A few weeks before David Heinemeier Hansson announced a policy at his company that subsequently resulted in a third of his employees abruptly quitting (with more very possibly on the way), he and I had a brief email exchange about Glenn Greenwald. Hansson had written a post talking about how much he disliked the reaction Greenwald received from people online, and about how he's slowly started to buy into the claims of "conservative censorship" online.
What I wrote him boiled down to: possibly, perhaps, people disliked Glenn Greenwald because he was an asshole.
What David wrote back was: no, it's a conspiracy.
Today, you can find plenty of people on Twitter decrying "wokeness" or "cancel culture" as the reason why Basecamp somehow found itself paying severance packages for a huge chunk of its now-former workers, including its Head of Design and Head of Marketing. It's a sentiment that Glenn Greenwald endorses too, as do plenty of the people forming the new "counter"-culture that Greenwald belongs to: Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Andrew Sullivan, who's still disturbingly open to the possibility that white people are genetically smarter than non-white people.
(I've been thinking about this Andrew Sullivan meme all week, incidentally. Just gives me a tickle.)
I've been a fan of Basecamp's since before they were called Basecamp. The attitude they evinced this week can't be called new. They debuted their original company, 37signals, with a manifesto called "Getting Real" that starkly, bluntly described what they felt people were getting wrong about developing web applications. Their subsequent books take a similarly harsh tone about business: they call a spade a spade, and stupid people stupid. At times, this is refreshing. Other times, it can feel aggressive, cocky, and even douchey.
Before he deleted his online presence altogether, a pseudonymous programmer I used to adore named "why the lucky stiff" tweeted this about David:
What I wrote him boiled down to: possibly, perhaps, people disliked Glenn Greenwald because he was an asshole.
What David wrote back was: no, it's a conspiracy.
Today, you can find plenty of people on Twitter decrying "wokeness" or "cancel culture" as the reason why Basecamp somehow found itself paying severance packages for a huge chunk of its now-former workers, including its Head of Design and Head of Marketing. It's a sentiment that Glenn Greenwald endorses too, as do plenty of the people forming the new "counter"-culture that Greenwald belongs to: Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Andrew Sullivan, who's still disturbingly open to the possibility that white people are genetically smarter than non-white people.
(I've been thinking about this Andrew Sullivan meme all week, incidentally. Just gives me a tickle.)
I've been a fan of Basecamp's since before they were called Basecamp. The attitude they evinced this week can't be called new. They debuted their original company, 37signals, with a manifesto called "Getting Real" that starkly, bluntly described what they felt people were getting wrong about developing web applications. Their subsequent books take a similarly harsh tone about business: they call a spade a spade, and stupid people stupid. At times, this is refreshing. Other times, it can feel aggressive, cocky, and even douchey.
Before he deleted his online presence altogether, a pseudonymous programmer I used to adore named "why the lucky stiff" tweeted this about David:
trying to reading dhh's articles on himself, but his website is so drenched in axe body spray that it has more of a tear gas effect
This was over a decade ago. Even then, David had a reputation for being contentious—not just arrogant, but proud of the fights he managed to find himself in. He likes to position himself as a champion of sane thinking, not to mention free speech. That people are mad at him proves how controversial (and therefore... correct??) his takes are. It's the same stance favored by Fox News correspondents, Donald Trump and his political flunkies, and stand-up comedians who like to say the word "fuck" and use their middle finger.
I don't love grouping David in with that lot. Hell, I don't like grouping him in with the likes of Glenn Greenwald either, but David grouped himself in first. It's not that I don't admire people with the courage to speak out against the crowd. And it's not that I don't appreciate how fun it can be to relish your haters, and bask in their resentment of you. But when you get self-absorbed with your own controversy, you start to celebrate, not the idea, but the furor. You get caught up in the purported righteousness of your task. And the people you draw to you tend to be, not just people who agree with you, but people who, like you, are spoiling for a fight.
When I was 18, I wrote a tech blog. For a little while, it was getting popular—enough so that I could've gone somewhere with it and made a splash. And at some point, because I was 18 and messy, I wrote a thing about men and women that wound up in some very dicey territory, got into a debate over it that pushed me, hot-headedly and kneejerkishly, into saying some gross shit that I hadn't thought much about and shouldn't have argued, and then a notoriously hotheaded-but-principled guy in tech called me out, publicly, on being a gross little puke.
