I (and many others) are of the opinion that you can’t truly be apolitical; claiming to be so is its own form of politics (and generally one that supports the status quo).

Politics is ultimately about how we engage and collaborate with each other as a society, not just which “party” you like. The very act of being a company is very relative to the laws and regulations your country has, which are of course determined by politics.

Coinbase is specifically a company about cryptocurrency. Crypto is directly related to a how governments manage their own currency, the right to privacy, law circumvention (see Alpha Bay), and so on. How can they truly be neutral on all of these issues that are directly relevant to the business they do?

> you can’t truly be apolitical;

that's one of those "you're either with us or against us" type of deal - which is not the right way to deal with anything imho.

You _can_ be apolitical - as in, you do not let your political views affect what you do. You keep your political views private. You do not try to change anyone else's political views as part of your job.

> that's one of those "you're either with us or against us" type of deal - which is not the right way to deal with anything imho.

I think it's more like saying you can't truly be unbiased. Try as you might, it's arguably impossible to truly be unbiased when making decisions an interacting with people. Journalists try their best, by presenting "just the facts" but even that is tough as which facts you chase down and which you deem important is colored by your biases. The flavor of words you write is also thus colored. I know they go through lots of training to account for this, and the truly great journalists we know of are mostly those that achieved some measure of success here, thus earning the respect of their peers and those that they interview.

So, you can try to be apolitical, but it's perhaps one of those impossible goals, because our political views are a form of bias, and if highly trained journalists still have trouble with this, everyone else will as well.

Companies are change agents, even if it's just to get people to use their product over somebody else's. But in Coinbase's case, it's more than that. They're trying to change the way the world exchanges goods and money. That would be a big change to how we all live, and thus it touches on politics in many places. As far as Coinbase is concerned, this makes sense. Many people are finding that just "having a job to collect a paycheck" is not fulfilling enough. They want to change the world as part of their jobs too. So they find jobs that align with their views. Awesome for them.

> I think it's more like saying you can't truly be unbiased. Try as you might, it's arguably impossible to truly be unbiased when making decisions an interacting with people.

That's the point of blinding yourself to the people you interact with, isn't it? If you pick and choose who to do business with, I agree. If you have a website where people buy things that get mailed to them, there is no biased decision making.

> if highly trained journalists still have trouble with this, everyone else will as well

Not sure about this bit. Journalists today (at least for Europe) tend to be politically active first, journalists second. They view their role as educators of the masses, not information presenter, that is, to explain to their audience, why they should believe whatever the journalist believes, not provide facts to their audience and let them decide. I don't see a lot of evidence for individual journalists and even less so companies trying to be neutral.

I understand the argument to be more that, if you don't actively fighting for whatever you believe should be the way society operates, then you're implicitly actively fighting for whatever way it currently operates. I don't agree with that at all. It would include that a doctor who saves a person's life without checking whether they are for or against some issue would be considered putting their weight on one side of the issue. They're not, they are doing their job and saving a life.

> Not sure about this bit. Journalists today (at least for Europe) tend to be politically active first, journalists second.

Then that is pretty sad. But, not surprising, and it's often the same way across the pond. Take a look at the Journalism Code of Ethics [0] and see if your news sources abide by it. This is what I hold my reporters accountable to, as much as I can.

Needless to say, I disagree that what you describe should be considered OK and normal.

> It would include that a doctor who saves a person's life without checking whether they are for or against some issue would be considered putting their weight on one side of the issue. They're not, they are doing their job and saving a life.

Agreed. But, have you thought about why the Hippocratic Oath exists in the first place? The very point of it is to force doctors to consider all lives equal and, to the best of their ability, ignore their personal beliefs and do their job. It's literally trying to prevent people from following their base instincts. Very similar to the Journalism Ethics, in a way. That said, it's not perfect; there are many studies showing that, statistically, minorities have higher rates of mortality and other adverse effects in hospitals. That's not causation, but it does point to some potential troubling behaviors.

Anyway, I digress. Not all jobs are considered equal, which should be obvious. If you only want to save the lives of your favorite political party, you should really not become a doctor. Or you will hopefully be found and reported by other doctors / law enforcement and rightly put in prison. Programmers, for better or worse, do not have the same issues.

[0] https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp

> Programmers, for better or worse, do not have the same issues.

I think they do, and we generally expect everyone to behave that way, but we're making it very explicit for doctors and lawyers and some other professions. Of course, it's not as immediate when you're dealing with programmers, but viewing the economy not as a total war with temporary alliances between buyers and sellers but as a way to get things done with the market place being the most efficient way to do so (which, I believe, is the more appropriate way, and it's also the way we look at it from the nation state perspective which will happily disable the market place in times of war or catastrophic events), discriminating with regards to politics when selling your services is throwing sand in the machine.

It's not outlawed for many professions (but usually is once you have a monopoly in some location), but it's neither wide-spread, nor encouraged or accepted, I believe.

IMHO it's job-dependent.

For example, can you be a gun shop owner without being pro-gun? Some would say actions speak louder than words.

On the other hand, if you own a bakery being apolitical is a lot simpler. Avoid the Masterpiece Cakeshop case and there's as little politics as you'll find anywhere.

It's funny you bring up bakeries. In 1905, the Supreme Court ruled that a NY law limiting daily working hours for bakers was unconstitutional under the 14th amendment (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lochner_v._New_York). The point of the law was to keep overworked and tired bakers from making a mistake and blowing the place up (aerated flour is quite the accelerant). This ruling began the era of the Lochner court during which many of the labor protections we take for granted like child-labor laws and overtime protection were struck down under the 14th. Fortunately, we have since pivoted, but that bakery owner's seemingly benign decision to work his employees a bit harder had massive political ramifications for years.

It's not as easy as one thinks to just steer clear of politics. Just about everything has an impact.

The announcement from Coinbase specifically says that issues concerning working conditions are in bounds:

> Of course, employees should always feel free to advocate around issues of pay, conditions of employment, or violations of law, for instance. Hopefully the above sets some clear guidelines.

One might make the argument for related vs unrelated politics. (Though the line between what's related and unrelated is fairly subjective)

A bakery is obviously going to have an interest in politics directly related to operating a bakery and the employment laws affecting it. A bakery might reasonably avoid political stances on something unrelated, such as nuclear power, foreign conflicts, etc.

This is a bit off topic from the original discussion, but I think you definitely can be a gun shop owner and be against guns at the same time, albeit still in a political sense. Having a gun shop provides you with the best possible venue for educating your customers about guns "from the inside", hence being able to push your agenda in the long term.

That being said, running a gun shop is definitely a political statement. I guess you could control what you sell as well, like "I only sell hunting rifles - for hunting" and refusing to sell hand guns or automatic rifles. Sorry for the example of guns, I'm swedish and have no insight in what is commonplace in US gun stores.

But owning a gun shop would by its very nature makes you pro-gun from a conflict of interest standpoint. Your very livelihood would require that the laws stay lax. It might even require that you actively advocate against any proposed legislation that might damage your business. To remain apolitical or even anti-gun would be failing your duties to your family, employees, and shareholders (if you have any) to grow and sustain the business and keep them fed, housed, employed, and paid.

> But owning a gun shop would by its very nature makes you pro-gun from a conflict of interest standpoint.

No it most certainly doesn't. A person can hold the opinion that many people can engage in some activity responsibly, while not everyone can.

Being a gun store owner that favors regulation on the ownership of guns is not all that different from a beer brewer that favors regulation of drinking age or laws against operating vehicles while inebriated.

Ignoring morality for a moment, there's a business argument in there too. A bunch of drunk hooligans causing car accidents is bad for business. Anyone in the business of dealing in "harmful" products is aware of potential public backlash from irresponsible people and will seek to mitigate that in some form.

Sure, I suppose our disconnect comes from two things: 1. The laws I imagined when I was drafting my comment were more akin to taking away guns completely, not something like more stringent background checks or cool down periods. That was my mistake 2. I personally believe the dollar has more political power than any vote by way of directly enabling or disabling the ability to act in any manner. In that regard, I feel that businesses are political in, for example, the supply chain activities (environmental impact, labor practices, etc) that they choose to fund. Merely by existing and directing money towards real world consequences, a business is political.

“Hunting” rifles and semi-automatic rifles that are erroneously referred to as “assault rifles” are functionally the same. Almost nowhere can you readily buy automatic rifles.

Not to dive too far into the politics or semantics of this, but I feel like OP meant "hunting" rifles to mean "bolt-action" or "single-shot" type rifles.

Also, OP didn't actually say anything about semi-automatic rifles, at all. So it's really a nothing statement to make that distinction; I guess I took the bait, though.

For most people, the debate about "assault rifles" seems to be a misunderstanding about the language being used by the other side. For people who label semi-automatic rifles as "assault rifles", they think of hunting rifles as small capacity, bolt-action rifles. Whereas folks like you do not make that distinction.

It's so weird to see that conversation play out, and realize that neither side understands the most basic definitions of the other. It's super common in gun debates. And very, genuinely strange.

> It's so weird to see that conversation play out, and realize that neither side understands the most basic definitions of the other. It's super common in gun debates. And very, genuinely strange.

it's not symmetrical that way. the way gun control advocates use "assault rifle" is usually pretty vague. I have friends who would call a semi-automatic MP5 an "assault rifle". to a gun enthusiast, an "assault rifle" is a specific type of gun that is quite difficult to legally own as a civilian. I suspect 2A folks understand what the other side means by "assault rifle" (as well as they do themselves, at least), but choose not to give it the dignity of acknowledgement.

the inverse occurs in discussions about racism. the left uses "racism" to mean "power + prejudice", while the right understands it simply as "discrimination on the basis of race". folks on the right don't necessarily understand through context which definition is being used (if they're even aware of the "power + prejudice" definition). folks on the left absolutely understand the source of confusion, but pretend they don't to leave their interlocutors looking stupid.

in both cases, you essentially have one side mocking the other for not having done their homework. not unfair imo, but probably not the most productive way to have the discussion.

To be honest, in the second case I refuse to acknowledge because it is newspeak: redefinition of words to mean whatever benefits the party now. (it has been a few years since I read 1984, but I think I remember this correctly.)

It is immediately clear even as a foreigner what racism really means and whoever tries to redefine it as a general slur deserves to be called out for it, just in the same way as they try to redefine assault rifle to mean any scary looking gun.

That said, have my vote: you seem reasonable.

I can see why you would feel that way, but I don't think it's malicious usually.

the way I look at it is the "power + privilege" definition comes from "racism" as an academic term of art, a meaning that everyone engaged in a certain kind of study/research agrees on. a comparable example from CS would be "syntax" vs "semantics". when people scold someone for arguing over semantics, they mean something more similar to the CS definition of "syntax". if you, a CS person, interpret them using the CS definition of "semantics", it would sound quite ridiculous. I often see left-leaning people (esp college educated) using certain words with their academic meanings. they're not being deliberately misleading, but they don't always do a good job of handling the confusion that ensues when addressing a broader audience.

Lots of hunting rifles have an internal magazine with a smallish fixed capacity.

That's functionally quite different from a rifle with easily swapped external magazines with high capacity.

Chambering also matters a little bit. Weapons with a military lineage tend to have smaller rounds than rifles for big game. The smaller rounds make it easier to pack large amounts of ammunition and reduce fatigue.

Of course assault rifle is a meaningless term, but that's a result of many efforts to warp the discourse and not because the weapons used for war are literally the same as a weapon that is sufficient for hunting.

Assault rifles are marketed as "sporting" rifles by their manufacturers. My rifle doesn't accept detachable magazines which is one of the features of assault/sporting rifles.

>For example, can you be a gun shop owner without being pro-gun

What do you mean "pro-gun"?

You're fundamentally trying to reduce something that's a range to a binary and you're gonna lose a lot of accuracy doing that.

There's lots of gun shops owned by fudds who support various things from the "anti gun" wish list. Just by virtue of being older the "people who own gun shops" demographic is likely less extreme on the pro-gun spectrum than the average person on the pro-gun spectrum.

Obviously this is gonna generalize pretty well to other issues. Anyone running an abortion clinic is gonna be pro-life to some extend but selling the service doesn't necessarily mean they're at the super extreme end of it.

> For example, can you be a gun shop owner without being pro-gun? Some would say actions speak louder than words.

That's a false dichotomy. There are multiple stances on guns besides "guns should be completely unregulated" and "civilians shouldn't be allowed to own guns".

Working at a gun shop is, for example, very compatible with the notion that people should be subject to buying background checks before being able to buy a gun. After all, it's the brick-and-mortar gun shops who have to abide by background checks; the more these shops dominate the market, the smaller the market will be for gun shows where such background checks aren't required.

You're repeating a common misunderstanding about gun shows here which is that there are different rules for gun shows. There aren't. All licensed firearms sellers, i.e. all the people with booths, must do all the same background checks they would when selling from their stores. Meanwhile, all the non-gun-dealers (i.e. attendees) follow the same rules they would any other time of the year, which is that private-party transactions don't require background checks in some states. But that would be the same as if they sold a gun on Facebook or whatever. The dealers at the gun show are all doing the background checks as required by federal law (and additionally many states have more checks and/or waiting periods that also must be obeyed).

Fair enough, and thanks for the correction.

In any case, working for an actual gun dealer is still compatible with a stance of "I support universal background checks and closing the private-seller loophole", which is still a form of gun control and a departure from the status quo.

I don't know what political issues affect bakeries today, but infamously, being any sort of consumer business in the US (particularly in the South) in the 1950s and 1960s was extremely political.

I'm not one of them myself, but I know people who would argue that the ubiquity of sugary foods in our diets is a bigger net negative to society than guns.

It's an easy case to make:

Causes of death (U.S., approx., annually) strongly related to metabolic health which is strongly affected by diet:

Heart disease: 635k, Cancer: 598k, Stroke: 142k, Alzheimer's: 116k, Kidney disease: 50k

Causes of death related to guns:

Suicide: 21k, Homicide: 11k, Accident/Negligence: 500

I don't totally disagree, but you have to go a little further to really make the point. excess sugar seems to cause more deaths than guns, but how many years does it take off of people's lifespan? a poor diet killing someone at 65 instead of 78 is not quite as bad as a healthy 20yo being shot dead in an instant. to go even further, what's the cumulative impact to quality of life, even if one does live to a ripe old age?

A counterexample is mysql: its licensing scheme combines both proprietary and copyleft ideas.

Mormons can own liquor stores but generally Mormons are thought of as being against alcohol.

It's only possible to believe this if you are in a majority with a majority opinion. If this was 60 years ago, during Jim Crow, is the apolitical thing for a company to do when it comes to their workers? Were companies in the right to have separate bathrooms, to hire less or no minorities so that they didn't have to maintain separate facilities? Saying those acts are ok is a political opinion endorsing Jim Crow simply because it was the law.

