Woke at Work: Why tech firms are trying to run away from politics and failing

I'm not sure where we go from here, but not being able to escape anxiety-inducing situations in a workplace is the definition of a toxic work environment. I don't think the answer is a return to 20th century "no politics at work," but at the FAANG I worked at, politics was impossible to avoid. Even the desire to be apolitical is itself criticized at worst and not respected at best. Work doesn't afford the use of the "block user" button. I hope we figure out a better way that respects some people have a hard time immersing in it the way others do.

&gt; according to a new Harris poll commissioned by Paradigm, a diversity consultancy, more than two-thirds of adults in America want to be able to discuss racial-justice issues at work<p>I just plain do not believe this poll.

Boards should have more apprehension about their companies being exploited as political platforms by employees.<p>It&#x27;s as though there is a bargain where in exchange for boards tolerating staff radicalization, these employee groups cheerfully overlook the dystopian, totalitarian surveillance infrastructure, environmental devastation, and political corruption machines they seem to have zero problem building and managing on their behalf, and decieving users into depending on them. One doesn&#x27;t even need to take a side to recognize the bitterness and contempt in tech toward red state denizens. I&#x27;ve sat through numerous meetings where all the shibboleths were trotted out to make sure we were all on the same political page before senior executives engaged in what would be considered hate speech against working class people in any other context. If calling people &quot;trash&quot; isn&#x27;t hate speech, I really don&#x27;t know what is.<p>There still exists a group (perhaps even a majority) in society who are good and charitable people with an immense amount of tolerance for this stuff because they believe tolerance is the price of principles, and they&#x27;re only principles when they are hard to keep.<p>Radicalized platform company employees do not have a single moral leg to stand on in this regard. Bringing your whole self to work to build defacto social credit systems and partisan social engineering and surveillance tools is just moral licensing. Maybe that&#x27;s how they sleep at night. While they found a new way to take a few more minutes of peoples time to show them outrage and advertisements, at least they mouthed the right party lines in favor of distant oppressed people they don&#x27;t know personally?<p>I know a number of people in tech who sincerely believe they do not need to be good men or women by any standard because they are self justified by being engaged not in discourse, but ideological warfare. I used to think they were misguided idealists and I thought their passion could be used for good, but I&#x27;ve come to realize they are just dispicable.<p>All I can recommend is, don&#x27;t let yourself be bullied.

My problem with politics at work isn’t so much that it’s politics but more that it’s always idiotic performative horseshit. Like please stop pretending you want to “help” a group of people who disproportionately hold the jobs you are automating out of existence etc. More often than not it has more to do with a small number of individuals trying to get more power for themselves than a genuine desire to help anyone.

Most political discussions fall apart due to people&#x27;s inability to tolerate dissenting views. The inability to tolerate disagreement in a civil manner is likely just one cause.<p>The amygdala hijack kicks in and suddenly people are frothing at the mouth shouting and are then soon reaching for their metaphorical pitchforks. Online its all about silencing that dissention. Shut up! You can&#x27;t disagree! Steps are soon taken to make such disagreeing wrongthink disappear.<p>It suits a child-like yet patronising view of the world but really its anti-intellectual &#x2F; anti-diversity &#x2F; anti-tolerance.

I&#x27;m just trying to wrap my head around how skewed a poll taken by &quot;a diversity consultancy&quot; would conclude that: &quot;... two-thirds of adults in America want to be able to discuss racial-justice issues at work.&quot;

The reason why politics is traditionally frowned upon in the workplace is to avoid toxic peer pressure and the resulting uniformity.<p>It is illegal to discriminate against employees for their political opinions, religion, sexual orientation, race, ethnic background, etc. Allowing or even encouraging open political debates in the workplace jeopardizes it.

&gt; Coinbase and Basecamp, which each lost 60 employees after their bosses changed the rules, have apparently been inundated with applications from people wanting to work for politics-free firms.<p>Basecamp lost 20 employees. 60 would be nearly their entire workforce.<p>Coinbase did indeed lose 60 people out of around 1200 at the time.[0]<p>[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;technology&#x2F;story&#x2F;2020-10-08&#x2F;coinbase-losing-staffers-over-political-activism-ban" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;technology&#x2F;story&#x2F;2020-10-08...</a>

Politics is what it is precisely because it is vacuous - you signal allegiance and that is all. You as an individual cannot influence anything any more than discussing an incoming storm would influence its trajectory.<p>But unlike the storm we know that the results of what society produces are determined by the society. And people don&#x27;t realize or care that they as an individual are not society and have no influence over it in any meaningful capacity.<p>Many of our problems may be alleviated if game theory was a mandatory class in highschool. But then democracy would perhaps be in peril as people realize voting is as useless to them as is discussing politics. Tragedy of the commons can be a depressing thing.

