Basecamp founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson violated a cardinal rule of the internet last week. It’s said that the internet has one main character every day, and your job is not be it, and they failed pretty spectacularly.
In response to an internal struggle over diversity and inclusion, they publicly announced that the company would no longer allow political discussion at work and would become a “mission focused” company, following in the footsteps of Coinbase and a few others.
“No politics at work” may sound like common sense to some.
The problem is, of course, that “No Politics at Work” never really means “No Politics at Work.” What it really means is that the management will determine what is and is not politics, and will not entertain any discussion that makes them feel uncomfortable about their politics. The company will continue to have politics, will continue to be political, and will continue to advance political goals - it will just do so at the sole discretion of the management, which will exercise its power to squelch internal discussion of those politics.
DHH, for example, is a prominent entrepreneur who has testified in front of Congress on political topics that are directly related to his business, he regularly opines on political topics on Twitter, and maintains a blog where he writes on these topics even more extensively than he tweets. His actions in the public sphere make Basecamp an inherently political organisation. He would not have the public stature he does if not for the company and for the fruits born of its employees.
What this really means is that DHH and Fried has decided that they will only engage in politics that make themselves, personally, comfortable. DHH said as much himself in this blog post.
I’ve read some opinions on all of this that charge that facilitating these kinds of discussions, however acrimonious or uncomfortable or unresolved, is actually good, because a lot of life right now is acrimonious, uncomfortable, and unresolved, so work should reflect that. I can’t get behind those arguments. As I wrote in the segment posted from our internal announcement of the changes, all of that, inasmuch as it does not directly relate to the business, is already so much of everyone’s lives all the time on Twitter, Facebook, or wherever. Demanding that it also has to play out in our shared workspaces isn’t going to lead anywhere good, in my opinion.
In short, these conversations made him uncomfortable so he banned them. To him, they are just pointless arguments on Twitter that people can opt out of by closing a browser window.
Except that what is “politics” to someone like DHH is existence to some of his workers. What he is telling his employees is “if something makes you uncomfortable, I don’t want to hear about it because it might then also make me uncomfortable.” And then, by continuing to engage public, affirmative activism on his pet political issues, he’s showing his hand that he will only engage in politics that he can do from a place of comfort.
The “funny” names list understandably made some employees uncomfortable and, rather than hear about how and why that was the case because it would then make him also uncomfortable, he told everyone to shut up and get back to work, invalidating their concerns.