The entire mission of a company doesn't have to be front and center in politics but there is no such thing as being apolitical for any company interacting with the world in a meaningful way

Coinbase is an exchange for people to access cryptocurrency. The gradual adoption of cryptocurrencies weakens central governments’ currencies. Their entire business is by nature, political.

Libertarian.

Yes but it is also subject to the powers of the market. As lonng as they don't use lobbying to give their product an unfair advantage, it's (literally) people paying with their wallets.

If you think that the market is a apolitical I have some socialists who'd like a chat...

> not let your political views affect what you do

That's a political stance. As long as you're part of society, you'll always have a political stance. That's what the other commentor was getting at.

Why would you ever want your views to not influence what you do? If not yours, whose perception would you use to inform what you do? And why would you want to keep your views private?

If you think that your views are so inappropriate or unimportant that you can't share them, that's a view in of itself and that's what people will see.

> You do not try to change anyone else's political views as part of your job

Whether you should try to actively change someone's view is a big question. It's a very different question than whether or not you should have/share your worldview. Whether you like it or not, your views are what they are because of others sharing theirs (explicitly or implicitly).

> It's a very different question than whether or not you should have/share your worldview.

the very act of sharing your view (implying it's unsolicited) is trying to change someone else. Let me use as an obnoxious example: vegans trying to sell the idea of veganism to non-vegans.

The view you just described is active support for the status quo.

One fairly non-controversial part of the status quo right now is our dependence on fossil fuels and co2 emissions to keep our economy running.

Saying "I'll keep my views private" means I'm giving an okay to what's happening now. If every individual shares the thinking at every company then it is impossible to even imagine how the most catastrophic climate change can be avoided.

Beyond even this example, it's is politically naive to believe there is some "normal". The status quo today is the politics of the current dominant power (which is largely market forces). Agreeing to be "apolitical" is actively support of this system. Your view is the one that is strongly "with us or against us" in that any opinion other than the dominant political ideology is supposed to be silenced at work.

"Just do you job and don't voice contrary opinions" is a pretty radical political opinion if you ask me, so your definition of "apolitical" is only "A"-political because you are so intensely in opposition to non-status quo beliefs that you disregard them completely.

Being apolitical at work is not active support for the status quo. It’s simply not using your role as an employee for your company as a vehicle to advance your political agenda. An agenda which is most likely irrelevant to the mission of your company.

You can be apolitical at work while still opposing the so called status quo with your vote. Or you can oppose the status quo in an explicitly political organization outside of your job.

> your political agenda

And the alternative is the company's political agenda. So you are saying we must all, 8+ hours a day, support our employers political agenda, and then in the time remaining we can try to counteract that a bit.

If you think political action begins and ends at the vote then you have a lot to learn about the nature of politics in practice.

> we must all, 8+ hours a day, support our employers political agenda

Isn't this the whole point of work? Exchanging your own preferences and time for money?

> in the time remaining we can try to counteract that a bit

Ideally you wouldn't be working for a company who is diametrically opposed to your own beliefs. This is why I will never work for Facebook.

> Isn't this the whole point of work? Exchanging your own preferences and time for money?

In our current economic system, yes for some people; but less so for some individuals, and again even less in economies with UBI.

A founder, for instance, is often not looking to trade preferences but instead to actually make an impact on the world while sharing in the profit of that impact. This is different than just trading things away: you are collaborating actively. Of course, that’s currently mostly available for small groups such as founders and small-business owners.

And you may note that… all of this has political ramifications :) Small business owners are heavily impacted by political regulation; the ability of workers to organize and take a joint ownership over their work is governed by laws too.

None of this exists in a vacuum. We are who we are because of who we all are, and we do what we do because of what we all do. That’s political. Some people just want others to be passive.

You aren’t being paid to promote your political agenda, you are being paid to perform your function as an employee. If you don’t support your company’s agenda, why would you work there?

While we're focused on the purely "Political" agenda in this conversation, politics of a company include anything from how on-calls work to how sick days are counted.

You can work at a company and advocate for changing things and it can be as comparatively small as ensuring on-call rotations are fair to ensuring the company voices support for and takes actions in line with supporting Black Lives Matter. These are all political in the spirit described up thread as saying that politics is the figuring out and deciding of these issues as a group.

The decision of how many sick days, etc. is relevant to the business of the company. Social justice movements like “black lives matter” are not relevant to the mission of companies like Coinbase, as determined by their leadership.

> Social justice movements like “black lives matter” are not relevant to the mission of companies like Coinbase

That's the whole issue, and you're just affirming the consequent by saying this. Structural equality is unavoidably the concern of every person and group in a society.

> Structural equality is unavoidably the concern of every person and group in a society.

Inspiring but simply false

Ah yes good point - it’s of concern to every FAIR MINDED member of the group.

Lest we forget, there are many people who support the structural inequality.

> it’s of concern to every FAIR MINDED member of the group.

Also false. Many fair minded people simply don’t have time to concern themselves with politics.

Not to mention that in many cases political actors who justify their actions on the premise of “structural inequality” end up reducing fairness.

Not having the time to concern yourself with politics isn't a position of neutrality or agnosticism. You can only adopt that position if the status quo of a society provides you sufficient protection, stability, prosperity, etc. to allow you to tune it out. If those conditions aren't true, it's not possible to "not concern yourself with politics" in a Maslow's hierarchy sense. And so doing so is unavoidably a tacit defense of the status quo.

Also false, many people who you would claim are affected by “structural inequality” and who are more focused with improving their individual conditions also do not have time to concern themselves with politics.

Example is myself. I am a child of poor immigrants. I am neither white nor wealthy. I do not care about involving myself in your politics, I spend my time focused on working and being productive for the sake of supporting my family. Frankly your politics destroyed my country.

> I do not care about involving myself in your politics

This is a political stance. You have involved yourself in politics. There's really no way out.

You’re twisting words to make your point vacuously true. I do not care about changing federal government policy or who runs the federal government. Call that whatever you like, doesn’t mean I have ever received special benefits from the system any more than anyone else. That is my stance because I have better things to do with my time, like being productive.

The fact that you are able to not care about these things is a privilege you enjoy. And not caring about them is a political decision that you've made.

It’s literally a privilege everyone enjoys. No one is forced to care about politics at all. That’s a false premise. It’s always a choice, it’s not a privilege.

If you are a trans person and need to use the bathroom in a conservative state, then you are forced to care about politics. If you are a black person who is stopped by the police and rightfully fear for your life, then you are forced to care about politics.

False in both cases

I mean, obviously you're wrong.

By definition, if you're able to ignore politics, you are not part of the demographic that I'm describing.

What demographic are you describing?

> politics of a company

that's not a political stance - that's negotiating your working conditions. It's private and individual, and only affect you (and your colleagues). It doesn't affect society at large whether you have on-call or how sick days are counted _at_ your place of employement.

But to use your position as an employee to push for universal sick leave, or for BLM, which affects society at large, not just yourself, is a political stance.

You take for granted current working conditions which were won via hard-fought political battles and which affect us to this day.

Also what about Maternity leave? Paternity leave? Are those not political?

How is negotiating working conditions not related to "how we engage and collaborate with each other as a society"? It's inherently (little p) political even if the engagement is at a company similar to how politics on your local HOA is still politics.

edit: typo

I think you’re conflating issues relevant to the business of the company, which might be considered political, and political issues which are irrelevant to the business of the company. The former is okay, the latter is not. The subject of OP is the latter.

Broadly, it's incorrect to claim the issues at hand here are irrelevant to the business of the (or any) company.

What issue are you claiming is relevant to the business of every company?

In this case: basic and functional equality of the members of a society. Like pornography, this is hard to define precisely, but I know when the violations are egregious enough, and the functional equality of black Americans through in the eyes of the police right now is certainly egregious enough.

Police brutality of black Americans is simply and factually not relevant to the business of every company.

Insofar as it represents a fundamental and existential inequality in society, it certainly is.

Really not. Many businesses are not impacted by inequalities in society.

> ... that's negotiating your working conditions. It's private and individual, and only affect you (and your colleagues).

No. That's an "it depends" thing. If the "political issue" in question is something team or working condition related then it's not necessarily private and individual affecting only you.

Some people will care about that and want to potentially co-ordinate. Other people won't consider it important, and/or have other priorities.

> It's private and individual, and only affect you

You must be aware of the existence of unions. You're mentioning US-political concerns, so you're almost certainly familiar with the notion that the mere existence of unions is highly political. Whether or not you are a union member, union activities effect US workplaces.

Ignoring their existence in this discussion is itself a political position.

It’s very brave if you, in the middle of a pandemic, to say that “sick days are private and have no impact on society at large.”

You must have missed March and April when sick days at “essential work” (such as grocery stores, restaurants, coffee shops, and more) was in fact a matter of national conversation: sick people going to work spread disease. The number of sick days was also of debate: most low wage jobs don’t offer more than 1 sick day a month or two. Not so good when someone needs two weeks off.

This kind of short sightedness and inherent support of the status quo as “it’s fine, I see no problem here” is exactly what the other commenter(s) are talking about.

Personal monetary relationship between employee and employer is business, not politics.

You honestly don't see how what you're describing is a fairly radical political opinion? You are now arguing that you should choose your means of survival as a political statement. If you don't lock-step agree with the politics of tech companies in general, you should find a lower salary someplace else that agrees more with your political beliefs.

I would love if people who are privacy advocates could get facebook salaries working for the EFF.

It looks like what you are advocating here is that not only should you silence non-status quo opinions, but your income should strongly correlated with your alignment with dominant political powers.

The premise of your argument is that you have no choice in your employment, which is false. There are hundreds of tech companies to work for, if not thousands.

No one is forcing climate change activists to work for oil companies. As a corollary it would be absurd for a climate change activist to argue that oil companies must employ them to allow their companies to be destroyed from the inside out.

I’m simply saying your employer does not pay you to advance any agenda other than their own and that using your employer’s time to advance a political agenda irrelevant to theirs is theft, for lack of a better term.

> choose your means of survival as a political statement...[or] find a lower salary someplace else that agrees more with your political beliefs.

or, compare how much you like a higher salary, vs a company that agrees with your political views. And choose appropriately.

What's not appropriate is to choose the company with the highest salary, but whose owner's political views differ from your own, and then try to change that to something more suitable to your own. Or use such a position as leverage to push your own political views to a wider audience than you could on your own.

A lot of people need to lie to themselves and others that they’re not complete sell outs who forfeited their morals for a high salary. Being loud at work and social media is one way of doing that. It ends up with no real traction in reality though because the companies they work for don’t prioritize it over profits.

> What's not appropriate is to choose the company with the highest salary, but whose owner's political views differ from your own, and then try to change that to something more suitable to your own. Or use such a position as leverage to push your own political views to a wider audience than you could on your own.

Very well put and I’m terrifyingly surprised at how many people are arguing for the opposite. That is literal subversion.

This is entirely appropriate. Why do you think it isn't?

> What's not appropriate is to choose the company with the highest salary, but whose owner's political views differ from your own, and then try to change that to something more suitable to your own.

Why is that inappropriate exactly? If my boss’ opinion is “unions shouldn’t exist because I think I’m entitled to treat people however I want/play them off each other/depress wages” why am I not allowed to rebel against that and organize with my coworkers? In fact, the right to do this very thing is enshrined in law.

Did you read the Coinbase blog post? The conversation has really devolved away from the original topic. Coinbase issued a statement saying they are focused on their mission as a for-profit company. You're spinning it into something its not.

"I don’t think companies can succeed trying to do everything. Creating an open financial system for the world is already a hugely ambitious mission, and we could easily spend the next decade or two trying to move the needle on global economic freedom."

What exactly do you disagree with about their statement? What are you proposing that Coinbase do differently? Should they collectively vote to align the company with a political party?

It's a business not an activist group.

If you think that politics is an overriding consideration at all times - that every hour you spend working for someone is an hour spent supporting their political agenda - I don't think you have any choice but to choose your means of survival as a political statement. I agree that this is a pretty bad outcome, which is why I'd encourage you not to embrace such totalizing views of politics.

I think what they’re suggesting is an employee who focuses more attention on work at work will outperform the employee who doesn’t. It doesn’t matter what the subject is.

If you feel like a change should be made at a company you'd probably advocate for it.

You just believe that 'politics' is outside the scope of the company. Other's believe that it is not.

> You just believe that 'politics' is outside the scope of the company. Other's believe that it is not.

I believe this is a strawman. The issue at hand is political issues that are explicitly irrelevant to the mission of the company.

Issues that are relevant to the company should be discussed and potentially acted upon, if that furthers the agenda of the company (and not just some irrelevant political agenda that you might be passionate about).

I have seen companies claim that the things that their customers do with their product is not their responsibility. They have claimed that they are right to ignore that issue because they believe it is "political".

Naming something as political can be used to shutdown conversation that can and should be happening in a company.

Let's get concrete with this:

Do you feel like a soft drink maker has an obligation to disengage with countries that have set up systemic discrimination and regularly violate human rights conventions?

It really doesn't seem within the mission of providing the world with sugary carbonated water.

It's hard to imagine cutting ties with a country due to disagreement with how they treat their population as non-political.

And yet 34 years ago this happened:

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-09-18-mn-11241-...

But wait you say: it's just a prudent business decision because the economics were against them and it was a "PR" win.

It doesn't matter. It's political.

This is an inherently political statement:

“Our decision to complete the process of disinvestment is a statement of our opposition to apartheid and of our support for the economic aspirations of black South Africans.” -Donald R. Keough

That was a decision that the leadership of that company made. I don’t see how that justifies employees bringing their irrelevant politics into an environment.

Employees were publicly advocating for boycotts and performing strikes at the time.

https://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/issues/1982/07/coke.h...

EDIT: why did you assume it was a decision made solely by leadership and that employees or other stakeholders did not have a publicly held opinion?

> why did you assume it was a decision made solely by leadership and that employees or other stakeholders did not have a publicly held opinion?

Was my assumption wrong? Did the leadership of that company not make that decision?

To put food on the table

Usually money.

Yes. When you join a company, you are signing onto their political agenda. If you don't believe that, then I wonder if you'd have an aversion to working for Jeffrey Epstein.

> Being apolitical at work is not active support for the status quo.

It certainly can be.

It can be but not must be and in most cases likely isn’t.

> The view you just described is active support for the status quo.

A passive stance is, by definition, not active support for anything.

Coinbase is actively working on financial infrastructure. That's what they "actively" do.

> Saying "I'll keep my views private" means I'm giving an okay to what's happening now.

No, it means that what's happening now is, while certainly important to many employees as people, not a part of or in any way related to the company's business.