I have no tolerance for politics at work. As far as woke at work goes, not too long ago someone in my office commented on slack &quot;I don&#x27;t approve of unnecessarily gendered emoji&quot; - I can&#x27;t even begin to imagine what sort of mind produces such thoughts. First world problems? No idea.

The weird thing is how it’s all seems so co-ordinated. As if the HR departments of every firm get their marching orders from some central advocacy group.

I always find myself amused at how the people who are involved in the political, social, and other flame wars in the workplace find time to do actual work. Just looking at the threads from earlier this week, I see a couple dozen people posting 50+ posts each every day for at least 2-3 days (each post is anywhere from a half-page to two pages of text with links, images, etc). It would take me at least 5-10 mins per post so we are looking at 6 hrs per day on average. Honestly it’s on low end since they also read other posts I would guess ;)

&gt; Why tech firms are trying to run away from politics—and failing<p>Really? Don&#x27;t be surprised when you manipulate the political sphere outside your walls in ways never seen in the history of the world and that politic creeps inside and devours you from within.

&gt; Coinbase and Basecamp, which each lost 60 employees after their bosses changed the rules, have apparently been inundated with applications from people wanting to work for politics-free firms.<p>Basecamp had 57 employees at the time of their announcement. Are they down to -3?

People are human. But work is work. The canonical point of a workplace is to come together to fulfill the aims of the entrepreneurs.<p>The personal aims of the workers are fulfilled best outside of work.<p>Just stop to think about it logically for a minute... is the workplace the best place to circulate a petition condemning something that has nothing to do with work?<p>The workplace necessarily is going to bring together people that do not agree on personal matters - but who best align on matters relating to... work.<p>Color me naive, but shouldn’t what happens in the office be about the office???<p>Shouldn’t we be advocating on non office things outside of the office??

Does anyone really believe that these giant companies actually care about the so-called &#x27;woke&#x27; values being foisted upon them?<p>Once companies realize that getting political is no longer a virtue (and by &#x27;virtuous&#x27; we mean anything that increases their bottom line), we&#x27;ll slowly start seeing sanity crawl back to the workplace. I&#x27;m glad to see <i>some</i> companies clearing that path.

Sometimes if I have a spare moment and a thought pops into my head I&#x27;ll put it into a notes app. Sometimes I&#x27;ll go back and expand these notes to the point where I&#x27;ve essentially got a blog post. I&#x27;ve got dozens of these but I&#x27;m just too afraid to post them. It&#x27;s not that I&#x27;m saying anything terribly provocative either, it&#x27;s mostly about coding and my experiences living in Japan.<p>Yet there&#x27;s always going to be a way of weaponizing what I&#x27;ve written against me - no matter how petty or far fetched.<p>Perhaps I&#x27;m not important enough for that to happen. But if that were to change there&#x27;ll be this massive trove of thing&#x27;s I&#x27;ve written and people with the time to deep dive through it. And then label me a racist, a misogynist, an ageist, a transphobe or any number of other words which can so swiftly destroy a person yet to make their fuck you money.

They&#x27;re reaping what they&#x27;ve sowed, so I don&#x27;t exactly feel bad about big tech firms trying to flee &quot;wokeness&quot; (read: performative activism that hurts its causes more than it helps them) and finding out they won&#x27;t be able to do so that easily, as it&#x27;s exactly the kind of environment they&#x27;ve cultivated and the sort of people they&#x27;ve catered to for the past decade. Everything you do can be construed as a political statement in one way or another, and if you make an ideological battleground out of a workplace you&#x27;ll be asking for trouble down the road.

