certain issues. I've always refused to work on military hardware for example. If my employer started working on military hardware, I’d refuse to contribute and I would try to encourage others to refuse as well. But actually we all have things we would refuse to do. Usually it’s not an issue because both management and the workers feel the same way. Most people wouldn’t want to create a product designed to murder people for example.

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!

The situation with Coinbase is the opposite of what you describe. Coinbase isn't moving into new territory that its employees find objectionable, e.g. by starting to develop crypto for the military. The activists at Coinbase are angry because the company isn't moving into their demanded new territory.

Millions of Americans are unemployed, hundreds of thousands are dying from a pandemic, tens of thousands are in lines at food banks, there are children in cages, women being given forced hysterectomies, and there are literally neo-Nazis that the President refuses to disavow.

If you’re not going to take a stand now, when will you?

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.

So what about Twitter flagging Trump’s tweets? Do you think that happened without a politicised workplace discussion? With the amount of power that tech wields over society these discussions _have_ to happen.

That doesn't require a politicized workplace. Only a mission-focused one. One of Twitter's mission could very conceivably be to attach warnings to misinformation, irrespective of what political agenda it is intended to advance.

An argument could be made that this mission is politicising freedom of speech, in that a tech company is now determining what is misinformation and what is not. This very topic was a point of contention in the congressional antitrust hearings.

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.

I don't see how a tech company being the final arbiter on what is deemed misinformation on its own platform is politicizing free speech.

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 am operating on an underlying principle that others may not share, but this could help elucidate why I disagree with many fellow liberals on this front:

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 tend to treat politics and religion as subjects best dealt with on my own time. The company is paying me to get results for the company, not the larger society. If I somehow disagree with the perceived politics, I’m free to seek other employment. Implicit in this position is that the company doesn’t get to dictate either politics or religion handled in my personal time.

So if you have a job you like, at a company that up to now has been only making products that you have no problem with, and they started working on something that you found morally reprehensible and assigned you to work on it, either you would work on it without bringing up your concerns or you would quit?

The problem is almost never an issue of the ethical nature of the company's own product or service. The "politicization" problem is largely around social activism that is adjacent to the company's mission.

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.

> you would work on it without bringing up your concerns or you would quit?

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?

Well, in my case, that situation would never arise (see previous comments). But, if I were the boss, I would advise the employee to either do that on their own time, or seek other employment. Again, I believe strongly that a work environment is not the place for personal politics or religion, unless that is the purpose of the business (the one concession I’ll make).

If I worked for a toy maker who suddenly decided to make land mines disguised as teddy bears, then I would absolutely have to quit, if we were in a disagreement over why this should happen.

If I knew that they manufactured these land mine bears before I started, I wouldn’t be there anyway.

Except that isn't what's happening at Coinbase. Coinbase is still making the same product it made six months ago. It's the activists who want Coinbase to start working on something else.

I think the relevant distinction that Brian makes is not "political vs not-political" but "relevant or not relevant to the business". It seems they are comfortable engaging on political issues that are directly related to what they are doing. For example, affirmative action is arguably a political topic, but it would be on the table for discussion at Coinbase because it's relevant to how they hire.

With that, I can more easily agree. I am then not sure how it devolved (in my opinion) into being "apolitical".

I definitely see the point of keeping a company focused on its task, though probably we have then the same discussion with different terms.

Not, as a company, taking a stance on Trump v Biden would probably be an example of being apolitical.

" (Almost) everything is political. "

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.

> Google search is barely political

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.

> Google search is barely political

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.

Yes, it's political but in the grand scheme of searches, it's almost irrelevant.

99.99% of searches are just searches, and that's it.

Who gets to decide what is a political search and what isn't?

And why do they get to decide that?

What I understand from what you are saying, and with what I can agree is, that not everything you do, has to be or should be a political statement.

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.

You're reaching too hard.

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.

What's funny is that traditional media has just as much issues with misinformation and bias, yet the whole discussion around how content related to the election might not be straight and honest revolves completely around tech companies.

For some reason it's just the west coast tech companies where information or search is political, but with traditional media it's not?

> Google search is barely 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.

Don't newspapers report on masks? Are they political as well? Doesn't TV? Why is all the politics revolving around these west coast tech companies?

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?

Of course newspapers are political. I don't understand how this is even a point you're confused about, unless you believe in a truly extreme form of cultural relativism.

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.

You didn't actually consider the fact that I might have an axe to grind towards everyone who makes the workplace political, and toxic by alienating people with minority view points?

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?

You only have so much time, money, energy and attention, and they are choosing that they do not want to actively spend that energy on active activism as a company outside of their company mission.

> (Almost) everything is political.

Only in a world where words have no meaning.

What meaning are you using then? Even the most basic dictionary definition of "politics" is something like "all the activities involved in determining the policies and actions of an organization or government."

If everything is political, including building a table ("because people can sit at a table") or breathing ("it's literally a life and death situation"), then "it's political" has no useful meaning. If a descriptive term doesn't serve as a means of distinguishing things, it's not a descriptive term.