> A passive stance is, by definition, not active support for anything.

Passive support for the status quo is that we all have to work and survive in this world. If you have to work for an airline to live, but hate what co2 emissions is doing for this world, you are passively supporting the currently political narrative.

Insisting that any belief that is non-status quo be silenced is active political action. You can pretend that it's passive, but that is just a cowardly way of abdicating political responsibility.

So, if I tell you about the issues of South African droughts in Capetown and now that you know this but haven't done anything about it and any excuse you give me like 'I don't live there' or 'I don't have the time' or 'I don't have the money', don't those all fall under 'we all have to work and survive' and thus you're passively supporting the status quo of bad things?

I think the next step is then I can assail you with facts of every bad thing going on in this world and if you do nothing about it, you're cowardly abdicating your political responsibility, neh?

I might go a step further with your position and say that silence/speaking out are really two sides of the same coin. After all, silence and 'talk' is cheap. If you really want to fight the status quo you ought to commit your life and the majority of your money to the causes you believe in.

> thus you're passively supporting the status quo of bad things?

Absolutely, as a relatively well-off Westerner, me and my way of life absolutely are the direct and indirect cause of a lot of violence and harm around the world. I likewise creates a lot of CO2. Filling up my gas tank causes a lot of bloodshed. Doing this things is a part of the life I am used to, but absolutely yes I am passively supporting these things.

An activist against these things will likely take active steps to resist this passive support.

> if you do nothing about it, you're cowardly abdicating your political responsibility, neh?

No. My point is precisely if I tell you "we don't talk about those things, it's not polite, I want this to be an apolitical statement" that I am switching from passively supporting the status quo to actively. But by claiming that this is somehow "apolitical" that is the cowardly abdication of political responsibility. What I mean here is being responsible for your political choices.

Saying that "wow I do passively contribute to co2 emissions, I don't know what to do about it but I don't like it." is taking political responsibility. Say "don't talk about that at work!" and claiming your taking the neutral ground is abdicating that responsibility.

> If you really want to fight the status quo you ought to commit your life and the majority of your money to the causes you believe in.

This is literally the definition of activism, and I of course support it. But the source of all activism is 'talk', which is not a cheap as you make it out to be. People who 'talk' about unions at Google tend to lose jobs. People who 'talk' about questionable legal practices at their company tend to lose jobs. And 'talk' is the seed of activism.

If I followed you around at work all day pestering you about obscure political issues irrelevant to your job, you wouldn't be able to get any work done.

Sure but I have not seen anyone advocating for that in this thread.

> If you have to work for an airline to live, but hate what co2 emissions is doing for this world, you are passively supporting the currently political narrative.

no that's just surviving. It's not politically supporting "the status quo".

> abdicating political responsibility.

implying that everyone _has_ to have some political responsibility.

Not everyone cares enough - they believe climate change, but they also don't want to expend energy fighting it - that' snot a political stance. It sucks, but that's the majority of people.

Yes: everyone in a society necessarily has political responsibility.

"Silenced" strikes me as a uselessly broad category. If I tell my friends to stop yelling about politics because we're trying to have a nice dinner, that isn't an active political action.

The financial infrastructure that Coinbase is working on brushes up against the lines drawn by the law in many countries. Working with Bitcoin could be seen as a somewhat political act in itself.

Yes, it would be a necessarily political act in direct furtherance of the company's mission, not a misdirection of finite resources and effort.

No I don’t think so. Upper management yes. Not rank and file. It’s like if the company vision failed and their next big product fails. That’s on management but not on the rank and file.

> A passive stance is, by definition, not active support for anything

You are sitting at a bus stop and you see a man having a heart attack in front of you with nobody else around. If you call the authorities and send for an ambulance, you will save his life. If you don't, he will die.

Whether you just passively sit there and wait for the bus, or whether you take action to save the man's life, you are making a decision and that decision will have consequences.

There is no such thing as being apolitical. Not making a choice is making a choice.

The reason the word 'political' exists is that some things are very political and many things aren't. To be political in your example would be to base your decision to call an ambulance on whether the victim is wearing a maga hat or blm shirt. To be apolitical is to set aside your and their views of government and focus on the thing at hand that has very little to do with government, which is that someone is dying and you can save them with a phone call.

The point was just to illustrate that inaction is an action. Not taking a political stance is taking a political stance. It is a game you cannot help but play.

Politics is more than government. It's our society, it's how we deal with each other. It's how we approach the economy, the family, the church. It's intrinsically linked to being human, or as Aristotle put it, the "philosophy of human affairs".

If your business does not actively support a reform, they are actively supporting the status quo. Which is fine, humans disagree. But to pretend it's something it's not is disingenuous or naive.

The "you are either with us or against us" mindset will keep people from building bridges to approach each other.

> First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action" MLK

Ultimately the people that don't care enough about a specific reform are the reason it isn't happening in the first place. I'm not trying to advocate for tribalism and polarization or promote a "mindset". I'm just stating a truth.

I too was just stating the truth.

> The view you just described is active support for the status quo.

Not really. I can do my job from 9 to 5 in a non-political way and then actively try to change the status quo on evenings and weekends. That doesn't align with how you are describing being apolitical at work means.

> If every individual shares the thinking at every company then it is impossible to even imagine how the most catastrophic climate change can be avoided.

Because many individuals can sincerely believe that the way to deal with climate change goes via individual or citizen advocacy groups changing cultural attitudes and then exerting pressure on the Governments to bring in the necessary regulations. Companies should not be engaged in climate change politics (or global poverty or abortion rights) if they want to avoid it.

> The view you just described is active support for the status quo.

It's really not.

It's just not giving a shit about whatever the thing is the political argument is about, instead putting time and care into other things you consider more important. eg kids, family, etc.

"Kids, family" aren't necessarily in opposition to "political argument". When you watch a political protest, you should see people fighting FOR their children's futures. Whenever politics has a multigenerational timescale, that's what it's about.

I also point out that "not giving a shit" and "considering more important" are synonyms for "not mattering" and "mattering", respectively.

Well yes. Some person may feel that their particular hot issue is "the most important thing ever". (!)

Other people don't, and care about other things.

Claiming that people who actively put their time and effort into stopping that change ("supporting the status quo") are the same as people who prioritise other things (eg "looking after their sick sibling"), is outright dishonest. And seems both silly, and like it would generate a bunch of negative things by trying to push it.

To illustrate, lets take a dumb example...

Lets say my sister is dying of cancer, and I need to pay for her treatment, her family's housing and costs meanwhile, and whatever other expenses come up. So, I'm doing bulk hours at my job to make that work.

In that situation, someone pushing an agenda of "there needs to be more sausage rolls in the canteen" (!) can go to hell. I have more important (to me) things to care about. I don't care about their hot issue in any way.

But if they keep on trying to take up my time with it, they're not going to get a positive reaction as they're literally wasting time I could be using productively. ;)

It is.

> "Just do you job and don't voice contrary opinions" is a pretty radical political opinion if you ask me, so your definition of "apolitical" is only "A"-political because you are so intensely in opposition to non-status quo beliefs that you disregard them completely.

Which is your personal opinion on the matter. What do I suggest for you? Start your own company and allow your employees to have their political views expressed as part of your ethos (or Manifesto if you can relate more to that).

Perhaps I want the status quo at my job. If I worked somewhere truly objectionable I would quit working there and rally against it in my own time. I get paid to produce services that we sell. I don't get paid to change the world as powerful as we'd like to think we are. Also I don't expect my employer to pay me to be an activist unless they really wanted to. I have every other hour than the 40 I work to do whatever I want.

I admire people that are willing to put in the time to advocate what they believe is right and just. And they are free to do that whether I agree with them or disagree with them. I just don't want to be at work where just coming in and wanting to do your job is considered insufficient and you have to be saving the world somehow. That doesn't mean that I disagree with the cause or won't contribute in my own time. I just want us working on the goal for our company. It could work both ways. Like what if an oil company gave you days off to counter protest at climate change events? If you did not attend, it would be questionable and perhaps ruin your career. So I think as a whole we support activism because it is the activism we like but it might not always be that way.

Will you be OK with everyone else doing the same, including people you deeply disagree with?

Because those people also have strong opinions, not because they are evil, but because from their point of view it is the right thing to do.

I'd say: unless you are OK with both Trump supporters, Biden supoorters, Pro-Lifers, Pro-Choice etc etc all bringing their politics to work, be careful about trying to use work for politics.

Edit: let me also add the Communist party, Jehovas Witnesses, the Catholic Church, Hinduism (a number of my colleagues wanting to learn meditation got stuck between two factions arguing loudly and angrily about some detail regarding reincarnation), the local NRA and everyone else. Unless you want to accept them doing activism on company time: don't be the one who starts it.

> in opposition to non-status quo beliefs that you disregard them completely.

Many of us disagree strongly with the status quo because we find it is way too little conservative.

Do you really want us to start using harder tactics instead of sticking to our current strategy:

- hoping the kids on the left will grow up soon. Traditionally in generation after generation they abandon the dumbest ideas after a decade or so. (And yes, this holds true for me too, I was influenced by socialism as a teenager even though I never torched anything.)

- be nice so that others will be nice to us, or at least think twice who they want to support

- stand up for others and hope others will stand up for us (and yes, despite me being deeply "conservative" that also means standing up for immigrants. I do that.)

- vote

- pray

- depending on location: make sure we are able to defend ourselves and our families if police cannot be expected to do so (we don't need to think about that here as crime rates are low and police arrive quickly if you need them)

> The view you just described is active support for the status quo.

I hear this all the time but I cannot for the life of me figure out why it is "active support" isn't it at most passive support? If you were actively supporting it, you'd be taking political actions and therefore not being apolitical?

It is not active support for the status quo. No one is saying to quit being political entirely. Just during work hours.

I don't agree. Opponents of the status quo can get an advantage by defecting from an apolitical equilibrium, by bringing politics into spaces where people who disagree with them aren't willing to. But when everyone starts being political, opponents of the status quo lose, because almost by definition their views are less popular.

> The view you just described is active support for the status quo. [..] fossil fuels and co2 emissions to keep our economy running.

So there's really no difference between doing nothing, and donating to FUD campaigns against climate science? They're both equally active in their support for fossil fuels, both equally "apolitical"? Or have you diluted the term "apolitical" to the point of meaninglessness, if it can describe such wildly different behavior?

Would you describe yourself as "actively supporting" Kony (or some other, similar warlord)?

No one said equally active.

This is an extreme example but imagine someone knocks on your door and says “help, the secret police are after me.”

You don’t help them, and, you don’t turn them in.

In January 2017, several of my coworkers were banned from reentering the country to go home to their families, while they were on business trips to visit other offices. How is anyone supposed to be apolitical in that context? How are the people who can't ever come home supposed to pretend everything is fine?

A functional definition of privilege is that politics doesn't matter that much to you. No matter how it turns out, you'll be fine, so you're able to mentally compartmentalize it and go about the rest of your business. There are many people whose lives are not like that, and it's unreasonable to expect them to treat politics as a game separate from real life.

> A functional definition of privilege is that politics doesn't matter that much to you.

The more privileged a group is the more they tend to be involved in politics. So a better definition is that privilege is when you have time and energy to spend on politics.

Having the time and energy to devote to it is not the same thing as whether it materially changes your life. Often those things are anticorrelated.

> mentally compartmentalize it and go about the rest of your business. There are many people whose lives are not like that, and it's unreasonable to expect them to treat politics as a game separate from real life.

I bet the closeted gay folks in countries where that's a death sentence would MUCH rather have their coworkers compartmentalize their views.

> A functional definition of privilege is that politics doesn't matter that much to you

You're even more privileged if you're so confident in your job security and the popularity of your political views that you can spend your working hours advocating them without worrying that it'll affect your ability to feed your family.

An Iranian immigrant can't help but advocate for their political views simply by existing. Living and working in the US is an assertion that they should have the legal right to do so. Simply by being glad to have them as a coworker (the most anodyne possible affirmation that everyone generally expects from the people around them) you are making a political statement. If I say, "I'm glad you were able to make it home," I'm expressing support for the court case that invalidated the executive order that allowed them to come home.

As long as some parts of politics are working to harm the people you work with, coexisting with them and exchanging pleasantries is political.

Right, so said Iranian immigrant is for the status quo where he is allowed to work in the US and therefore would be in favor of banning discussions related to it, no? Enabling discussions would favor the people who want change, that is the people who want to kick him out, is that really what you want, do you want to help him get kicked out?

This is roughly how the people who argue against Coinbase decision sounds.

It was obviously not the status quo, because they were banned from the country.

Companies should advocate for the rights of their employees. They should demand their employees treat each other with respect. Both of those stances will often conflict with some people's politics and there's no way around it.

> You keep your political views private.

In nearly every case, the people who are claiming to encourage politics in the workplace are actually demanding allegiance - try supporting the other side and see how they feel.

This is a very salient point.

That is not what the parent comment is arguing. It is arguing that cryptocurrency has heavy political baggage it cannot shed. That is evident in the kinds of people attracted to cryptocurrency. There are many tribes, but, to take one example, there are a lot of enthusiasts who think central banking and/or national currency is a conspiracy of some kind.

They think that cryptocurrency eliminating the ability of nations to set monetary policy, or to enable people with enough means to escape from the impact of monetary policy, is a good thing. This is politics baked into the product cryptocurrency companies create, and it is part of their "mission."

Those policies aren't baked into the product. They're baked into the people. That's a huge difference.

But they are baked into the product. Coinbase’s success depends on the success of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. That is fundamentally related to questions of wealth inequality, banking, state economies, and crime.

Would you say that Facebook is an apolitical product since it is just its users that are affecting public behavior?

Absolutely I'd say that! If a tool just improves communication efficiency, that efficiency improvement doesn't necessarily mean that the medium is political.

If coinbase and its cryptocurrencies improve the means of wealth and capital exchange, that doesn't mean that cryptocurrencies are political. That makes it a tool, just as a shovel and rifle are tools. How they're used by people is what makes them potentially political.

Facebook's choice to moderate content that isn't advertiser friendly is what makes it political, not the fact that it improves communication. They're deciding what other people see. Cryptocurrencies make no such choices for users.

> Facebook's choice to moderate content that isn't advertiser friendly is what makes it political, not the fact that it improves communication. They're deciding what other people see. Cryptocurrencies make no such choices for users.

Coinbase has. They've done things like blacklist wallets that they believe were involved in crimes or scams.

> they believe were involved in crimes or scams.

which is not a political action. You can argue they are acting extra-judicially - which is true, but it's not a political action. If coinbase refuses to serve a customer because they are anti-whatever-political-stance-of-coinbase, then coinbase is acting politically.