This &#x27;article&#x27; is very short, and the evidence of &#x27;failing&#x27; to run away from politics is dropped in the second last sentence.<p>I think there is a big difference between having a discussion about politics at work, and <i>using</i> your workplace as a tool to forward your political agenda. Somewhere in the middle is using company resources as a platform for (not directly work-related) political discussion.<p>Although I dislike the way that most employers take advantage of unequal power distributions with employees, I don&#x27;t see any real issue with a company saying &quot;our policy is to leave politics for non-work time&quot;. At some point as an employee you are actually expected to do things that your employer wants, and if you are doing non-work why should the company pay for it unless it&#x27;s part of your work agreement?<p>A company transitioning between different policies is a challenging situation, and for a company in the public eye that will almost inevitably generate controversy, but actually &quot;letting the market decide&quot; about this issue seems good. It means that there are companies at various points on the politics-at-work spectrum that employees can choose from.

&gt; &quot;according to a new Harris poll commissioned by Paradigm, a diversity consultancy, more than two-thirds of adults in America want to be able to discuss racial-justice issues at work&quot;<p>Of course it does, they are a diversity consultancy (whatever the heck that is)

I see a lot of anti-politics-at-work commentary here. This makes me wonder what the posters would do working for companies that have an explicit social agenda. If the politics are baked into the company, does that void the &quot;politics and work should be separate&quot; point?

You don&#x27;t really see them running away.<p>The big 4&#x2F;5 are doubling down in their wokeness and courses that have a very American &amp; democrat slant with absolutely no space for discourse because there&#x27;s really nothing to gain, risking your job to fight a corporate machine that analyzes woke actions as a sort of compliance of PR to keep appearances.<p>You either sing the political tune or try to remain neutral. Censorship of a lot of ideas&#x2F;opinions have become so normal and demanded even (FB, Twitter, Google, etc) that &quot;those that bring themselves&quot; will mostly be those furthering the woke narrative.<p>It&#x27;s funny how Israel creates a conundrum because it&#x27;s the one place were the bipartisan support from the US clashes with the woke view so they&#x27;re trying to suppress it as fast as possible.

I&#x27;m trying to avoid getting involved in politics online. I have a bad habit of speaking my mind and getting into arguments. I&#x27;m starting to realize I&#x27;m not doing anyone any good, especially me. I think we are struggling to live in a world where everyone&#x27;s opinion is everywhere. For me at least, I need to learn to live and let live.

A feature of US work culture is that you invest your “whole self” into work. As in work isn’t just a thing you do for money, but a calling... Additionally, there’s a lack of basic social services. Those that do well can carry guilt, this leads to USs tipping culture, among other things.. also in the US private companies wield a lot of political power and capital.<p>Companies work in this context to attract talent. And people look to large powerful employers to large, important projects for social good. This could mean working at SpaceX to colonize Mars or wanting AWS to have carbon neutral data centers. I want to at least hope my company isn’t a soulless behemoth, but actually lives up to the mission or advertising.<p>So it’s only natural any kind of social or political issue is going to fall into this category. Including issues of racial equity...<p>Of course the market can decide what things here they want in companies they work at. It’s not a black and white “politics or no politics” line. Everything and anything can be political.

People are bored at work. This leads to politics at work - especially fashionable politics of the day.<p>Same as with people who are bored in general.

Companies provide too much freedom and they are too afraid to punish employees for not doing actual work they are paid to do. Not to mention not punishing those who create toxic unproductive work environment for others by pushing political agendas at work. This leads to workplace radicalization when arrogant self-proclaimed judges of other people morals and executioners of other people careers behave as uncontrolled passive-aggressive troublemakers.

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The only reason this is an issue in the first place is the outsized, insane amount of influence these firms have over our society and culture. It wouldn&#x27;t be as interesting (or consequential) if these guys were in Ford or GM (in fact it&#x27;s not rare for unions to have stated political positions).