Public dressing-down sucks. I don't recommend it. I was young and messed up and did not gain a whole lot out of a man decades older than me being furiously, relentlessly angry at me in public. Though I will also admit that, when other people attempted to patiently help me see why the things I said were a bit, uh, iffy, I entirely failed to take the hint.
At the time, quite a number of people emailed me private words of support. I needed that. I felt absolutely wretched, and had hated myself plenty before I said some dumb shit and got chewed out by one of my low-key idols, so kind words meant a lot to me right then. Even so, I couldn't help but notice how many of the people writing me were viewing me as something that I'd never meant to be: as a truth-teller, speaking up to some imagined power, fighting against some oppressive authority that just couldn't handle my telling them what was what. These beleaguered men—somehow, they were all men—had finally found somebody who was willing to voice their private feelings, their buried resentments, and in their gratitude to me, they couldn't help but let some of those resentments slip as well.
I wound up deleting my blog and hiding away from any kind of public-facing role for a while after that. What made me hide wasn't the man who dressed me down. It was the people who wrote me in support. I saw the kind of following I could have, if I chased the controversy. I saw how easily I could keep going that way, using sharp words to combine my theories and my feelings, without taking care to see how the feelings prejudiced the theories. And I saw how much the people writing me wanted confirmation—and wanted things to end right there. Amidst my misery, I was asking myself: "What if I was wrong?" The people writing me weren't asking that. In fact, they were encouraging me to stop asking that myself.
I think it's important to stand up for what you believe in, to grow a bit of a spine, to let yourself occupy a little pocket of the world. And I'm critical of the ways our culture encourages us to feel grievance and outrage, loudness outcries drowning out the tender spaces where we actually develop. I find it easy to empathize with David, and continue to think that he fundamentally means to do well, fundamentally cares about doing good. But to the extent that I take issue with his approach to things, it's always been wrapped up in how eager he is to turn disagreement into feud. I wasn't surprised when he wrote in support of Greenwald and Taibbi, because those are two even-more-prominent instances of men deciding that their critics are part of a conspiratorial social force, and doubling down on their insistence that they're champions fighting back against a darkness.
Good people can get caught up in that, and it's a shame when it happens. Matt Taibbi at his best is fantastic! He still does great work semi-frequently. But when he's bad, ooooooof, it's hard to watch.
The man who called my 18-year-old ass out, Zed Shaw, is a frequently contentious man. He cusses a lot. He gets angry in public. He has made a fair amount of enemies, I suspect. But he never revels in that. It's not a part of his self-definition. Does he let himself be angry and sharp and opinionated? Sure, and I suspect he'd argue that that suits many of the things he tries to say. But he leaves himself out of the equation: he is the vessel for the things he puts out, and lets those things speak for themselves. As a consequence, you pretty much have to take the things he says and does on their own merit, and form an opinion of them yourself (unless you borrow someone else's). He remains the sum of his parts, rather than defining himself as the self-interpretation of those parts, and of people's reactions to him, on and on and on, yadda yadda yadda.
There was a point, reading David's explanation of the Basecamp fiasco, where you can see exactly where his interpretation of events differs from his employees'. Someone shares a diagram showing how minor incidents of apathetic xenophobia—making fun of names from other cultures—is part of a larger framework that includes more serious racism and even genocide, and David interprets that as an accusation that Basecamp, personally, endorses genocide. In a measured conversation, somebody can then say "Oh, no, that's not what that means at all!" and everybody has a laugh and the tensions simmer down. Instead, David decided that this kind of language belongs to a conspiratorial movement designed to oppress him personally, and pushed to ban internal political discussion, and now a third of his company is gone.
I'm not a fan of that sort of orders-of-magnitude rhetoric, because in my experience nobody responds to it well. David's not the first person, and he won't be the last, who sees the word "genocide" on a poster and goes wide-eyed with disbelief. But, like I said when discussing the people earlier this week who were calling Basecamp's executives "white supremacists," there's a difference between not loving the delivery of an idea and not loving the idea itself. That's what defines a tone argument, after all: refusing to entertain an idea because you dislike the emotional way in which it's been delivered. And far too many people receive criticism, dislike the way it makes them feel, and decide that their critics are unilaterally in the wrong. By the time you're defining yourself by the fact that you have critics, you're pushing away from the fact that things you think, things you express, things you share, are going to be picked up by others and contended with, disagreed with, reacted to. Sometimes, people will think you're wrong. Sometimes, people will be angry. If you start thinking highly of yourself just because you make people angry, you'll wind up in a place where you'll never think of yourself as wrong or unjust—and there's no easier way to open yourself up to the possibility of becoming both.