Sure it is. How is this different than refusing to work with ICE because you believe what they are doing is illegal or wrong? Scammer wallets were never given any trial.

Banking has purely technical user experience problems due to stagnation, that cryptocurrency doesn't have.

You can be apolitical in that you are not interested in politics.

But:

1. Doing so is a political decision. 2. Your views shape your perspective and there will be actions and omissions that you take that impact politics in ways that you are unaware of.

It's very destructive to discourse to force people to polarize to one side or another. Most people when intimidated to "choose sides" will choose the side of the person NOT trying to pressure them into taking sides.

To give you an idea of the types of historical figures that used the "you're either with us or against us" most famously...

Benito Mussolini

Vladimir Lenin

George W Bush after 9/11

Recep Erdogan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27re_either_with_us,_or_ag...

You seem to be arguing anyone who is political is either for or against every political issue if they aren’t allowed to claim to be neutral in general.

But to people who are arguing that being “neutral” is actually a political stance and usually supporting of the status quo, you try to say they’re tantamount to Mussolini.

Really? Someone disagrees with you so your go to response is to bring up Mussolini?

If you don't want to be compared to a Nazi, don't regurgitate fascist dogma.

You really don't see the irony that you believe your side, what you currently view as "neutral" is so absolutely unquestionable that any one who critiques it should be silenced?

You're not even allowing for the idea of opposition to exist which is a radical view pretty similar to the ones held by all the people you have mentioned.

No one is saying opposition to the so called status quo should be silenced. Simply that political advocacy may be outside the scope of your role as an employee for your company.

You're not even allowing for the idea of opposition to exist which is a radical view pretty similar to the ones held by all the people you have mentioned.

You are mischaracterising the point and assuming bad intent.

What I am saying is that your actions and omissions have political outcomes whether you want them to or not.

Right, and the person you’re replying to is stating that many questionable political leaders have used that same argument to bully people into submission.

It's also kind of destructive to say that people you disagree with are like Mussolini, but here we are.

If you don't want to be compared to a Nazi, don't regurgitate fascist dogma.

Taking a non binary position is still a position. Ignoring the divisive nature of political discourse doesn't keep one from having to deal with the political and economic reality that it's creating for everyone. Crypto itself is fairly heavily married to libertarian politics which most now see as the gateway to the unfairness->nihilism dialogue being promoted by the right as a cover for their political machinations.

Crypto is also very capable of moving huge amounts of money from hostile foreign nations to disruptive factions anywhere in the world. Claiming libertarian alliances could be an easy cover for those kinds of activities. That whole space has been a cesspool.

>It's very destructive to discourse to force people to polarize to one side or another.

Do you mind quoting the GP on where you feel like he's trying to force people to polarize and why that makes you feel that way?

edit: Could those downvoting me please make an effort to help me understand parent comment's viewpoint instead of making low effort downvotes? I really don't feel like asking for clarification on something warrants a downvote without response.

You can have political stance, you just don't need to put it everywhere.

That's an easy stance to have just as long as nobody is trying to politicize your gender, sexuality, skin color, ethnicity or other things that you literally can't do anything about or go anywhere without. Your skin color is either white or "political". Your gender is either male or "political". Your sexuality is either straight or "political". If you are not in the group that is protected under the status quo, then being asked to not "politicize everything" is the same as being asked to accept being stepped on. They didn't pick this fight, the people that decided to politicize their very person did.

I think you and at least the person you’re responding to are using different meanings of “political” here.

When the people in this thread are arguing for being apolitical, they’re arguing for companies not being involved in seeking to lobby for change in formal, legislated power structures. They’re not arguing for companies to not take a stance in cultural power imbalances, because to them, power imbalances enforced by a government and power imbalances enforced only by social norms are not the same thing, and only the former is actually covered by the term “politics”, i.e. the thing that politicians do for their job. The latter, in most countries, is usually just called social — and there’s nobody arguing that companies should avoid taking social stances.

Forming a company to do something is inherently a social stance — a stance in any culture-wars that might be shifted by the product or service the company provides. But forming a company to do something isn’t inherently a political stance. For a company to take a political stance, someone from the company would need to actually talk to a politician at some point, in their capacity as a representative of a company — i.e. to do the thing we call “lobbying.”

Tangent: associating “politics” with attention paid to cultural, non-legislated power imbalances, is really mostly a US thing. I think this might be because most other developed, democratic countries have a lot fewer such cultural, non-legislated power imbalances; for painful historically-segregationist reasons, their entire populations are mostly formed out of what in the US would be considered a single mostly-uniform voting bloc. And so politicians in most countries, can’t really base their platforms on the cultural stances of any particular bloc — there’s not enough variation in such stances that highlighting one would win you any points.

The US is unique in that it ended up as one country composed of many extremely-divergent blocs, but with there being basically no formally-recognized, legislated divisions between most such groups†. Compare to all-of-Europe or all-of-Asia (which are the most sensible comparisons, given the land areas involved): the people within those continents have long ago assorted into relatively-like-thinking groups, splitting off into their own smaller countries, historically not granting citizenship to those who are “not like them”, and so becoming each much more internally-uniform in both makeup and viewpoints. (And then, if one of those countries went on to conquer the other, the introduced power-imbalance would be a formal, political one, with real legislation — the sort of thing you do “politics” about — determining the relative power of the two sub-nations within the new merged nation.)

† The US does have one formally-recognized, legislated division, where both sides explicitly sit at a negotiating table within government: that division being the one between native/indigenous Americans and N-generations-naturalized-immigrant Americans. And guess which group in the US isn’t heavily invested in the culture war? That’s right, the native population. Because they form a politically distinct group — effectively an annexed nation, as above — whose problems are raised to the level of actual politics, rather than social debate.

Yes, you’re right, we’re using somewhat different definitions interchangeably.

No, I think that many are arguing for companies not to take a stance in cultural as well as legislative power balances. (I would argue that legislative power structures and cultural power structure are not so easily separated, as they inform each other).

Both concepts are covered by the term “politics”. The colloquial “office politics” is just such an example of that.

To sum up, I appreciate the direction you took to uncover the crux of disagreements that ate going on but I feel that your analysis is flawed because you assert that the issue is cut down a particular line (which I believe it is not) and then invalidate the opposing half through a projected misuse of the term “political” (when it is in-fact mot a misuse of the term “politial”).

To your aside: I would hesitate to say that this is a uniquely US thing. Womens rights would appear, to my relatively lay self, to still be a prevalent source of cultural and legislative power imbalance in many countries and blocs across the world.

The only people who are actually in career (and sometimes physical) danger based on their political views in America right now are right-wing Trump supporters.

Sure but you can’t help the fact that your actions and omissions to act have political outcomes.

People do make big sacrifices when they work for an employer. They literally sell a sizable fraction of their lives which they could spend doing something else.

If everything is political then nothing is political and the term loses all meaning

Perhaps that is because, in this instance the term “political” has 2 meanings which we need to tease out to see why your statement is false.

1. Political intent - acting or omitting to act because of a political view point. 2. Political outcomes - the results of actions or omissions to act which impact politics.

I guess my point is that your actions and omissions have political outcomes whether you want them to or not.

We should also agree what “politics” means. I’m not simply referring to the science of government but to the decisions around the distribution of power, resources and status in groups of people.

> I guess my point is that your actions and omissions have political outcomes whether you want them to or not.

It does not even stop there. If we choose to understand what's political in this way everything that humans choose to relate to (even things that do not exist beyond human imagination) have, of course, probably some influence on political outcomes.

Rain, an escaped alligator from the local zoo, the color of a button in a web form, etc.

I think that this second idea of what's political is merely the realization that we can choose to view everything according to it's political impact. Like a pair of glasses we might wear or might want others to wear.

...to stick with my example: One might end up making a long term study on how news about escaped zoo animals affect election outcomes. That might lead to surprising results. It's just not always guaranteed to be a very productive use of time.

I think there's probably a healthy middle ground here. It's not hard to argue that there's some reasonable moral expectations regarding company decision making. Like, don't construct gas chambers. (Local example from my German home region.)

On the other side it's easy to see that insisting on questioning every minor decision will lead to almost instant gridlock.

That's why I think that both radical positions are pretty hard to defend. A better society might hide behind pragmatic decision making with some reasonable, probably even academically shallow moral questioning of ones own actions. Not in corporate apathy or zealotry.

You’re constructing a hypothetical “what-if” that sometimes could be true, but is not guaranteed to be true.

I could just as well say “no one should ever argue anything because then people could argue about every little thing and it would be impossible to do anything at all.”

I don't think it's a hypothetical. Overpoliticization is already at this point. There was a week or so at my company where a slack bot would automatically scold us for not being inclusive if we used the word "guys".

What is the situation at your company currently?

There's still a soft ban on some terms like "slave", "whitelist", etc., but "guys" is allowed again.

On a recent project we decided to use the term “main” instead of “master” for our primary branch.

At first I was like “ugh” - not a big fan of that kind of language change, but then I was like, well, if it does matter to some people, what is my investment in this particular term anyway?

I could see how it gets trickier as a company policy, as opposed to something chosen collectively by the group.

Nonetheless, with everything going on in the world right now - and I say this as an advocate of free speech and of freedom of expression in art - this seems like such a small thing to stress about.

Tbh if this is your big fear then I’d say maybe read more news?

Being excoriated for an honest slip Of the tongue or absent mindedness is a different story though and there are definitely people that do that.

In some ways I think the conversation to be had around changing how we use certain language is equally or more valuable than the change itself :).

If anything, I'd say the news is what causes me to be concerned in the first place. I don't personally know anyone who's been fired for not using precisely the right language, but I've read a lot of news stories about it.

I feel like that's kind of a manager-conversation thing, plus, like many policies, will depend on the workplace culture to begin with.

IMHO the tricky bit is that, there is both an honest and genuine way to express concern around using "precisely the right language", so to speak, and, a malicious, not-an-honest-partner-in-the-conversation, gum-up-the-works way.

And also, I guess a "this-is-all-unpleasant-and-I-just-don't-want-to-think-about-it-or-think-about-the-historical-context-for-why-we-are-talking-about-this-in-the-first-place-I-have-enough-on-my-plate-as-it-is" kind of way.

Of course there is also virtue signaling or what have you; that's a thing. Human foolishness has no bias.

Obviously HN is not the right place for discussing specifics, but, IMHO, that's maybe the only way to have a real conversation around this stuff. Which takes trust and a shared safe space.

Which can be hard to come by these days.

That said, IMHO my patience decreases a bit, sadly, every day when I read the news. There's a context to all this, after all. And a very real history.

What is your point?

My point is your parent is right and you are wrong.

Artificially extending what's seen as political to excess is a pointless exercise that removes all meaning and usefulness from the concept.

That's bad because a shared understanding of some political sphere (which comes into existence through its boundaries) is really important for democratic discourse.

That sounds nice, but how, and as importantly who decides what those boundaries are?

In a best case scenario those boundaries are continuously questioned in the democratic discourse.

Some moral entrepreneur might argue: Politics should govern the bedroom for [reasons]! ... and others might object: No; the bedroom is a private sphere where politics has no say for [reasons].

... and over time there should emerge a shared understanding of which aspects of life are political grounds and which are taboo.

The bedroom case is mostly decided today. One side won (mostly LGBTQ&Friends) and now we see the bedroom as something that should be free from politics. ..like I think that the vast majority of people in the western world now sees sodomy laws as bad fit for modern democracies.

But there are other issues that are more contemporary: The idea that speech is violence, for example, is prime moral entrepreneurship. Western societies regulate violence in a certain way and this equivalence would suggest to treat both equivalent, one way or the other.

... and it's far from decided how speech will be treated in the future and we all have many open arguments on the matter.

It's a healthy thing for societies to continuously re explore their specific boundaries of politics.

I have difficulties seeing the "everything is political"-trope as anything but the proposal to be reckless regarding the process of a shared understanding of the boundaries of politics.

> It's a healthy thing for societies to continuously re explore their specific boundaries of politics.

To rephrase: through political action (such as activism, lobbying and campaigning), societies should continuously reevaluate what topics are within the political sphere.

If how we decide what is or is not "acceptably" political is itself a political process, how can you honestly say certain things aren't political.

Claiming that bedrooms "aren't" is naive. There are still absolutely exist people who have and are and will continue to try and control what people can do in their bedrooms. Just because one side, and the side you presumably agree with, appears to have won the argument for now, doesn't mean that things are finished.

There are lots of things that I think should be outside of the realm of politics: basic human rights, white supremacy, a woman's right to choose. And yet.

So we return to the original question: how come those topics are "political", but in your opinion "bedrooms" aren't? (And would someone in the UK agree with you? They probably would, despite laws that affect them).

Who decided that bedrooms were off limits but uteruses weren't? How? Why? Can I change that? Those are all political questions.

And when you start into this meta-discussion of how do we make something political? The answer is pretty straightforward: you find people who are that there's an issue and you make noise about it.

When lots of people see a problem and make noise about it that problem becomes political. Disagreements, on a societal scale, are politics. So "this shouldn't be political" isn't much more than "I don't think the status quo is worth spending resources on". And, well, the people who think there's a problem will disagree on that. And thus: politics.

Yeah there are things that I wish we didn't disagree about, but I also am willing to stand by my convictions and say I disagree, instead of hiding behind "this isn't even a discussion, you're not allowed to bring up this complaint because this isn't acceptable politics". If you're fine with the way things are, say that.

> through political action (such as activism, lobbying and campaigning), societies should continuously reevaluate what topics are within the political sphere.

No that's not what I've said. I talked about discourse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse

This difference is important since the discourse is in itself not framed by any material boundaries. This difference also answers your question on whether political action deciding on the scope of politics might be incoherent.

> Claiming that bedrooms "aren't" [political] is naive. There are still absolutely exist people who have and are and will continue to try and control what people can do in their bedrooms.

A shared understanding of what is political does not require every single person to agree on the scope of politics. In the end it's all about relative stability, not unanimity or majority or something like that.

> Just because one side ... won the argument ... doesn't mean that things are finished.

There I agree. I don't think the concept of "finished" exists in any human context.

> Who decided that bedrooms were off limits but uteruses weren't? How? Why? Can I change that? Those are all political questions.

This question on who specifically might make a specific decision seems to be a reoccurring theme in our dialogue. In modern societies that's usually a multitude of interlinked processes. Very rarely there's an isolationable agent/action relation relationship. ...and that's, of course, a good thing.

> ... this isn't even a discussion, you're not allowed to bring up this complaint ...

Who forbade you anything, by the way? I don't get why this conversation should be so confrontational or accusatory.

I have no strong feelings on any of the many crossroads in debating social science epistemology or democratic theory in general.

Politics is how groups make decisions (literally that's the definition). Discourse with the intent to influence how a group makes a decision is political discourse.