The problem isn&#x27;t politics, though. The problem is that you have two mainstream belief systems that do not share the same reality, that are mutually exclusive. One has to be completely wrong. This is not about perceived polarization, black-and-white thinking and stuff. Those camps live in two different worlds, and the truth isn&#x27;t somewhere in between. They don&#x27;t disagree about some facts, they disagree more fundamentally about the question how facts are produced.<p>Naturally, the people in-between or the ones that are silent are seen as an enabler of the other side. And to a certain degree, in this polarized situation, that is true. After all, the other side wants to take away your fundamental rights. And again, that is factually true - the other side does want to take away or not grant some rights from&#x2F;to you, and you see those rights as fundamental.<p>So the question is, can you ignore and escape politics? Should you? Do you have to get involved? Well, generally, you should get involved - of course: Society doesn&#x27;t work otherwise. However, in this situation, its understandable if you skip out, with tensions running that high.<p>But then how can these two camps can ever come together? The solution can certainly not be that two separate groups enforce themselves in their beliefs - because unfortunately, it seems that this only works by vilifying the other side, only increasing tensions.<p>So it seems that talking politics at work is the lesser of two evils? Or is it too late for that and stuff&#x27;s just gone too far?

There’s a very good reason there is an old tradition against politics and religion at work. You’re there to get stuff done, and topics like that tend to derail things.

I absolutely do not talk about politics at work. I really don&#x27;t want my career derailed because someone doesn&#x27;t think I&#x27;m progressive <i>enough</i>.

I wonder why companies don&#x27;t take advantage of such rivalries. Separate the wokes from the unwokes and make them compete who will deliver first

As with anything, we need to ask ourselves how something can be used to attack political enemies and punish outsiders. The woke politics thing is dangerous, and I think organizations (like the CIA) will ultimately be the ones to wield this power against the people, even if they haven&#x27;t fully mechanized it yet. That is because this isn&#x27;t just &quot;politics&quot; as the article asserts. This is a form of ambiguous morality (one is expected to just know when something is wrong, and everyone is expected to agree) which requires the use of an oracle (CoC, D&amp;I council, etc) that exists outside of the traditionally enumerable, rules-based systems based on the rule of law, except that it additionally can&#x27;t be questioned or opted out of. This is the most ideal thing imagineable for people who want to weaponize the workplace to achieve their own ends. Proponents of this system, beware.

I just listened to a conversation where Sam Harris paints a bleak picture after having spoken with leaders in tech.<p>Sam Harris (SH):<p>I was recently at a meeting of very connected people in tech and media. I won&#x27;t name anyone but they are people who are or were running some of the biggest companies. These are people with massive influence and are on the same page with everything we&#x27;ve said here. But when told that they really should just present a united front here and not tolerate these mutinies of their woke employees. So the example I gave in this meeting is ... (Sam goes over the situation of Nicholas Christakis at Yale, omitted for brevity) ... So I floated that example to these captains of industry, and said at what point do your companies just hold the line? And say: if you feel that way go work somewhere else. And everyone in the room agreed that that was not going to happen, that there was no way that was going to happen.<p>Jesse Singal (JS):<p>Just because of the backlash you mean?<p>SH:<p>Yeah that it has gone too far, it&#x27;s too scary, there is too much money to lose. It went over like a lead balloon, it was a complete non-starter. I kept pushing it, the people in this room literally know everybody, you could have a star chamber meeting where everyone agreed to be on the same page here, so that the mutineers from Google couldn&#x27;t just jump over to Amazon or Facebook or Apple. You could literally get everyone to agree to just wake up simultaneously. They said: there&#x27;s no way it&#x27;s going to happen. It&#x27;s over. It was an incredibly bleak picture coming from people who either are at the top or were at the top of some of the biggest businesses in tech and media. Which suggested to me that the situation is worse than I thought, not better.<p>The above is a partial transcript of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=M18mvHPN9mY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=M18mvHPN9mY</a> from 36:55 forward.