Building a table does imply a bunch of politically charged decisions:

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.

And everything determines the policies and actions of an organization or government?

That's like saying every conversation is about syntax and semantics.

In this conversation I think it is fairly clear we're talking about government politics. And I would say the majority of things you do in your life do not (and should not) involve government politics. Obviously "apolitical" in this context does not mean Coinbase will lack "office politics".

That's an uncharitably pedantic way of looking at it. I think the parent meant that (almost) every endeavor will have some element of politics in it. That doesn't mean the word "politics" has no meaning.

> I think the parent meant that (almost) every endeavor will have some element of politics in it

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).

Gay marriage is a divisive topic in the USA. A gay man talking about his wedding around the water cooler is political. A straight man talking about his wedding around the water cooler is not political. The only non-political choice is not allowing either to occur. Because if you allow both, that is a political statement. If you only allow one, that is too.

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.

> Gay marriage is a divisive topic in the USA. A gay man talking about his wedding around the water cooler is political. A straight man talking about his wedding around the water cooler is not political.

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.

While that's true now, it wasn't true 10 (or even 5 in some places) years ago. It's arguably not even true in some places today. Just this week, the Supreme Court denied cert on a lawsuit about same sex marriage (Kim Davis).

You’re confusing “controversial” with “political”. Someone’s marriage may be controversial to someone, but talking about it isn’t political (at least not in the sense we’re discussing here). It becomes political when someone is arguing for or against gay marriage.

Seems like a reasonable interpretation in my experience. I have definitely seen people told not to talk about what you might call controversial because it is political.

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’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.

It is possible for a subject to be both political and controversial.

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.

> It is possible for a subject to be both political and controversial

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.

The phases I use in my response above explicitly often explicitly use the word politics. The people saying that are not being narrow with their definitions like you are here.

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.

>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.

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.

> And you can research and discuss those topics outside of work.

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.

>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.

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).

> 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 that is in itself a political act.

Being open about something that can land you in jail in some countries is taking a political stand. If I am an Atheist and I keep that to myself, I can travel to places I wouldn't be able to safely go if I were open about my religion.

And before anyone says anything, when religion informs lawmaking, it becomes political.

Ah, another "everything is political" argument. Strangely, the "everything is political" crowd seems the most concerned with Coinbase's no-politics stance. It's as if they fear the policy will have a real impact. But shouldn't they know better? After all, the policy doesn't even make sense since everything is 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.

> A gay man talking about his wedding around the water cooler is 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.

That's an uncharitable way of looking at it.

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.

Politics is the process of determining the allocation and distribution of scarce resources, status, and power.

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.

Missions are often in pursuit of political goals. (It's a political stance that promoting the use of cryptocurrency is good, and not one I share.)

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.

But that's not what is being addressed. Not getting involved in "every hot-button political issue" is clearly advisable, but Coinbase is preemptively deciding that all political conversation is off the table while they run a highly unregulated multi-billion dollar currency exchange.

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.

This has been explicitly contradicted by several of their communications, including the one which launched this thread.

Coinbase is far from unregulated, they're subject to and enforce the same KYC rules that banks do, go ahead and try to buy some BTC there anonymously and see how far you get.

Exactly: Being "apolitical" is a political decision. In this case: Don't question what we are doing (in the larger picture) or what our impact is.

If everything is political, then nothing is.

One's preferred flavor of ice cream is apolitical. But anything that involves more than one person, and actual or potential conflicts between people, is political. Status quo, as a whole, is political.

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.

I don't think your comment is entirely true. For example I think a lot of purchases of the Bernie Sanders flavored ice cream from Ben & Jerry's had nothing to do with the actual taste of the ice cream.

That's like saying that if everything is physical, then nothing is. "Everything," by which we mean many things, is political in the sense that it has political aspects that should be recognised, but those aspects are very different from one thing to another. Political means pertaining to the distribution of power and resources in a society. But what kind of power/resources, which society and what form of distribution vary greatly. That many things have a colour doesn't mean the concept of colour is meaningless, nor that it draws its meaning from things that don't have a colour, because colour is an aspect with many hues. In short, "everything is political" means learning to look at the political aspects of things. The goal is not to distinguish between the political and apolitical, but between the many different shades of the political.

"Everything is political" is literally the working definition of totalitarianism.

> "Everything is political" is literally the working definition of totalitarianism.

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.)

Certainly not, because the question of whether a government ought to be involved in some interaction is, clearly, a political question, and asking that question is clearly not equivalent to saying that the government ought to be involved in all interactions.

>and asking that question is clearly not equivalent to saying that the government ought to be involved in all interactions.

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.

I didn’t say “putting everything up for grabs for state control.”

Saying "everything is political" is putting everything up for grabs for state (or mob) control whether you said it aloud or not. Doesn't matter if it's a tyranny by some generalissimo or amorphous mob of twitter gibbering nitwits or tiki torch bearing numskulls.