> Who forbade you anything, by the way? I don't get why this conversation should be so confrontational or accusatory.

You've said that certain topics are not acceptable. Presumably this means one can't discuss them. Maybe you don't intend to enforce this beyond the force of your moral condemnation, but you're still saying "you're a bad person if you bring up this topic because it's not part of the political discourse and we're only discussing political stuff".

Politics is many different things depending on who you ask. Obviously. Luhmann wouldn't agree with Foucault who wouldn't agree with Rousseau who wouldn't agree with Arendt, etc.

In our previous conversation I'd argue that politics as power relations or as a specific set of societal institutions might be the most productive definitions just because both are compatible with our main argument.

Nobody said they can't discuss something. It's a good example though:

You might believe that someone who argues that something does not belong in the sphere of politics does not want to or is unable to discuss something at all primarily because you already very strongly believe that politics necessary includes everything.

If you were to step back from that premise for a second you would see that there might be other human endeavors, think science, philosophy, math .. and that those are discussed by people completely without any connection to politics (..or as you would probably argue: they're willfully ignorant of the political dimension of their actions and might even be motivated by subversive, ultraconservative intentions.)

I just of course can't make you realize that this is only one very specific worldview out of many. ..which might have its place and usefulness but probably wasn't meant to act inhibiting on its enthusiasts.

Some do believe that every action needs to be reflected according to its compliance with some religious dogma. For them, ignoring the religious dimension in any action is very suspicious, because they are able to see a religious component in any action. Surely others must appear as stupid or willfully ignorant to them.

They're driven by a specific set of religious premises and that's completely okay. We just wouldn't want them to be literally unable to understand that there are other worldviews out there with their own premises.

A strong conviction is born through the understanding of its opposing ideas.

> You've said that certain topics are not acceptable. [...] you're still saying "you're a bad person

Oh dear goodness, where? Would you mind to quote me on that?

Because I don't think any of this is true.

You seem to agree with me despite denying it. Everything is political, there are complex interrelated systems by which decisions get made and people hold power. Arguing that some things aren't within the sphere of acceptable political discourse is naive and pointless since you can't actually enforce it at all.

> that's one of those "you're either with us or against us" type of deal

And as the saying goes, if I'm either with you or against you, then I'm against you. It doesn't matter what your object-level goals or values are, because you have clearly stated that you care more about using those goals as a pretence to attack anyone who isn't willing to subordinate themselves to your particular movement than about actually achieving said object-level goals.

There's still plenty of room for nuance.

As an example: I strongly oppose oil pipelines, but a couple of years ago I had to assist with emergency network maintenance on a very large, very controversial pipeline that I do not like at all. My job required me to do what I was hired to do, and I didn't let my politics get into the way. The issue was resolved in a couple of hours, and I returned back to the projects I was working on for other customers.

But we still had a conversation at our company about what it means to support customers that we were uncomfortable with, and we ultimately decided that the views of employees should help guide how we conduct ourselves as a business. That if we noticed that our customers are doing harm, and we believe ourselves to be contributing to the harm, we should voice our concern and decide if we are operating morally and ethically.

The pipeline was whitelisted, because we don't actually help build it on native land, and we don't help drill the oil out of the Earth. We only help keep the sensors working, and those ultimately exist to keep the pipeline from failing and doing damage.

But we have preemptively decided that there are certain businesses that could use our services to contribute to harm, and so we have a process for keeping ourselves in check.

I worry about "apolitical" companies, as they have decided that they no longer care about judging the moral or ethical issues surrounding their business decisions, and have instead decided to operate entirely based on what is legal.

And it goes without saying that acting in accordance with the law is not the same as acting morally and ethically.

I think the issue is “How do you decide what is political and what isn't?” e.g. if you're a communist, then the existence is shareholders is political support for capitalism. So how do you remain “apolitical” then?

I think the answer is, you both use your own intelligence and judgement, and both talk with and listen to other people.

> So how do you remain “apolitical” then?

Outside of your job, you can be as politically active as you wish. Nobody is saying you should stop all political activism.

But if i walk into a store intending to buy something, i don't want to be blasted with any political message or be asked to sign up for a rally or donate to some cause i don't care about.

And an employee should work on the job they are being hired to do, not spend work time undertaking political activism unless explicitly allowed by their boss (for example, your company may allow you time off for charity or such activities).

If, for example, your political view is that of communism, then you will have to suffer in silence in the USA while working for shareholders/owners of property. Or quit your job if you cannot stand it. What you can't do is use your job as a resource to push that view further than you could on your own.

So that's unions out then. Sounds like a political stance to me if you ban people from advocating for collective bargaining in the workplace.

collective bargaining starts at the level of government - not within the workplace. It would obviously be in the interest of the employer to stop it from starting up.

So you take this political stance outside of work. If enough people can be convinced that collective bargaining is a good idea, it will get enshrined into law. Employers will have to comply.

On the other hand, organising during work time (which is being paid for by your employer) is unethical - and regardless of my feelings of the idea of collective bargaining, it should not be done on someone else's dime.

> collective bargaining starts at the level of government - not within the workplace. It would obviously be in the interest of the employer to stop it from starting up.

I dunno where you live, but organizing at work is a protected right that workers have in the US and Canada (and other jurisdictions, but that's where I've been employed). An employer forbidding that is actually a violation of labor law.

> the existence is shareholders is political support for capitalism

You are only political when you try to change the minds of others. Just existing is never political support for anything. If the communist argues that the shareholders shouldn't exist then he is political. If the company fires the communist for thinking that shareholders shouldn't exist (lets say he said that on his own time, so he wasn't political at company time) then they are political. If the company allows pro capitalist opinions but not pro communist opinions they are also political.

> I (and many others) are of the opinion that you can’t truly be apolitical; claiming to be so is its own form of politics (and generally one that supports the status quo).

If someone just does their job with people no matter who they are then they are not political. Being gay is not political. Being trans is not political. Being black is not political. Saying that gays/trans/black people shouldn't exist or doesn't belong is political. Saying that everyone needs to care about gay/trans/black rights is political. A trans person and a fundamental Christian who works well together without bringing up either political stance are not political. If the fundamental Christian makes a fuzz then he is political and should be reprimanded. If the trans person digs into the Christians opinions until they find something to get angry about and then get angry they are political.

I don't see why this is concept would be so hard to understand.

> If someone just does their job with people no matter who they are then they are not political.

And what happens when it's not the case? When people don't just treat people of foo group normally, and it's happening throughout the company? What should foo group do?

Ask the company to get to an apolitical state where they can just do their job? Let people in the company know that it's going on? By you definition, that's political and wrong. Or do they just bear the cost of it while others continue doing what they're doing?

> I don't see why this is concept would be so hard to understand

Because (In my opinion) you're starting with a fundamentally flawed premise that there isn't already politics in the work place. There always has been. The important difference is that the only thing that gets branded as "politics" is anything different from the status quo. If it's politics aligned with the status quo it's not seen as politics even when it it.

A similar example. I'm not taking a stand on it in any way here, but kneeling during the national anthem before a football game was considered a political act (which it is). One response was "keep politics out of football" (parallel to our discussion here). But again similar to our discussion here it was glossing over the fact that playing the national anthem before a sporting event is an extremely political action to begin with (ex. Should we play the national anthem before a game of Jeopardy?).

Saying there wasn't politics before / by default, is just turning a blind eye to the existing politics because it's the status quo.

What that person can do in order of difficulty is talk to the person/group that they are made uncomfortable by, approach their manager about the issue, take the issue to human resources, leave for a competitor that will likely win in the long run with a better work environment, or ultimately sue for being discriminated based on a protected class.

None of these options require a company to adopt a political platform.

> playing the national anthem before a sporting event is an extremely political action to begin with

no that's not a political action, because the intent of the song is not to display some political message, but to display a sign of respect to the nation that has enabled the game to exist.

Is it a political action if the happy birthday song is played at McDonalds for a birthday party? It only becomes political when an action has intent behind it to display a message that furthers a political agenda.

The kneeling at a football game is political, because those people who kneel knows that their kneeling is going to be seen by millions, and thus they can leverage their visibility (due to their position as players or at least is on camera). Therefore, it's highly political - they want to send a message out there to as many people as they could that they support a particular cause (and implicitly want an outsider that also happen to be watching the game to also support). Would you declare that it's OK for the same group of people to perform a nazi salute under the same circumstances? If you're OK with that, then I would be OK with "political" actions in my football game.

The problem in this discussion here is that many are unable to separate their own political leaning with the general idea of political expression in non-political settings (such as a football game or place of business). I keep hearing that apolitical stance is not possible - but then if there are politiking that they do not like, then it's not allowed (aka, if a company "forced" their employees to engage in white-nationalist politics).

That's why I take the stance of apolitical neutrality in public places where politics isn't expected (e.g., in a place of business).

My sister's husband is a software engineer at a bank, and the health insurance plan they use specifies that men can have their wife covered under the plan, rather than a gender-neutral spouse and it doesn't count civil unions. Now this has worked out fine for them, but the choice for the bank to use this healthcare plan means that same-sex couples don't have equal access. So just existing as a gay person can be political.

> Being trans is not political.

Until that trans person needs to go to the bathroom.

You don't have closed off bathrooms? Anyway, denying them a bathroom to go to probably breaks some workplace laws. I agree that we need workplace laws, and if a company can refuse to accommodate the basic needs of a worker without breaking any laws then the laws needs to change, which of course is politics.

> ... and if a company can refuse to accommodate the basic needs of a worker without breaking any laws then the laws needs to change, which of course is politics.

Voila :)

Now, to take another example - paternity leave in the United States - should there be a workplace law requiring more of it, like many other countries?

Political! :)

> I (and many others) are of the opinion that you can’t truly be apolitical; claiming to be so is its own form of politics

This seems like a fallacy. X may be undesirable, but it's impossible to completely rid ourselves of X. Therefore it's pointless to even worry about reducing X. Thermodynamics tells us that we can't ever reach absolute zero. Therefore I don't have to put the groceries away in the refrigerator.

No person or organization can be completely apolitical, but they can aim to be minimally political. And that difference is substantial. Only a maximal postmodernist would dispute that the NRA is orders of magnitude more political than the IETF.

Similarly we strive for our courts to be free of bias. However jurists are flesh and blood. They'll get hungry or sleep and that will affect their mood. Yet we'd all be horrified if a judge openly declared "Ya know what? I hate Dutch-Americans and plan to rule against them in every case regardless of the facts"

First - the neutrality of a judge is political. It is an expression of their support of the law of the land - namely the system of justice. Judicial neutrality, is in fact, special.

> This seems like a fallacy. X may be undesirable, but it's impossible to completely rid ourselves of X. Therefore it's pointless to even worry about reducing X.

No one said anything about it being pointless.

And, no one said undesirable. Politics isn’t good or bad. It’s just part of life. In the sense that people are inherently social and will always be discussing, civilly or not, how things should be done.

To me, if I live in a democracy, what would be undesirable is a citizen who is not, in some form or fashion, active in the body politic since a democracy depends on an active (and educated) citizenry in order to function! :).

I think the analogy works the other way. Thermodynamics, like politics, is a thing we can't be rid of. Therefore, even if you don't care about the exact temperature of your groceries, put them in the fridge. If you have a bag of fresh bread, milk, and frozen meat, it's a lot better to stick the whole bag in the fridge than leave the whole bag in the counter. Obviously it would be even better to put them away properly, but if you want to not care as much as possible, you still have to care a little bit. There's no way to avoid it completely, and ignoring it doesn't make it go away and is certainly not meritorious.

The NRA is "more political" in the sense of their daily activities, of course, but I think you could construct a great argument that the IETF has more impact on world politics (or, let's say, the governments of the world) than the NRA. Everyone knows the NRA is taking an absolutist give-everyone-an-AR-15 stance; they work very hard on it, but at this point they're almost an anchor. Some parts of the US give easy access to guns, and they're going to do so regardless. Other parts (NYC, where I live) make it very hard to access guns, and the NRA isn't able to do much more. And the rest of the world doesn't care. Meanwhile, the IETF, in how it chooses to distribute power to network operators vs. service providers vs. end users, which protocols it facilitates standardization work on, who is in the room, what sorts of threats cryptographic protocols protect against, etc., has a lot of influence on who has power over digital communications.

I think I'd even argue that it's more important for someone at the IETF to be aware of the political implications of their work than someone at the NRA. The NRA has an obviously political mission; whether you choose to pay attention to it in how you do your job and what you prioritize or not, you're going to further that mission. (Imagine, for instance, being a gun-control advocate at the NRA and see how much impact you'll have.) The IETF's mission is more open-ended, which means you can develop protocols to facilitate government surveillance or to subvert it, depending on what you think is more important.

Politics is too personal and can only lead to discord among employees. There is little upside to politics being in the open in an established company. It may be useful in attracting talent at some point, but at another point it becomes a liability, unless your company is a PAC or something of the sort. If you serve a wide audience or have a wide workforce, it’s less headache if workers separate their politics from their work unless the employer is paying you to be political.

Yes, and choosing to have such a policy about political discussion is a political act that supports the status quo by quashing dissent. Therefore, many people who are not happy with the status quo are upset by companies that do this.

I don’t want to have to manoeuver and tiptoe around shit all day long. I don’t want to have to think about whom I might unwittingly offend today because of something that happened yesterday that I’m unawares of today. I’m not seeking to offend anyone, but I also don’t want have keep a twitterpulse of what’s woke today vs yesterday.

I want a predictable workplace where people understand we’re not perfect and sometimes make untacful remarks without meaning to hurt. I want a forgiving workplace one where minor peccadilloes aren’t picked apart by vultures looking to score points.

There are big issues we can agree on. Energy, climate, crime, justice, etc., from a big picture perspective rather than an activist perspective. Activism is tiring. People get exhausted. Long term, people just want to make a living and be left alone if they are not being negative. You can’t live in a world where activism is a way of life like Cuba. Listen to the “Commandant” brother no 1. We have to up bread production right after we recite the revolutionary manifesto one more time before we join hands in community work for the revolution”. No, let me be in peace.

Some of your coworkers might want to drive to work without fearing that they'll be profiled, pulled over, and arrested or shot. They'd also like to be in peace.

Let’s take something like Tibet or Xinjiang or Crimea, etc. All have good grounding for people to see where things might be wrong. I still don’t think that discussion should happen in the workplace agitating management to be active and organizing coworkers into friends and foes. If you have a political interest in that thing do it outside of work —it may involve like minded coworkers but don’t bring this to work. Exception is Union organizing, that necessarily involves workers and management.

>I want a predictable workplace where people understand we’re not perfect and sometimes make untacful remarks without meaning to hurt. I want a forgiving workplace one where minor peccadilloes aren’t picked apart by vultures looking to score points.