I disagree with the entire premise of this article, and the statements it makes to prove it’s points are flimsy.<p>The first three sentences:<p>&gt; When at work, steer clear of politics. This rule, generally accepted around the world, does not apply in techland. Employees bring their “whole self to work”, including their political beliefs.<p>As a software manager who has worked at a handful of companies I never once found this statement to be true. I’ve been around people who formed friendships at work and became comfortable enough to discuss political events among themselves on breaks - but never once met someone who thought that it was an acceptable topic for general discussion at the office.<p>&gt; Internal online forums are full of heated debates<p>Ok yes, this is a problem and it might be more problematic for tech companies who might be more willing to have internal forms. I believe society as a whole has failed to follow our own interaction guidelines when online. It’s too easy to cross the line without the immediate vocal or visual cues you get in person or on the phone.<p>&gt; Digital technology has always had a political bent<p>I disagree and the argument that apple is ‘counterculture’ is their marketing agenda and has nothing to do with the technology.<p>&gt; Technological shifts have tended to be framed in political terms<p>I disagree with this too. Open source is simply what it is. Beyond that one argument, it’s such a broad statement it’s insane. Yes, politics likes to frame change in favorable terms- that has nothing to do with the technology shifts themselves.<p>&gt; tech firms have felt obliged to offer plenty of perks, such as free food, but also “work that aligns with personal values”<p>How does wanting to have a positive impact on the world have anything to do with the tech field? Only thing I can think of is that there is a lot of really shady tech out their now- anything from tracking people to AI for drones. I don’t want to work for them. I also don’t want to work for a payday loan company- nothing to do with one being a tech company.<p>&gt; One reason is that more than in other sectors, discussions in tech firms mostly take place over Slack and other corporate communication services<p>Back to my first concession- this is the root cause of the problem, and with so many offices closed now isn’t really a ‘tech’ problem anymore. Society as a whole needs to learn to to behave in a asynchronous environment.

One part of the article:<p>This is about a guy who wrote a book on his own time, published it outside of work.<p>Someone did not like some parts of the book and the guy had to quit his job?<p>There is nothing to suggest the man acted improperly at work.<p>I write fictional stories in my spare time (never at work), I enjoy doing it. Some people enjoy reading them (I can&#x27;t figure out why)<p>It is a sad day for a Democracy when I am supposed to worry about what self-appointed political officers acting entirely outside of HR, will feel about what I write.<p>That is an autocratic regime. Soon we will have struggle sessions at work.

I&#x27;m curious why it&#x27;s a binary thing. The debate seems to wage between two camps: OnlyWorkRelated vs BareItAll.<p>The truth is, I want neither extreme. I want a nice comfortable balance that my peers and can both tolerate. I appreciate being able to &quot;solve the world&#x27;s problems&quot; with fellow workers, but not all day. And especially when it starts to get emotional. I find that humor and self deprecation are great ingredients to throw in the mix when I think things are spiraling. In either direction.

“When at work, steer clear of politics. This rule, generally accepted around the world, does not apply in techland.”<p>Sure, let’s just ignore the long and important history of organized labor around the world. They’re imagining a fantasy land of white collar labor, which in the west was historically white and male. For everyone not in that sliver of white collar work, work for sure was a place where politics were both discussed and engaged in.

As someone straddling the line between gen x and millennials, the concept of partnering with your corporate bosses to advocate for political causes far astray from your company&#x27;s products, particularly without regard for the ability of capitalism to co-opt that energy in a cynical pursuit of profit, is basically insane to me.<p>It seems like people have become so desperate to fill the widening void of meaning and purpose that they are willing to graft it even onto their at-will employment contract.<p>And as someone who watched the internet exponentiate the number of niche subjects and communities it shocks me how much homogeneity there seems to be in how people think and speak today.

Eventually people will lose trust in the system, and will only work as hard as to not get fired. Like they did under Communism. Just a general decline in morale of the country. And lowering of standards of everything produced. This was also coupled with having secret police like the Stasi, and job site informants. Something like 1&#x2F;3 of the population was making reports on their fellow citizens in East Germany. And work was the primary place to get dirt on someone. Any sign of not being a True believer in the system could get you reported. People should fear the authoritarian left, as much as the authoritarian right. Having communist party affiliation meant you could be terrible at your job, and be promoted. Having party connections, also meant your kids could go to University, with terrible grades. Get cars or housing, when others had to wait years.

This gets tricky when employers ask workers to internalize the company values (incorporating them into their identities). Probably helps with retention, but then you get everything else that comes with identity. If you represent the company, and vice versa, it&#x27;s only natural to want the company to use its influence in ways that embody that, even if it seems superfluous from a purely financial standpoint.<p>There&#x27;s a case to be made that we should tone back the importance of work in all of our lives, which would potentially help with these issues. I understand the need to defend minorities from bigots, and even from milder, less intentional forms of discrimination&#x2F;bias that can accumulate over the years to cause a strong drag on your life. I still like to think there are ways to do that without a lot of outrage and constant, inane meetings, but who knows.