I'm not saying I love it when people call me wrong, let alone stupid or mean or evil. And I don't love that we're increasingly encouraged to crank our disagreements with others up to 11, to immediately castigate them as agents of evil or accuse them of sociopathicy or narcissism or BPD or whatever other clinical term we use to mean "deserving of our judgment". But embracing controversy is its own kind of outrage culture, its own kind of fostered grievance. And it produces the same result: an environment in which conscientiousness and empathy gives way to paranoid feelings of self-righteousness, in which everybody's an enemy the moment they deviate from you in the slightest.
I can't say I'm entirely surprised by the Basecamp walkouts. And I think the situation is a lot more nuanced than some of the folks cheering the walkouts are making it out to be. I still largely think of Basecamp as a company that's passionately dedicated to making people happier, and I think that that vision comes directly from its executives. I love using HEY, I love writing on HEY World, and I'll gladly pay for another year of both when my bill comes round. Jason and David are both good people, by and large. But at some point, they became more than people: they became leaders, both of the company they owned and of the vast and broad discussion which their writings and opinions have fostered. Once you take control of something larger than yourself, it's your responsibility to be receptive.
This week, the Basecamp executives failed to be receptive to people who were loudly telling them there was a problem, and they let their belief that they were principled for their embrace of discontent get in the way of examining where that discontent came from. They've damaged their company and, likely, their brand—perhaps irreparably so. Who do you think they'll blame? Themselves, for steering their company towards an easily-avoidable disaster? Or their critics, for trying to silence them, those much-maligned tech executives who dared speak truth to power?
I'm not a fan of that sort of orders-of-magnitude rhetoric, because in my experience nobody responds to it well. David's not the first person, and he won't be the last, who sees the word "genocide" on a poster and goes wide-eyed with disbelief. But, like I said when discussing the people earlier this week who were calling Basecamp's executives "white supremacists," there's a difference between not loving the delivery of an idea and not loving the idea itself. That's what defines a tone argument, after all: refusing to entertain an idea because you dislike the emotional way in which it's been delivered. And far too many people receive criticism, dislike the way it makes them feel, and decide that their critics are unilaterally in the wrong. By the time you're defining yourself by the fact that you have critics, you're pushing away from the fact that things you think, things you express, things you share, are going to be picked up by others and contended with, disagreed with, reacted to. Sometimes, people will think you're wrong. Sometimes, people will be angry. If you start thinking highly of yourself just because you make people angry, you'll wind up in a place where you'll never think of yourself as wrong or unjust—and there's no easier way to open yourself up to the possibility of becoming both.
I'm not saying I love it when people call me wrong, let alone stupid or mean or evil. And I don't love that we're increasingly encouraged to crank our disagreements with others up to 11, to immediately castigate them as agents of evil or accuse them of sociopathicy or narcissism or BPD or whatever other clinical term we use to mean "deserving of our judgment". But embracing controversy is its own kind of outrage culture, its own kind of fostered grievance. And it produces the same result: an environment in which conscientiousness and empathy gives way to paranoid feelings of self-righteousness, in which everybody's an enemy the moment they deviate from you in the slightest.
I can't say I'm entirely surprised by the Basecamp walkouts. And I think the situation is a lot more nuanced than some of the folks cheering the walkouts are making it out to be. I still largely think of Basecamp as a company that's passionately dedicated to making people happier, and I think that that vision comes directly from its executives. I love using HEY, I love writing on HEY World, and I'll gladly pay for another year of both when my bill comes round. Jason and David are both good people, by and large. But at some point, they became more than people: they became leaders, both of the company they owned and of the vast and broad discussion which their writings and opinions have fostered. Once you take control of something larger than yourself, it's your responsibility to be receptive.
This week, the Basecamp executives failed to be receptive to people who were loudly telling them there was a problem, and they let their belief that they were principled for their embrace of discontent get in the way of examining where that discontent came from. They've damaged their company and, likely, their brand—perhaps irreparably so. Who do you think they'll blame? Themselves, for steering their company towards an easily-avoidable disaster? Or their critics, for trying to silence them, those much-maligned tech executives who dared speak truth to power?