Just going off this one statement, if you want a forgiving workplace, does that mean you have to own your mistakes and ask for forgiveness when you make an "untactful remark"? It sounds like seeking forgiveness will require you to do things like "think[ing] about whom I might unwittingly offend today because of something that happened yesterday that I’m unawares of today."

I want people to understand we all come with flaws. That PC policing is toxic and it’s better to give people the benefit of doubt rather than going all in on them being “bad”. Take compliments for example. Most often they are just nice things people say to each other. But in the wrong environments they can be taken (interpreted) as offensive as well as they can also be intimidating (unwanted). But in some circles by default (rather than exception) they are considered risky.

>I want people to understand we all come with flaws.

I feel like the best way to make room for people to understand that is to acknowledge your own flaws

For instance when you make an inappropriate comment, owning up to it by letting everyone know that you made an inappropriate comment and are making an effort to stop saying inappropriate things.

The problem is that people can't have political discussion without taking things personally. Many people thought that the James Damore memo was objective, but other people found it offensive. In the end, neither side really "won" and in the end, it just made the work environment more toxic. Even if you believe that Damore is sexist, people like him are inevitably going to exist at a company of hundreds of thousands, so it's best if everyone stayed quiet.

> Politics is ultimately about how we engage and collaborate with each other as a society,

It is so sad that people increasingly have this view. Politics was never how “we engaged and collaborated in society”.

Politics is discussing when it is justified and appropriate to use violence. For enforcing laws, collecting taxes ect...

All peaceful human interaction falls outside of that.

I legitimately do not understand defining collecting taxes as violence. That's like the third time I've seen this type of argument on HN.

I don't get it. Can you please explain that to me?

Most tax collection is completed without violence in practical sense. But taxes are backed by the threat of violence. If you don't pay them, you can be charged with a crime and ultimately imprisoned. And if you try to resist imprisonment that is enforced with armed agents of the state who will use force to compel you. Taxes aren't voluntary.

This is an old libertarian argument, which when taken to its narrow logical conclusion says all taxes are fundamentally theft and immoral. The primary counter-argument is to suggest that the property or wages being taxed aren't "fully" the possessions of the taxed individual or entity. If you are receiving wages in part because of the state apparatus, then the wages weren't fully yours to begin with. Various forms of social contract theory are used to justify taxes.

The other main argument is probably more utilitarian. Your right to property only extends to the extent that it is socially valuable in comparison to other rights and responsibilities. Property is this model isn't a fundamental right, but one mechanism used in combinations with others to maximize human welfare.

I mean, I agree with you, but it's still not work appropriate discussion.

> I (and many others) are of the opinion that you can’t truly be apolitical; claiming to be so is its own form of politics

This is a Kafka trap

The original post specifically said they would be involved in things directly related to their mission. So conceivably they would be involved in privacy, currency, etc. What I think they are opting out of is the pressure on businesses and individuals to support every cause du jur or denounce the latest fad outrage.

While you can't be apolitical, you can be measured, polite, balanced, and recognize there is an appropriate time and place for everything. You can recognize that there is only time and energy for so many things. You can also recognize that much of politics is manufactured outrage and theater. Opting out of all of the daily outrage cycle as a business or individual in favor of contemplative attention to things that truly matter to you on a 10 to 15 year scale seems like a very reasonable approach to me.

Claiming that people doing so "support the status quo" or "if you're not with us you're against us" is groupthink and coercive at best, and a mob mentality at worst.

I know I posted it recently and it was poorly received, but it needs to be repeated because people forget.

> Politics:

> the activities associated with the governance of a country or other area, especially the debate or conflict among individuals or parties having or hoping to achieve power.

If you think it means:

> how we engage and collaborate with each other as a society

You're biting at a hook baited with identity politics. That's a curated opinion that politicians are glad you've accepted because it's choked you from imagining that apolitical positions exist.

It's absolutely possible to be apolitical. It may be hard to do so. It may be possible to claim to be "apolitical" in a way that gains political leverage. That's dishonesty and it's a different topic.

> I (and many others) are of the opinion that you can’t truly be apolitical; claiming to be so is its own form of politics (and generally one that supports the status quo).

This is a fairly untenable position. Suppose there is an alien civilization somewhere with a similarly complex organization as our own society. You have no stake or opinions in the outcomes of what they do. You might even have beliefs that might give rise to politics ("I don't want earth destroyed," for instance), but in a real sense, you are apolitical with respect to that civilization. That doesn't make you in favor of the status quo, it just means that you don't know or care what's going on there.

Bringing it closer to home, you'll realize that you have similar apolitical beliefs with respect to a small town in a neighboring country, or maybe the government policy of the Central African Republic.

You might object that in these cases, a person is by construction unaware of the goings-on in distant places; however, I think the contrary argument is more absurd. The contrary argument is that as soon as someone merely knows about a political issue, she is then forced to choose, without her consent, that she is in favor of the status quo. That's not a tenable way to treat people with respect, not to mention organize society. And loads of people intentionally ignore the goings-on in politics.

So then, if people can be apolitical about certain or even most issues, certainly someone could be apolitical about all but the most mundane issues (like the governance of a family).

Further, the status quo is not a political issue; it's the condition of living in some reality. Human collective action is only one component that shapes our status quo. Many are beyond human control. So the mere existence of a status quo does not imply that anyone "chooses" it.

That I think is the error. A person can have no opinion and withdraw from politics. That is apolitical. Constructing the concept in such a way that forces them to pick a side of a line in the sand excludes the middle ground, and is also profoundly disrespectful and unfair.

> How can they truly be neutral on all of these issues that are directly relevant to the business they do?

I can see why a company might want to engage in a little bit of politics, particularly when it is tied to its very own existence. But that doesn't mean it should be engaging in all kinds of politics at all the times. So we are talking about "truly apolitical" vs "mostly apolitical" vs "not at all apolitical".

It seems Coinbase wants to be "mostly apolitical" here.

> How can they truly be neutral on all these issues that are directly relevant to the business they do?

They most definitely will not be neutral on policy decisions that affect their business, and if you go read their blog post they said exactly that:

> If there is a bill introduced around crypto, we may engage here, but we normally wouldn’t engage in policy decisions around healthcare or education for example.

certain roles require you to be apolitical, i'm thinking of employees of a national civil service whose role is to implement policy not decide it. If you had to quit when a party you didnt support was in power it would cause huge problems for continuity of services. Essentially then the civil service becomes political, which is really what it should not be.

> claiming to be so is its own form of politics (and generally one that supports the status quo).

sure if someone says that they believe drug use should not be criminalized but also claim to be apolitical and do nothing to help make drug use legal, it follows that they are supporting the status quo of actually keeping drug use illegal.

However if that status quo is changed by the actions of others who do want drug use to be legalized and the apolitical person does nothing to try to oppose this new status quo it can be reasonably assumed that they were in fact apolitical.

Then you might say that their politics is to support the Status quo, but that is probably only in regards to the things they don't care strongly enough about to do anything about one way or another. Which is the case with most people.

Most people throughout history have been apolitical in this way - if you give them something to decide regarding an issue they have no strong opinions on they will most likely do nothing and let the status quo prevail.

Apolitical doesn't just mean "supporting the status quo". It can mean "improving the world along a particular dimension with a coalition that cuts across historic factions". That's what Coinbase is trying to do, and (for example) open source has historically been.

Making a workplace political means excluding people who believe in the mission but don't share your views on things irrelevant to that mission. This is dumb for a couple reasons:

* you've now hamstrung the mission your organization was ostensibly about

* the people you excluded are still out there. Even if you no longer have to work with them, you do have to share a society with them. And now they're going to form their own organizations and become more polarized.

It may be a cost worth bearing in some circumstances, but generally you want to keep the number of people excluded in this manner to a minimum.

This is a blog about the company's direction, not about whether it will perfectly conform to the ideals laid out. The CEO is not claiming that they are apolitical, but that that is their goal.

>Politics is ultimately about how we engage and collaborate with each other as a society,

An organization can be apolitical in which clients it takes, how it applies its agreements and rules, and its involvement in the campaign process.

>How can they truly be neutral on all of these issues that are directly relevant to the business they do?

They do not need to take a stance on law circumvention or the right to privacy other than to uphold the law and maximize customer value.

> They do not need to take a stance on law circumvention or the right to privacy other than to uphold the law and maximize customer value.

The products and tools and services they sell are specifically designed to permit the circumvention of the law.

They are no different than people who make lockpicks in that respect. Technically the company couldn't care less what you do with the lockpicks. Maybe you're a hobbyist, or a locksmith. Maybe.

Some of their employees may be okay looking the other way, but not all of them will be. Based on the way this is going down it sounds like there was some internal drama about this, and they feel like it's best to part ways with the pro-law crowd.

What products are specifically designed to permit the circumvention of the law?

Cryptocurrencies.

All these arguments just feel like people wanting the benefits of owning a company without doing the work or taking the risk.

When you accept employment at a company, you do so on their terms -- including whether political activism on the job is permitted.

If you want to set the terms of employment, start or buy a company. Or, I guess, get laws passed that outlaw companies from having a policy you disagree with.

Whether being apolitical is itself political or not is a circular argument -- for some it is, for some it isn't. And that difference is itself a difference of political opinion of the same kind as the others.

When companies say they are being apolitical they mean more narrowly political - ignoring as much as possible the things that do not affect their core business. Does coinbase have to have a declared position for whether there should be a Mexico wall, or gun rights, or abortion - not really. What about BLM or gay rights? They probably have to have some minimal position like "we treat everyone equally", but that's also different than donating to the protests or conversely declaring support for the police union, etc.

> How can they truly be neutral on all of these issues that are directly relevant to the business they do?

These are issues with consumers and state not the business.

> How can they truly be neutral on all of these issues that are directly relevant to the business they do?

Coinbase didn't say they would be neutral about all issues, just issues that aren't related to their business. Obviously if the government wants to ban cryptocurrency, they're going to lobby against it.

Should toilets be political too? Which would you use?

Toilets are political which is why certain places have moved to uni-sex toilets.

I mean the porcelain friend specifically. Which party symbols should it be ordained with?

Indeed, the choice to "be apolitical" is itself a political choice.

That's one way to see it. But it seems the general trend is that every company needs to be political on every issue.

Where employees seem to spend more time on social justice than building the product the company is selling.

I think this is the premise of of The Witcher series.

Like that famous song,

"Don't say he's hypocritical, say rather that he's apolitical. 'Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down, that's not my department', says Wernher von Braun."

If you don't know how to separate social issues from politics, well shit, that's the whole problem isn't it. Figure it out or continue being a moron dragging civilization back into the dark ages.

Personal attacks aren't welcome here.

it's correct that crypto is against all politics, and thus coinbase is de facto far-libertarian, or anarchocapitalist. That doesn't prevent it from creating "an apolitical culture" in their workplace. Just like how , today , a libertarian might work for the Fed or something. I thought their point is that the politics of individual workers won't distract from the company's "mission" (whatever that is, i assume it's the product).

that said i think it's wrong to ascribe political motives to every move and claim that nobody can be a-political in public. Political belongs to the public sphere and not everyone wants to live in there.

>I (and many others) are of the opinion that you can’t truly be apolitical; claiming to be so is its own form of politics (and generally one that supports the status quo).

The Far Left and the Far Right, and college activists everywhere, tend to agree with this statement.

Everyone else finds the idea of a forced battle, which is what you said entails, to be the beginnings of authoritarianism (or bullying if taken at an individual level).

You are confusing people with companies. A person is political, a company should not. Otherwise, you are siding with totalitarian regimes that decide which services or rights you have based on what you think or believe. It was tried in the past, good luck for that.

When things like climate science have been turned into political issues, this is next to impossible.

The West Coast and its inhabitants live in a bit of a unique bubble and assume that the rest of the world see things in the very progressive manner they do, and expect that companies will march in lockstep with this sort of unique bubble. It's a very internalized unrecognized sort of expectation, but that's because so many companies have accepted these expectations completely. The rest of the country doesn't really care about this stuff, but media and tech related companies are disproportionately west coast so it gives an inaccurate picture as to what is going on.

I work remotely from the midwest for a CA tech company.

I was surprised that other people were surprised that there's a confederate flag spray-painted on a car-sized piece of corrugated steel that's been beside the interstate (on private property) for years now that I see every time I drive between two cities.

Similarly the number of confederate flag shirts and, recently facemasks.

> "The West Coast and its inhabitants live in a bit of a unique bubble and assume that the rest of the world see things in the very progressive manner they do."

That's tarring with rather a broad brush. There are a lot of old school liberals on the west coast who strongly disapprove of the progressives and their behavior, including myself. The progressives' "You are either with us or against us" rhetoric is diametrically opposed to the liberal "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." philosophy.

> There are a lot of old school liberals

It's kind of funny to hear DLC/Clintonian Third Wayists described as “old-school liberals”, since when they rose to dominance “liberal” in American politics meant about what “progressive” is used for now and they were very much associated with the conservative wing of the Democratic Party, with an economic policy that synced up so well with that of the Republican Party that the period between their rise and the sharp rightward jump of the Republican Party that was a response to the resulting shift of the left edge of the Overton Window became known as the “neoliberal consensus” period in economic policy.

The real old-school liberals are the progressives.

Yes and every year those old school liberals get less and less, especially on the West Coast, because they are seen as being right wing as you can tell by the many new normal West Coasters in this thread.

My 2c:

* Companies, like the rest of the world, are now hyperconnected. We have slack and email and so on. This makes it a lot easier for similar interests to connect across a massive organization, which is a boon for special interest groups, like anime, or magic the gathering. Or politics.

* Companies muscle in on workers' identity. Workers respond to work over email/slack during their off hours. Workers pop open the laptop at home, even pre-covid. Companies try to justify this with a sense of pride, you should be PROUD to work for the great conglomerate XYZ. And guess what? If I'm proud to work for XYZ, as a worker I'm going to expect a consistent worldview that XYZ is aligned with my values. But my values are also tied up in my politics, so now I'm expecting my workplace's values to be consistent with my politics.

* The simple fact is that many companies are overwhelmingly a monoculture in terms of politics. It's easier to make your workplace political when 90% or 85% of employees are liberal anyways, as opposed to say 60%. This is largely a demographic thing, at many companies the target demographic for hiring is a strong overlap with certain political ideology (You are looking to hire a young, 25 year old computer scientist living in a big blue city who graduated from PresigiousUniversity. What politics do you think this person likely subscribes to?).

> You are looking to hire a young, 25 year old computer scientist living in a big blue city who graduated from PresigiousUniversity. What politics do you think this person likely subscribes to?

