Every so often in the US you’ll hear of people with neuroses that stem from the Great Depression (quite frequently, with hoarding among the elderly population). I think COVID will have a similar impact on a significant subset of the population today.
Sure, the vast majority will move on, but some will continue to live with a vague fear of being too near to other people. Personally, I find this thought very saddening, but I’m bracing myself for it and doing my best to make sure it doesn’t happen to me.
You are leaving something out that seems quite relevant to me, which is that the list wasn’t just objected to as unprofessional but that the conversation was escalated to the highest possible level, linking it to genocide.
One person mentioned the pyramid of hate and you think it makes sense to point that out when talking about a policy that spans all employees? It’s clear basecamp doesn’t know how to handle difficult discussions, but politics is business. The state, laws and political institutions are the basis of all wealth and power. Their cowardice means their business is now in jeopardy.
We have lots of difficult, sometimes racialized discussions at BigCo. It makes us better at engaging with the world outside our walls. It’s not unnecessary or distracting from our work because our customers live in the same world we create products and services for, it’s part of our work.
Look at Apples stance on privacy, that’s based on a lot of difficult political discussions that culminate in corporate policy. If we did away with politics, we couldn’t have come to some of the decisions we have until forced by legislatures or our competitors.
DHH says the trouble didn’t come from objecting to the list. In fact, he’s disavowed it repeatedly. He said the trouble was that the employee said that the list was not merely unprofessional but was one step on a ladder of racial oppression that leads to genocide.
It’s one thing to say someone is acting unprofessionally. It’s another thing altogether to accuse them of being on a path to genocide. If I did that to someone when it was so clearly uncalled for, I would be an asshole and my relationship with that person would be strained from that point forward.
If you don’t like that strain in your workplace, you try to draw a line on speech. It’s not something I’d want from the government, but it seems appropriate for a workplace.
But isn’t this also DHH making a strawman of a strawman?
I’m led to understand the graphic in question was about how long-term tolerance of micro aggression can lead macro-aggressions over time, the ultimate form of which being genocide.
To share such a graphic isn’t to make a point that “your actions lead to genocide”, it’s to highlight the important of being diligent about not allowing micro aggressions to become commonplace and accepted within a culture. Because the long term society-wide effects of that can be genuinely terrible.
Except it's a fairy tale from the minds of social scientists with lots of research funding and zero experience of real world genocide. The simplest response to the diagram would be a free copy of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago for all employees.
Exactly this. Graphics like this serve to educated about how an environment tolerant of small things can eventually become tolerant of bigger things, and then much bigger things, and that's why it's important to pay attention to the small things.
The employee wasn't accusing anyone of supporting genocide, even though DHH clearly took it personally.
> an environment tolerant of small things can eventually become tolerant of bigger things, and then much bigger things, and that's why it's important to pay attention to the small things.
Huh, sounds like the "broken windows" theory of policing. Did not expect that.
The list was clearly unprofessional and made some people uncomfortable, that is enough for it to be gone. It would be worthwhile to discuss explicitly what was wrong with the list, opening people's eyes to perspectives they hadn't considered and to take a little time to foster shared ideals for the workplace culture. Even alluding to genocide is wildly over the top and I can understand if it offended some people, regardless of whether they had anything to do with the list.
Ok, but how is that relevant to making Basecamp better?
If he's disavowed and apologized for the list then this genocide point is just a big waste of time and a distraction. I can't see how it would achieve anything productive.
I do see the point, it's an argument that there exists a plausible slippery slope from (allegedly) quasi-racist jokes to genocide.
I just think it's sanctimonious, a total waste of time and a distraction to throw such incendiary and flamebait things out into the workplace's communication channels, especially if it's been apologized for already.
Yeah seriously. I’m the first to complain about wokeism (e.g. I disagree with a lot of claims of cultural appropriation), but there wasn’t anything unreasonable about the graphic there and dhh is really strawmanning it.
And yet, it's possible to have a direct conversation with someone where you say, I appreciate where you're coming from on this and I hear what you're saying, but in this place and time you escalated this conversation in an unproductive way and I'd like to talk to you about bringing more light than heat to what is a difficult conversation.
Going from "someone posted an ADL infographic about the pyramid of hate" to "we're cancelling all external benefits, DEI discussion group is cancelled, and nobody can talk about politics anymore in our office ever" is an insane overreaction.
It sounds as though the commity was trying to push a critical theory agenda, and the founders came down on it.
I agree.
On the other hand, it does sound as though basecamp is actually just a lifestyle company for the benefit of the founders, and once everyone realized that is the true 'mission', many left.