&gt; Technological shifts have tended to be framed in political terms, as was the case with open-source software, which initially had an anti-capitalist impetus.<p>This is not true at all. The idea behind free software was always that if you bought it or it was given to you, you should own it entirely. This is very free market. It was anti predatory in nature, and overall political motivations to support it ranged, but the bent was very libertarian. It was opposition to abuse of customers or users and opposition to monopoly and cartel formation, and where it was focused on community building it has always been based on the principle of free association, a foundational libertarian value.<p>Beyond that gripe, I think the reason for the push against politics at work is because people are tired of being immersed in politics 24&#x2F;7 whether they like it or not, being and just inundated with every conceivable political anything all the time. Party politics, ideological politics, a constant demand to pick a (very particular) side or face professional repercussions, it is exhausting. More specifically, there&#x27;s a certain political ideology that has a mantra &quot;everything is political&quot; and I think people are sick of appeasing them and playing their game because they vehemently scream at the top of their lungs every chance they get that they&#x27;re the super good guys and call everyone that disagrees with them evil.

I don&#x27;t want a work &quot;family&quot;. I don&#x27;t want to be on camera or see coworkers on camera. It is a trope now but <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.phrack.org&#x2F;issues&#x2F;7&#x2F;3.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.phrack.org&#x2F;issues&#x2F;7&#x2F;3.html</a>

Cancel culture ruins free speech and free thought. Just keep politics out at work. Severely punish sexist and racist behavior. it&#x27;s pretty simple. People will avoid wearing their politics on their sleeve. I think there should be a company wide dictate that you don&#x27;t have to listen to anyone who tries to drag you into it and that you can take it to HR when someone tries to force your hand. Work is for work. I don&#x27;t want to go there and become a social warrior. I donate to liberal political groups all the time but I don&#x27;t think that has anything to do with my coding or working with others. Honestly I don&#x27;t care about you or your politics at work, please leave me out of it.

Don&#x27;t talk politics. Don&#x27;t talk about how much you make. Just do as you are told!

I try to keep personal interests and views for myself while staying open to discuss any politics that the company is involved in. That can range from internal &quot;woke topics&quot; to external matters like doing business in countries with governments that don&#x27;t care. The important thing is to stick to facts instead of personal opinion. It&#x27;s not so difficult and if more people did it, the workplace would be much more pleasant for everyone.<p>I&#x27;m always confused that politics at work can now mean either internal corporate career politics or politics in society. Still, I think it applies to both types.

A major part of &quot;politics at work&quot; is actually politics <i>about</i> the workplace -- see also, the recent Basecamp kerfuffle, which turned out to be about actions taken by employees in the office. Trying to ban politics is well and good, but what happens when the politics are about things that happened in your office?<p>Politics are inevitable. Companies ought to try to manage discussion realistically, rather than covering their eyes and ignoring the problem.

Time and place : the place for political debate.<p>Your Place : the place where you have such freedoms as you wish.<p>Work Place : the place we work together with other dedicated professionals in order to fulfil given tasks so that we can enjoy :<p>A Place : the rightful place in society earned by individuals who abide by the rules and contribute positively to their social environment without causing damage, harm, upset or unfair expenses for others.<p>No Place : the place for woke campaigning folk in a healthy society.

I suspect they want to get rid of ethically-minded employees who could potentially become whistle-blowers later when they find out how the company really makes its money.<p>The next step will be to start increasing the salaries and bonuses of remaining employees.<p>If you&#x27;re ethically-minded, the best strategy is to stay in the company, pretend to be one of them, then when you catch them doing something bad, blow the whistle on them.

I’m just here for the jamming of “x” into words:<p>Latinx, womxn, etc.

This isn’t surprising, largely a consequence I think of the ‘Bowling Alone’ phenomenon, such that people don’t do much outside of work anymore which allows the expression or development of political views.<p>I also think that deep down some tech workers feel guilty about how much they earn (wokeness generally entails self-flagellation), and this manifests as workplace activism.

What I learned recently is that a lot of the &quot;woke&quot; efforts in these large public companies are directed by boards who are answering to Wall St, who are answering to elites and politicians. It&#x27;s no wonder none of the &quot;wokism&quot; feels so in-your-face instead of genuine and organic.

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It&#x27;s usually the people with no life outside of work that insist on politics at work.