I think people too readily assume that these people are blue, but you have to remember that academia (and tech in general) tends to have strong social pressure to either be blue or hide your political beliefs. There is likely a very large contingent of closet republicans.

It's one thing to be a closet Republican, another thing to be against putting up even an anodyne corporate statement about BLM/racial intolerance.

That's doubtful in polarized conditions.

And we have to remember that even the categories here are highly artificial; even people who'd never describe themselves as closet Republicans don't necessarily agree with whatever specific aspect of politics a company might try to target. There are a couple of California ballot propositions I have in mind where polling is very divergent from what you'd expect reading any kind of public discussion about them.

I don't assume anything about any particular person, but I was under the impression that, statistically speaking, someone with these demographics is much more likely to lean liberal. Perhaps I'm wrong about this.

> There is likely a very large contingent of closet republicans.

Whether the minority is outspoken or not, my point is just that it's a minority.

> Companies muscle in on workers' identity.

Great point. Maybe this is it?

I have been skeptical of work activism, but maybe it makes given the size of the lever (vs alternative activism options).

Cities and people with STEM jobs tend to be right wing in Europe though, since you vote right when you earn more and cities have more money. So if you intend to be a global company you will have a mix of right and left wing opinions. At local companies the Engineers I worked with were right wing, then when I worked for Google the local engineers were still mostly right wing but the company culture was very left. Felt very strange, especially since so many concepts people take for granted in USA are very different here.

I worked at a media company with a reach of 400 million ADI. We had internal meetings more or less instructing employees how to vote. Our hand curated content intentionally catered to this same narrative.

It was completely politically biased. I was hired when the company was neutral but over the years the extreme left narrative settled in and we tended to only hire people with the same ideologies.

Executive discussions revealed it was an intentional culture shift to attract candidates.

Did it go well for the people and the company?

So what does the future hold? Will there be left-leaning companies and right-leaning companies? What if I am centrist? So when I apply for a job, do I have to make sure my political leaning fits with the employer? Brave, brave new world.

I wouldn't worry about it. The issue will burn itself out. Courting a culture of loud, demanding people with an axe to grind is a much better short-term strategy than long.

> We had internal meetings more or less instructing employees how to vote.

Is that legal?

Yes, unfortunately. Most states don't have any law against employers politically pressuring their employees.

If it can be construed as threatening or coercive, it appears that many actually do:

https://www.grubblawgroup.com/employee-rights-and-informatio...

> Why is a company wanting to be apolitical is controversial?

It's wild. That was standard not long ago. Most companies, even in tech, were apolitical. Maybe there would be some watercooler chat near the election with that one coworker who was really into politics, but that was about it. People mostly didn't know or care what the politics of their coworkers were. If they did, it wasn't a big deal and would still be friendly regardless.

But now many are convinced they are warriors in a never-ending existential war. Then it's hard to understand why someone isn't a warrior.

"We're about to die! What are you doing, not fighting? You must choose a side. You're with us or against us!"

Normally this happened on a 4 year cadence[1]. Locusts would descend to rally the troops, warn of impending doom, have the battle (vote), and then go hibernate for a few years. But now it's non-stop. The war just never ends. It bleeds into everything. Those who choose to not participate in the war or don't engage in the approved way are looked at with suspicion, accused of being the enemy.

1. https://benlandautaylor.com/2018/09/22/the-four-year-locusts...

Just before the 2016 election, we issued an internal memo that political and/or religious conversations were not appropriate.

Not a RULE, but guidance that it can be divisive and that folks should concentrate on work during work hours, whilst physically at work.

One person quit as a result - and, frankly, everyone was relieved. She was a hateful person that wouldn't shut up about her politics.

I agree - it's crazy that this is controversial. We are a much stronger and more unified company as a result of this policy.

I agree that it is wild that wanting to be "apolitical" is controversial. Sadly though, I think that it has become almost impossible to be "apolitical" due to how politics has creeped into every facet of life.

What is more wild to me is that statements like "black lives matter", "climate change is real and a problem", and "the coronavirus pandemic is real" are political. These seem like they should be commonly agreed upon facts. If those statements are political then it is much harder to be apolitical.

>Why is a company wanting to be apolitical is controversial?

It depends on how extreme the politics of the society are. It only sounds like there's an obviously "right" answer to you because you're used to living your entire life in a society where politics aren't that extreme yet from your point of view. But for many other people, the line was crossed in recent years.

> It depends on how extreme the politics of the society are.

I live in Northern Ireland the politics of my society are very extreme when its allowed in the workplace, group A kills group B and vice versa.

Calling out the extremists and forcing them to apolitical in the work place is necessary to stop them from killing every one.

You can argue that this is a call for centrism and the status quo and it is, but it makes sense for this to be the status quo simply because extremists like to kill anyone that doesn't agree with their politics, this is true across history, country and race.

There is an obvious right answer because I have seen what happens when extremism is made the status quo.

I think it used to be like that?

My dad taught me not to talk about politics nor religion in a workplace. I think it's for the best.

I think all of the people (in this thread, and at Coinbase, and at Amazon, etc.) could use a reminder that opening the door to politics in the workplace includes open support for, say, Donald Trump, too.

in a perfect world it would. but it doesn't.

It's sad. We ought to be able to debate important topics without people getting upset and emotional and ruining each others lives.

You can do that anywhere. Just don’t do it with a captive audience.

And the people most inclined to discuss politics in the work place tend to be the people who take it personally.

I read the original post from Brian as; you can, but at work one should work. Coinbase isn't paying folks to debate politics, they're paying someone to further the company mission.

this is undoubtedly true, but also undoubtedly easier said than done. we don't seem to be wired as a species to have difficult conversations without feeling emotions amd having those emotions affect our relationships.

This seems to be more prevalent at companies with younger workers and often more associated with tech companies and the West Coast (of the US).

Forbidding debate is taking an implicit stance in favor of the status quo.

No, it's just stating that the workplace is neutral. It's not for or against anything. You can do that on your time instead.

Blocking even the discussion of change is the definition of conservatism. It's explicitly against change and implicitly for the status quo.

That is not the definition of conservatism, and a limit on discussion is not implicitly for anything. It's your own subjective interpretation if you think it's for the status quo.

This isn't complicated. For example: People may be on both sides of climate change, but not discussing it in the workplace doesn't mean the company is for or against anything. Apply this to any other topic that has nothing to do with the business.

Sure, the company provides services that help others comply with regulations and thus favors those regulations. Just like any other corporation that prefers regulations that help drive it's business.

Our workplace is still neutral though, and we don't discuss politics. To be extra clear: Whether you're for or against privacy regulations is not relevant. Whether the law is changing and will increase our revenues is relevant. See the difference?

I see that you think there's a difference. But you've admitted that politics is a topic you discuss. In fact, lots of companies spend money to actively make said laws bend in their favor.

The difference is less straightforward than you make it out to be.

Since you consider everything to be political, then everything is politics and there is no discussion without it. It's a tautological inevitability.

However there is a difference in that we don't discuss personal opinions on politics. We talk about changes, and whether those changes are good for the business. That's a pretty clear line that you seem to be refusing to accept even though our team understands it perfectly.

> Since you consider everything to be political, then everything is politics and there is no discussion without it. It's a tautological inevitability.

but that's kind of the point. Pretty much any human discussion (or interaction for that matter) _can_ be viewed through a political lens by someone.

Thus by declaring to forbid political discussion, you are just declaring a blanket right to ban any discussions that inconvenience you by judging them political.

No, we don't constantly live with theoretical extremes in our day to day life and can operate without political discussion, like our company and many others do.

And yes, corporations can set the rules of the workplace they maintain. It is not about "inconvenience" but to avoid chaos and improve productivity. You are free to do as you wish outside of the workplace, including choosing a company that lets you say whatever you want. I applaud and encourage this freedom on both sides.

Corporations may be people to you but their rules are written by actual humans, using their existing political biases. And it usually the people at the top choosing them

You might think that a discussion you are having is not political because for you it's "common sense", "obvious" and "surely everyone reasonable agree" but that's not forcibly the case.

If an employee says a thing you don't agree with, for you it is a political statement and you shut it as such.

If you make a political statement an employee don't agree with they shut up and don't contradict you because they don't want to lose their job.

> "Corporations may be people to you"

I never said this. What does this have to do with anything?

> "If an employee says a thing you don't agree with, for you it is a political statement and you shut it as such."

No. Disagreement on something doesn't not mean that it's political. Most reasonable people can easily figure out the difference: Talking about weather or our tech stack is not political. Talking about immigration policy is. So we discuss the former without the latter, just like millions of other people in many companies. It's not difficult.

> "If you make a political statement"

I don't. That's what no political discussion means and it applies to everyone. Why do you assume people can't follow their own rules?

Overall, if you don't like the rules of the workplace then leave. That's the whole point of this policy and exit package. You're not entitled to stay and discuss whatever you want, and thinking that you can is a very privileged expectation.

> I never said this. What does this have to do with anything?

You said "Corporations can set rules" and I wanted to punctuate the point that theses rules don't come from the nether.

> I don't. That's what no political discussion means and it applies to everyone. Why do you assume people can't follow their own rules?

I meant no insult to your character. The point is you think everyone agree with your list on what is political is political or not and I don't.

To give examples:

You might say "I arrived late again, I wish they would build a new highway" and I'm thinking it's political because really they should build more subway

I might say "I have a cat it's nice, I recommend it to everyone" and you might think it's political because you think cats are decimating the bird wild life and should be banned"

> Talking about weather

Not the example I would have used in your place with climate change...

> or our tech stack

Open source/ closed source is a political debate for example. But they are also some who dismiss technologies based on their country of origin.

So again you might think you follow the rule because for you it's not a political statement but for me it might be and inversely.

None of those examples are political in so far as to be a problem. Reasonable people understand this. Maybe that's the major issue: the boundary of reasonable is being pushed to the extremes by those who are unwilling to accept anything else.

so it's only really political and forbidden when it's a problem for you

Again, why do you keep making this personal? It doesn't matter if it's a problem for me or not, if it's not relevant to the business then you don't discuss it. If a topic seems risky then you don't discuss it. This is fine for the vast majority of people and companies; because they're reasonable people working in inclusive and neutral companies.

Those who can't be reasonable and insist on irrelevant politics in the workplace should should leave. That's quite literally what this policy and exit package is for. I don't see the problem. In fact those creating such a problem with it are precisely those who the policy is referring to and they should find another employer more suited for them.

Apolitical workplaces works just fine in practice, you are just fearmongering.

I didn't intend to instill fear, sorry that there is a comprehensions.

I don't believe that apolitical workplaces actually exist. That you can view workplaces as apolitical is either ignorance or privilege

If people aren't proselyting their views on how the country should be run then it is apolitical. This is the norm. You must be very damaged if you think this is impossible.

I will not do a repeat of the discussion on how supporting the status quo is in itself a political statement.

But you must be very naive if you think how a company is run has no effect on how a country is run.

Fifty year ago in the US whether your company had segregated bathroom or not was a proselyting of their views on how the country should be run.

Now it whether trans should be allowed to use the bathroom they want.

Why? Because they are political decision taken from the people working there.

I don't think "everything" is meant to be taken so /literally/.

It is your personal opinion on privacy that led to the founding of the company. It is most likely your employees' personal opinions that made them choose to work at your company vs Google or FB's ad divisions.

But let's discuss a more relevant political topic. Your name, manigandham, implies you are of Asian origin. The /political/ immigration laws determine your/parents' existence in the USA. If the company you/they worked for was serving/assisting organisations that would invalidate your legal residence, would you not be concerned? Or would you help the project succeed & accept your fate once ICE came knocking?

And yet we don't discuss opinions in the workplace. I don't see why that is so difficult to understand.

I caution against making this personal because it's a poor argument and unproductive. But since you asked: I was born in India, legally immigrated to the USA, and am now a naturalized US citizen. I have never feared ICE or any part of the US Government, and fully support legal immigration, strong borders, and proper law enforcement. Corporations do not affect my citizenship or residence, that's a matter of state and law. If I didn't like what a company was doing, I would simply not work for them. None of this requires discussing my political opinions at work.

Speech and action are not the same, and nobody is forcing you to work anywhere you don't want to. If you don't like the rules of limited discussion or anything else the company does, then leave. This Coinbase policy is specifically designed to give you a very comfortable exit. What's the problem?

This is a very personal topic, for the people that are being "political".

Claiming you no longer care about this, after becoming a naturalized citizen, is a prime example of the "I have mine" philosophy. You would not be able to quit a company while on an immigrant visa, to protest your company's problematic workings. This is not a fair view, and you know that.

1) The topic is political discussions at work. You made this thread personal by asking about my background instead of arguing the merits. What issues others are personally affected by has nothing to do with this.

2) What do you know about what I care about or my philosophy? I said I support strong borders and law enforcement. This does not stop others from becoming citizens, nor do I have any responsibility to anyone else.

3) You choose the company you work for, and you can always quit. That doesn't mean there are no consequences but that's life, and life isn't fair.

You're conflating several topics with random tangents and have attempted to personally attack me with assumptions, strawman scenarios and mischaracterizations. Nothing you've said is a reason to break the rules of the workplace and discuss whatever you want, especially when you have the alternative of leaving (and the company is offering a generous package to do so). The entitlement that you stay employed and yet break the rules and create disturbance is the very epitome of the privilege you claim exists in those that choose to actually follow those rules. This is precisely the attitude that this company (and many others) are trying to avoid. I'll end this thread here as there's nothing more to discuss.

Or it's just acknowledging that it can be disruptive and divisive at a place where your goal is to focus and communicate effectively.

I don't see this press release as forbidding debate. This is simply saying that the company won't be taking a stance. That shouldn't stop individual employees discussing political topics as long as they can act like adults and not create a hostile environment.

> I don't see this press release as forbidding debate.

It specifically does:

> We won’t: Debate causes or political candidates internally

Hm. What is the legality of limiting employees speech during e.g. their lunch break time?

> Forbidding debate is taking an implicit stance in favor of the status quo.

If the reformists are winning outside the company then the status quo is in the reformists favor and thus forbidding debate is pro change. For example now, Biden is favored to win so status quo is Biden wins, so a company forbidding political debate is liberal.

For Coinbase specifically, all their US locations are in blue states, making the status quo Democrat no matter how you see it.

Edit: Anyway, your argument doesn't make sense, you aren't in favor of the status quo unless you fight to bring it back after things change or you fight to keep it from changing. Also you aren't pro the status quo just because you prevent people you pay money to waste time arguing with each other instead of doing their job.

The issue here is that the company HAD a political mission, and decided to change that. Some employees may have joined specifically because of the company's politics and now they can leave.