If "everything is political" there is no room for private life, which is the only life that matters.

No, as I said, the statement "the government should not be involved in your private life" is very clearly a political statement, because it relates (directly!) to the policies and actions of the government. And that is, of course, the opposite of totalitarianism.

Could you clarify what you mean by this?

If you define “political” in such a way that nothing can be “apolitical” then the word “political” completely loses its meaning. The whole point of any adjective is to distinguish between things. It’s a tautology.

one can also think of what it means if almost everything is unique, or almost everyone is smart, etc.

> 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.

Perhaps less Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, and more Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe:

https://craphound.com/category/est/

> The mission of the company is not disjoint from the society it is embedded in.

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.

You can make a connection between the work you do and society at large without getting into unproductive arguments on company time. Think that sort of thing has value? That's fine: do it outside of the time the company carves out for you to perform your normal duties.

Activists never planned to try to talk and listen and went too far in this direction. If it keeps going, at some point it becomes untenable and needs to stop. It's not business' job to teach activists how to live, they must figure it out by themselves.

> (Almost) everything is political.

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.

Do you have an example where in a political company both views were heard?

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.

>(Almost) everything is political.

I'm curious what your definition of political is, because my gut feeling is that (Almost) nothing is political.

From entering "define political" in Google:

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.

It's safe to say that a company can impact the public affairs of a country by creating economic value without taking an official speculative stance on e.g. the racial distribution of unjust police killings. It's pretty obvious to me when people talk about "leaving political topics out of the workplace" they mean "topics which are unrelated to one's work".

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).

Even deciding what is political or not is political. If you try to limit the definition to something putatively objective like "directly relating to the function of government agencies" a great many topics are immediately ambiguous: institutionalized racism? marriage? the environment? the economy?

> Even deciding what is political or not is political

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.

That's totally fair, I hadn't considered it from that perspective. In my mind politics are things like the tax rate. So a social issue could never be political.

To me, "everything is political" is a bumper sticker version of the assertion that what is and isn't "political" in the sense of "political statement" is often way more subjective than we sometimes recognize it is.

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?)

To me, the deciding criteria is the intent of the person undertaking said action. Are they taking an action to express their allegiance to a political movement? Are they taking action to attempt to convince/recruit people to a cause they believe in?

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?

That seems like it'd be a tough standard to apply in practice -- how do you prove intent?

Do you believe end to end encryption is political? Do you believe that companies should disable E2E encryption in order to be "apolitical" in the eyes US's attorney general?

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 you're deliberately avoiding the point that coinbase wants to make - which is that if the topic is relevant to the business (as determined by the owners of the business), then it's considered on-topic for work place political discussion and activism.

But if it's unrelated to the business, then the business is no place to undertake such activism.

> I'm curious what your definition of political is, because my gut feeling is that (Almost) nothing is political.

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.

This does seem to be the standard Libertarian worldview, but no matter how much you intend to ignore the world around you, it exists and you're a part of it, and you answer to your neighbors.

> This does seem to be the standard Libertarian worldview, but no matter how much you intend to ignore the world around you, it exists and you're a part of it, and you answer to your neighbors.

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.

The opposite strategy is to talk about politics constantly, so that it's painfully obvious who's in the minority.

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?

> The opposite strategy is to talk about politics constantly, so that it's painfully obvious who's in the minority.

> 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.

The objection you and others are making to TFA is that you can't choose to be apolitical, because everything is political. Your contribution is to propose that people might claim things are apolitical to prevent people from realizing the truth about how political they actually are.

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/!"

> The objection you and others are making to TFA is that you can't choose to be apolitical, because everything is political. Your contribution is to propose that people might claim things are apolitical to prevent people from realizing the truth about how political they actually are.

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.

>you answer to your neighbors

Fundamentally, this is our disagreement.

That's like not agreeing that water is wet

HTTPS is political (see attorney general of united states). Do you use HTTPS on your websites? (a step against the U.S. government position) Have you turned HTTPS off in your browser? (a step towards the U.S. government position) Do you implement forward perfect secrecy for HTTPS connections? (more against U.S. government position) How do you weigh it's threat to national security against it's protection from criminals for individuals and companies?

All of these actions can be viewed as political statements. Everything is political.

The DOJ just today announced that they are drafting new regulations on Cryptocurrency markets.

Coinbase is intrinsically political. They're a financial institution. Their product is subject to both laws and public scrutiny.

Absolutely, which is why their apolitical stance is absurd.

How should I properly demonstrate my wokeness while pooping? What about when I'm walking my dog? If everything is political I don't want to be seen as one of those complicit through silence while doing the dishes types of people.

If I could separate myself from certain segments of our society and never have to deal with them ever again, I'd gladly do that. However I don't keep my fingers crossed. They are too dependent on my money to implement their policies, I doubt they will ever leave productive members alone

The only people who could think that are people who do not have to deal with people different to them in their daily life at all. Having three shades of skin tone on software developers that all went to Stanford does not count for your difference quota.

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.

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