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I guess politics are reserved for the higher-ups.

Are we allowed to discuss the fact that, nine times out of ten, it&#x27;s women, not men, bringing politics to work? I&#x27;ve noticed this pattern in every place I&#x27;ve worked.

I am really trying but I still have no idea what &quot;being woke&quot; means. I would like to try being woke tomorrow - what do I do?

Why was the title edited here?

Looking at this thread, references to Nazis, KKK etc. are fairly frequent.<p>One of the curses of the woke movement is the loss of the ability to distinguish between really bad things and banalities. Nothing is banal anymore.<p>If a Cuban guy writes something unflattering about SV women in his book, it might not be pretty, but it is a far cry from &quot;let&#x27;s roll our armored brigades through the continent, enslave unwanted ethnic groups and gas millions of people as subhumans&quot; or &quot;lynch blacks and terrorize entire cities&quot;.<p>Signatories of the &quot;fire him&quot; letter do not seem to distinguish that anymore. That is the fruit of the victim mentality tree, watered with everyday Twitter outrage. Nothing is banal and every crisis must be escalated to verbal equivalent of nuclear war.<p>I wonder if tech rotted our minds. Social networks are full of vicious, all-out conflicts that nevertheless do not cause any visible physical destruction and fatalities - or at least, most of the time. Thus, we are losing our ability to de-escalate, compromise and move beyond. But precisely this ability is the core of diplomacy, as opposed to constant wars that plagued the world previously. This is a dangerous way to go. It feels like a prelude to the religious wars of the 1600s and 1700s. [0]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Odium_theologicum" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Odium_theologicum</a>

tip: Disable javascript to get around the paywall<p>I&#x27;m a huge fan of what Coinbase and Basecamp have done. Coinbase is thriving and Basecamp <i>appears</i> to be no worse for wear. I hope we see a continuance of this trend; whereby we continue to encourage DE&amp;I whilst keeping the worst and most toxic topics out of day to day business.

Meanwhile at Basecamp: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;world.hey.com&#x2F;dhh&#x2F;after-the-storm-9370f871" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;world.hey.com&#x2F;dhh&#x2F;after-the-storm-9370f871</a><p>I hope there will be more anti-woke companies in the near future where I can <i>work</i> instead of getting distracted by brainwashed wokes.

&gt; Alphabet, Google’s parent, had to deal with another internal petition circulating among employees, this one calling on the firm’s leadership to make a statement “recognising the violence in Palestine and Israel”.<p>:facepalm: corporations, like nation states, now(ish) are lobbied to take geopolitical stances.

They invited it in and fostered it. I say they get what they deserve.

Why can’t we just let the market sort it out? Let the people who want to talk politics all day start, lead, and work at firms that encourage it. And those that don’t will do the same.<p>It’s my same issue with socialists who want democratic control of companies. If it’s so obviously better, why not start one yourself? Or use government money to do so (socialists, after all). I just wish everyone would voluntarily associate and live their best lives rather than forcing a “one size fits all” approach to every problem. We live in the greatest time ever for expressing yourself in any myriad of ways. Just live and let live.

Politics of any kind should definitely be banned from work. Activist types that want to shove their ideology into other people&#x27;s throat can definitely do that during their free time where other people can at least avoid their presence. There are always plenty of like-minded woke friends to be found from Twitter or r&#x2F;socialism.

Its heavily paywalled.. I&#x27;d love to read it though

The challenge is defining the line between what’s considered politics and not. For example, would applying gender pronoun titles to internal corporate profile pages be considered politics or not

This sort of stuff happens when society reaches a level of prosperity so high that it starts worrying about nonsense<p>None of this happens in Mexico<p>The US needs to import fresh blood and fresh brains if it wants to survive.<p>Less people studying social trends and more studying consumer trends.

&gt; last week Alphabet, Google’s parent, had to deal with another internal petition circulating among employees, this one calling on the firm’s leadership to make a statement “recognising the violence in Palestine and Israel”.<p>It&#x27;s a special kind of hubris to believe that despite over a thousand years of conflict in the region, the right people to comprehensively understand and solve the problem are some people who make a search engine from the other side of the planet.

These problems fix themselves given enough time. Less productive firms go out of business and take their cultures with them.<p>Social norms are <i>evolved</i>, not designed.