He disavowed it repeatedly, once he was criticized about it. He and Jason Fried were aware of it for years and had no issue with it until the dirty laundry started to smell.
So this "good faith" requirement seems like a huge gaping loophole, just a wonderfully easy way to dismiss and even censor a ton of people you merely disagree with. Whether or not they are arguing in good faith is so subjective and therefore the question of who you should hear out becomes the usual popularity contest: if you are sufficiently unpopular, it will be easy to convince people to dismiss someone as arguing in bad faith if they already dislike that person.
One example might convince you that this "good faith" rule is too restrictive if you agree with me on one premise, that ~90% of politicians regularly argue in bad faith. Yet most of us who agree with this do not as a rule claim that we will never hear them out.
I think the conversation is just a little more sophisticated than you imagine it to be.
And you can be generally in favor of free speech (!= the First Amendment) without accepting its more extreme interpretations. I mean, I'm guessing that you personally are too if you are like most people. For example, most of us would think that YT shouldn't censor either of two people saying (respectively) "Trump was elected in 2016 as a result of Russian disinformation" and "Trump was not elected in 2016 as a result of Russian disinformation."
The interesting question here is, "What speech should a privately-owned forum allow that its owners disagree with?"
How would you suggest a company like YT can "allow people to make up their own minds" about an issue if they do not "provide a platform for views" of that issue that they "don't share"?
Unless you are just making the point that YT censorship is more acceptable than government censorship (which I think everyone agrees with), then I'm not sure how you can have your cake and eat it to here.
Right. The actor matters a huge amount. We all agree on that.
But if you run a forum and say you will not allow any view to be expressed therein that you don't agree with, you aren't in fact "allowing people to make up their own minds"---unless by "allowing people" you just mean not actively harming them for expressing views in other places, or something equally wild.
Another way of saying it is that no one would say you are "tolerant" if you only "tolerate" behavior you agree with.
> But if you run a forum and say you will not allow any view to be expressed therein that you don't agree with, you aren't in fact "allowing people to make up their own minds"
I think you're missing their argument. YouTube censoring doesn't prevent information from being published elsewhere.
Yeah, I've definitely grasped their argument, which became clear once they clarified that "allowing people to make up their minds" doesn't mean "allowing content the owners disagree with" but rather "we won't try to criminalize this speech on other platforms." After all, if I were a publisher who refused to publish books with a certain viewpoint, in what other way could I say I (as opposed to the government, say, or the publishing industry as a whole) am "allowing people to make up their minds"?
(Sidenote: I do think YouTube and other corporate-run forums like that would welcome some regulation in the area, for two reasons: (1) they'd no longer be blamed for how they decide difficult content questions, and (2) it might make it more difficult for small startups to disrupt this space by increasing the legal barriers to entry.)
I think if you’ve decided that there is something wrong with the employer/employee relationship where hundreds spend their professional life working at someone else’s company, pushing ahead that person’s vision, and fulfilling that person’s goals, then you shouldn’t turn around and play an integral role in the same game you once despised, all because it’s much easier to succeed in business if you have a bunch of people devoting their working lives to your vision.
I don’t know how to escape that model at a wider scale, exactly, but if I were worth millions of dollars, I think I’d have the economic luxury to invest some time to figure out how.
I sincerely think that your CEOs of large companies are much less powerful than one would naturally think. They have money and power, but much of it is based on a group of people sympathetic to some pretty extreme views approving of you.
We call it “FU money,” but these guys aren’t satisfied with being able to say “FU” and still live comfortably; they want to be in charge of things that are seen as significant.
I believe it will always take more than money to get thousands of largely independent adults to do what you want.
I’m working at my job doing just fine. My employer is pretty happy and so am I. Then a new guy comes along and says, “I can do thorough’s job better than he can.” My boss hires him and she agrees. At length, she decides to keep the new guy and fire me because he’s meeting her needs better than I am. She doesn’t need to pay me anymore.
There are two happy people in this story and one unhappy one. But the fact that there is an unhappy one doesn’t seem like nearly enough to me to decide it shouldn’t have played out like it did.
Does it seem like enough to you? If not, what other common element would this story have to have to decide it shouldn’t have happened?
If the new guy doesn't follow regulations or doesn't pay taxes like you do (Airbnb, Uber) or if he somehow provides drugs to the boss and as a result she needs him day in and day out (Facebook), then this shouldn't have happened.
Sure, the vast majority will move on, but some will continue to live with a vague fear of being too near to other people. Personally, I find this thought very saddening, but I’m bracing myself for it and doing my best to make sure it doesn’t happen to me.