Church and state are separate because you don't get to choose your birth citizenship. But you do get to choose where you you seek employment. As long as the company is upfront about their politics when you take the job, it's up to you to decide to work there. ie, don't take a job at a christian bookstore if you aren't christian

You can’t operate in a liberal society (liberal in the sense that we favor human liberty and freedom) and demand that your employees suppress their opinions. It’s a contradiction.

Except that every company that's taken a political stance has demanded that their employees suppress their opinions, unless those opinions are extreme left-wing opinions.

Define "extreme left." Do you mean stalinism or maoism? Are these companies in favor of exterminating the aristocracy through lethal force? Do you mean marxism? Are these companies that are in favor of peacefully gifting their workers with the means of production, and equalizing pay for all employees? Show me these leftist corporations.

Or are you referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and subsequent Supreme Court rulings as the "extreme left"?

Or do you mean it in the Fox News sense, where any disagreement with the president is "extreme left"?

Equality of outcome is extreme left, California subscribes to it pretty hard. The left we have in Europe are much saner.

Europe is a pretty diverse legal landscape, but it looks like quite a few countries there have had affirmative action for over a decade. Is California extreme or is it somewhat more progressive? Because I consider Stalin, Mao, etc. to be the extreme left and California to be extremely conservative by comparison.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action

There are different kinds of left. California is not economically extreme left.

Edit: About Europe, we almost never practice affirmative action the same way as US does. It mostly is "If two applicants has equal merit you are free to choose the disadvantaged one". See this court case for example:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-47335859

In USA there are many examples of worse students being accepted thanks to affirmative action, and it is defensible in court.

> There are different kinds of left. California is not economically extreme left.

I see. This is a confusion of the economic "left/right" axis with the social "progressive/regressive" axis. Mainstream media does tend to collapse those axes, along with the "authoritarian/libertarian" axis, but this is intellectual laziness that doesn't even represent american bipartisan politics faithfully. We can do better.

Personally I am economically left of California and socially right of them. I prefer higher taxes, spend those taxes to help the poor get better opportunities, and then evaluate based on merit. California instead prefer to do lower taxes, let poor suffer and then give them bonus points in selection processes.

The replies to your comment exemplify Coinbase’s delicate position, or more specifically why you can’t be apolitical while physically located in a monoculture like the Bay Area.

Outside of the monoculture, it’s actually extremely easy to be apolitical at work and people seem to get along despite extremely different personal views of each other (for example, being non-Mormon in Salt Lake City).

This doesn't sound like an apolitical mission to me, in fact it sounds like quite the opposite. They're doing their absolute best to eliminate potential traitors.

Because running a business is a way we participate in society, and society is run by politics, so being "apolitical" as a company feels like a willful ignoring of the social consequences of your business practices.

You cannot separate the business practices of a financial institution from politics. It simply isn't possible. To attempt to do so is a political statement in an of itself, and quite frankly, it isn't a good one.

Some people would argue that -- in some exceptional circumstances -- claiming "apolitical" is the equivalent of Switzerland's "neutrality" in WWII.

Companies are inherently political. If nothing else they support capitalism and oppose taxation and worker's rights.

Coinbase is not "apolitical". Proof-of-work cryptocurrency is an explicitly libertarian political project and an environmental disaster.

This is just the boring old dodge that "politics I agree with is apolitical, why are you being so controversial!"

> If you offer web-hosting to a group of white nationalists, this is a political action.

no it's not - you're just offering a service for a fee. As long as the service is not illegal, and you're not under-charging (which can be considered a political donation), then it's apolitical.

Deliberately choosing not to conduct business with a certain group because of their political ideology, on the other hand, _is_ a political action.

I don't agree. Selling a gun to a hunter is not the same as selling a gun to a known child murderer. Both is "just" selling a gun but they are very different in practice.

You can't take responsibility for what someone will do with your product. This is insane. If someone buy your car, how can you make sure he will not use for kidnap someone?

Of course you can. We just sell cigarettes it’s not our fault problem of people smoke them and get sick?

Society is much better when we have individual freedom and responsibility, which includes the ability of people to make bad decisions.

And here “freedom” means you are forbidden from discussing certain topics at work?

Yes. The environment and time is controlled by your employer to maximize productivity for the business. You're free to do whatever you want on personal time, including not working for a company you don't like.

Usually people making your argument also say that private corporations can and should moderate speech. Do you support that? If so, then why do you disagree with workplaces banning topics?

Setting aside whether business can or should regulate employee speech: can you expand on how them doing so makes people more free?

You're misunderstanding the concept. Individual freedom means you're free to make your own choices and then take responsibility for those choices. This freedom is protected by your rights granted by the state.

Corporations setting workplace rules have no impact on your freedoms. You're free to work there or quit, or suffer the consequences of breaking their rules.

People make dumb things like smoking. We already know that prohibition doesn't work. Putting warnings in the cigarets doesn't work either. So, the next thing would be the seller give a speech about how bad cigarets its for each sale?

If you take a look at the history of smoking, it's very clear that education and taxes DO work.

Absolutely that yes. Cigarette salesmen are performing a valuable service.

Yes you can, and this is why know-your-customer laws exist. This isnt black and white, and depends on the kind of transaction. But if I’m selling cars, and someone comes in looking shifty, and says they want a big SUV to mow people down with, then claiming “I’m just a merchant with no responsibility on end use” is honestly weak bullshit.

> looking shifty

How do you decide this? Your intuition? The clothes someone is using? The way his talk?

If seller offers guns to general public (e.g. gun shop) and child murderer does not have restriction on gun ownership as a part of their sentence, then not selling gun is not a political action, it is an extra-judicial punishment.

Yes, but this distinction doesn’t require a corporate policy to implement. One transaction is legal and the other is not.

Would you like to mandate background checks for every potential customer?

ya, one would be illegal

Does your view change if the gun was sold to a republican vs a democrat? Or a communist?

Deliberately choosing to not not conduct business with certain groups on the basis of their political ideologies is a political action. It implies a disposition toward trade and exchange that is itself political.

Consider the fact that you cannot legally offer a service or a fee to terrorist groups (however that may be defined), money launderers, industries from countries under sanctions... the list goes on.

These limitations are political in nature and could be revised, expanded, or eschewed via political action. But even if they were all eliminated, this would not constitute a "depoliticization" of trade: such an action could be characterized variously as libertarian, free-market, laissez-faire, or something of that nature but it would nevertheless be explicitly political.

This is on-point. Others here seem to be oblivious to reality:

White guy at webhost: We took the white supremacists' money, so this is totally legal.

Black colleague: Sure, but now they're using the website to display anti-black ideology and actively plan rallies to remove my rights.

White guy: This is politics and I'm trying to be apolitical. Please lobby the courts if you have a problem.

That's exactly how it should work.

> using the website to display anti-black ideology and actively plan rallies to remove my rights.

When it's not a crime and it's completely based on your subjective view: you're kidding yourself if you think that process is going to be a just measure. Likely, it's just going to be a free for all, whoever gets offended at what.

Let me add another colleague to your mix.

Asian guy: I don't agree on these statements. I'm quitting if we remove this content.

You see where this is going?

Objectively speaking, it's your privilege that makes this issue seem subjective enough to dismiss it so.

Seems like you are just gaslighting this person rather than explaining your position.

What would you say if these grassroots movement talked webshots into taking down all BLM sites for promoting an officially recognized terrorist organization? Would you still be in favor of workplace politics?

Currently you are privileged since the side you like has the power. If you aren't fine with the situation if you lose that privilege then you aren't fine with workplace politics.

I don't think the BLM movement is "in power". That seems woefully misinformed.

Moreover, BLM and such movements aim to overcome white privilege to enable the equal treatment of colored people. I can see why this may feel aggressive to a white person, and your argument about sides confirms that.

> I don't think the BLM movement is "in power". That seems woefully misinformed.

Then why aren't their webpages being taken down while pages from some of the opposite sides are? So to me it is pretty obvious that people supporting BLM have more power than the people supporting white nationalism.

> Moreover, BLM and such movements aim to overcome white privilege to enable the equal treatment of colored people. I can see why this may feel aggressive to a white person, and your argument about sides confirms that.

I don't even live in the US, nothing the BLM movement does affects me. I do know that Trump made it an official terrorist organization though, so it would be fairly easy to argue for takedown of their sites if you don't like them.

A white supremacist like Trump classifying an opposing movement like BLM as a terrorist organisation, is exactly the problem.

Yes, which is why we shouldn't let companies take down websites just based on workers political views, since then the BLM sites would likely get taken down if the views of their workers were right wing.

You could just as easily write an example where someone of a particular religion (pick any one, they all have a list of things they find immoral) doesn't like it when the web host takes the money of some group that furthers something the religion objects to. Everyone has to hold their nose sometimes.

I think what we're seeing these days is that people don't want to "hold their noses" any longer. It's not making the world a better place.

I see no proof the unbounded political activism is making the world a better place. For example, crowds running up onto people’s dinner and demanding fists raised in solidarity. I think videos circulating of that kind of stuff has somewhat tragically introduced regression. It definitely doesn’t belong in most workplaces.

It's easy to choose an example that you don't like. Are you sure there are no examples you can agree with?

This is not a mainstream view. Maybe it's a 2020-american thing that every action and company and invention is judged by its political potential, but most people wont agree that Gutenberg is to be blamed for what politicians did.

This is not an opinion, politics is the exercise of power. If you are making decisions, you are exercising political power. Apolitical means “We’re going to make political decisions but we are not going to engage with any debate or discussion about them and you are not allowed to either.”

people make decisions, companies don't. That's the problem, people see the company as a political vehicle, akin to a political party. That's wrong on so many levels, primarily on the level that it's a well-funded for-profit organization with the means to cause undemocratic, arbitrary political damage. Blame individuals as much as you want for their politics, don't use the overfunded big tech as a trojan horse to destroy democratic balances.

>If you offer web-hosting to a group of white nationalists, this is a political action

How so? I would say that this is a risk of exposure to politics but hardly a political action.

> a 100% chance of exposure.

Because you're providing material aid to that group, and you're saying there's nothing wrong with doing that.

But not to JUST that group. You are also providing "material aid" to every other group that uses your service which is what makes it apolitical.

We have a system for resolving political differences in America. It's called elections. There is no reason why every business transaction needs to evaluated on political grounds. In fact tolerance and commerce have historically been key to maintaining a peaceful democracy.

By offering I understand selling it the same way like selling it to everyone else. If by "aid" and by "offering" you mean giving it away as a gift or similar then yes - definitely political.

I see a case where it can be political, like creating a mechanism to protect specific group from the others however simply doing business is not a political action by itself.

There's also possibility to be a political action where it's widespread to deny services to certain groups but even that is a stretch because it can also be a good business opportunity.

> Because there's really no such thing as, "apolitical."

This a thousand times.

I've tried to be apolitical in a "least damage" way, but it is not possible. You are supporting someone who is doing something abhorrent either explicitly or implicitly.

In tech we are huge enablers, and when we support implicitly we need to accept that we are enabling behaviour that all employees would find unacceptable. Whether it is individuals, management, directors, the board - the accountability for that is at all levels but definitely starts and stops at the top.

That employees are left to fight this shows a lack of accountability at the other levels - but it isn't apolitical of the company, no... now the company has chosen to go from implicitly supporting behaviour enabled by them to explicitly supporting that behaviour.

> You are supporting someone who is doing something abhorrent either explicitly or implicitly.

This comment might make somebody have an idea which will then change the world for the worse. Have you supported that idea implicitly? I'd argue no, but if you look at it purely from an consequentialist perspective, then sure, you did.

> That employees are left to fight this

But they aren't "left to fight" anything. They're asked not to try to use the company to further their personal political goals.

All I see here is that you shouldn’t use Grafana if you don’t want to have your service arbitrarily terminated because of a random news article or a couple calls by activists.

> Why is a company wanting to be apolitical is controversial?

The fact that a company can emancipate itself from the political scene is nothing but a libertarian fantasy. And the fact that professional lobbyists exist show that they do influence the political life of a country.

When one guy is hitting another one in the head, a "this is not my concern" stance tends to benefit the guy doing the hitting.

We essentially have terrorist organizations like the ACLU that hound companies until they meet their demands. Thats a primary reason why.

If a person refuses to be political (e.g. vote), that's stygmatized, because it's irresponsible. The same should hold for a group of people (like a company).

The separation between government and church in the US is about 0.001inch or basically no centimeter... You'd be lucky if the president doesnt talk about god daily

> I would expect a government to have proper separation from church and state, so why is it weird to want a company to separate politics and mission

Because this is a non sequitur? You’re making appeals to protections enshrined in law to prevent the government from limiting the freedom and rights of individuals, when almost no such protections exist in the workplace. Why do people organize in their workplace? Because there exists no bill of rights for workers to prevent equivalent abuses of corporate power and hierarchy that are ostensibly so tyrannical when done by the government.

A better question would be why America has a two-track system of rights, where one must constantly defend their violation from the government, but also completely abandon them the moment they walk into their workplace.

> A better question would be why America has a two-track system of rights, where one must constantly defend their violation from the government, but also completely abandon them the moment they walk into their workplace.

One argument could be that it's much easier to change jobs than to change citizenship.

This argument doesn’t address the discrepancy. “I can move from one job, where my boss can fire me for anything I do or say arbitrarily to another where my boss can for me for anything I do or say arbitrarily” does not explain why protection of speech is so important in one context, but not the other. The vast majority of people don’t rely on the government for their immediate material needs, so why should they need so much protection from the government as opposed to the bosses who have this leverage over them?

Coinbase is a deeply political company already. Here are some political claims that they support that are not universally agreed upon:

- Cryptocurrencies are good and should be legal.

- Private ownership of unrestricted amounts of capital is good.

- Central banks controlling the money supply are bad.

- The ability to send and receive money across borders and avoid capital controls is, in general, good.

- The existence of corporations is good.

- Venture capital is good, as is making money for the stock exchange.

- Reporting large amounts of customer information to federal tax agencies is bad and should be fought in court.

- Spying on individuals on behalf of governments with poor human rights records is bad, and moreover, having supported this work makes you ineligible to be an employee. (This is new as of March 2019; previously, the company did not have a position here.)

Now, these are entirely reasonable positions to take (in the sense that they're well within the Overton window, at least in the US), but they're absolutely political positions! (If it helps, note that the negation of all of these is a political claim.)

I'd understand the argument if it's something like "I don't want my company to mandate that I support expanded bike lanes on Market St." or whatever, but it's very silly to pretend that a company doesn't have a mission in the world or that its mission doesn't have political aspects. If you don't agree that cryptocurrency is making a positive difference in the world, why are you even there?

(And even so, I think it would be entirely rational for the company to say, "It's okay if individual employees disagree, but as a company, expanded bike lanes on Market St. is important to our business because it's how half the company commutes to work.")