In keeping with my general attempt not to turn a blind eye to the lousy behaviors of people I like, I should mention that the two founders of Basecamp—the company responsible for the thing I send you these words with—decided collectively to ask their employees not to talk politics on the company's internal app.
Here's the less-fiery founder's write-up of it.
Here's the more confrontational one's take.
I feel a number of different feelings about their decision, and the firestorm it brought about in its wake.
Here's the less-fiery founder's write-up of it.
Here's the more confrontational one's take.
I feel a number of different feelings about their decision, and the firestorm it brought about in its wake.
- To begin with, this policy was not a good one.
- Unlike many of the people currently furious at founders Jason and David, I wholly believe that both had nothing but good intentions going into this.
- I doubt that the people calling them white supremacists on Twitter will sway their mind, and, additionally, don't think that kind of language in this context is particularly useful. Discussing the ways in which white supremacy infiltrates even seemingly-inoffensive decisions can be fruitful when the goal is enlightenment; there is a perspective from which you can argue, fairly, that Basecamp's decision helps white supremacy more than it hinders it. But jumping from that to calling Jason and David white supremacists is an emotional leap, and not a productive one. (If you have two hours, Natalie Wynn talks about this very well.)
- The counterpoint to the above is that this kind of emotionally charged language does get a bunch of people fired up, which might damage Basecamp's brand and lose it customers, so people upset with this decision gain something by speaking in that manner if their goal is to reinforce their disapproval with genuine economic protest. Which is not the same as having a conversation, unless you think the purpose of conversation is solely rhetoric—in which case emotionally overheating the discourse to the point that it hurts Basecamp's bottom line is rhetoric, and therefore is a valid way to approach the conversation.
- Is that last point disingenuous? On some level, yes. But is it disingenuous for two founders to make a choice like this for all of their employees, despite many of them speaking out against this decision? Yes—in the sense that they simultaneously say they want a conversation and act without one. So people calling them "bastards" right now aren't, on one level, entirely wrong.
- If choosing to quiet discussion of politics is itself a political act—which of course it is—then choosing to ignite a furious discussion in order to "gain a meaningful voice" is a political act too.
- Politics, it would seem, is harder to stifle than you'd think.
I started out by saying that I wholly believe Jason and David have good intentions. Both stressed that they're open to their employees having these conversations—not just in general but with themselves. I doubt that either will attempt to reprimand their numerous employees who spoke out against this policy. They simply wanted a space dedicated to work, rather than to off-topic political discussion. And I'm sure we all agree that political discussion can get heavy, exhausting, and infuriating.
The problem is that all conversation is inherently political, because on some level everything is politics. Politics is just a blanket term we use to describe the phenomenon of dissimilar, unequal people coexisting in a space; that leads to its becoming heavily entwined with power (which lets certain people do certain things) and governance (which attempts to work out a way of keeping everybody, somehow, okay with who has what power), but it starts wherever people are unequal, which is to say it's everywhere. Few things are apolitical—if 2008 could manage a whole-ass firestorm about a leafy green, then truly nothing is safe.
Where people get up in arms about their rights to Be Political is where certain things are declared to be political matters where others aren't. This differentiation is itself, of course, political. Is it politics to discuss medical issues? What about healthcare? What about health insurance? Does that change if you're a woman, or gay, or transgender, or non-white? If you're a woman with a history of doctors dismissing your medical needs—an upsettingly common phenomenon—is complaining about that considered a personal or a political matter? Is that different from if I just complain about my doctor chewing gum during my appointment?
Where do we draw the line? Well, usually some people get to decide that and others don't. If you own a company, for instance, you have more leeway to draw it than others do. At that point, deciding what other people don't get to say is clearly a political issue—and their subsequent silence is, in a very real way, a kind of speech that's been forced upon them.
If Basecamp had specified that all non-work-related conversation should be kept out of their internal discussions, people may have responded differently. If they'd said that discussing personal life is one thing and discussing politics is another, perhaps they could give their employees room to talk politics as it applied to them personally while still tightening their focus. But instead they called political discussion out specifically. And that itself was of course a political choice.
Politics is by nature elusive. Attempts to keep politics clean and delineated is itself a kind of politics: bans on televised commercials, as some countries have, or on corporate campaign contributions, or simply on lies and slander during political campaigns, amount to an ongoing process of trying to keep politics out of the sewer. Those efforts are necessary because, left to its own devices, politics will exploit every inequality and every imbalance it can find. That's its nature, after all. Are people reading their news through Facebook, which prioritizes sensationalism and controversy? Politicians will aim to be sensational and controversial. Those are the rules of the game, as defined by nobody and suffered through by everybody. Like nature, politics abhors a vacuum—which makes civilization more-or-less an ongoing attempt to create structure where none naturally exists, and to ensure that that structure treats all its participants fairly. (To be clear, no civilization in history has ever managed this.)
I'm empathetic towards Jason and David here. And I don't love to see them called white supremacists, both because it feels unduly mean towards them and because that kind of sensational leap feels to me like an extension of the problems we're facing nowadays. I've written a fair amount about that lately—about why I don't like it and about how easily I think it can be exploited by pernicious actors to malevolent ends. At the same time, however... Jason and David are two very powerful men, so powerful that they can impose this kind of ban upon dozens of people who rely upon them for their livelihoods. And those employees don't have any direct power to circumvent that ban, though of course we don't know what their discussions are like internally. So is it any wonder that the protestors have taken to the proverbial streets, where they might be able to enact change in a language that companies historically care about? It's not like rich men with a history of being stubborn and convinced of their own rightness often listen to others as fully as they maybe ought to—and there was a way in which the two founders could have moved towards this solution with the aid and consent of their employees, so their ham-handed approach to this announcement is itself a part of the problem.
It's a fine hair to split: I like the Basecamp people and wish them well, and would love for them to receive less outraged rhetoric, and simultaneously think there's a reason they're receiving it that they're not really taking into consideration. The moral here isn't that we should listen to all outraged mobs, or that forming outraged mobs is the best way to go about making a point. (What if that same outraged mob was calling for Basecamp to endorse, I dunno, #GamerGate?) It's that there is no convenient way to "escape" politics, or to "silence" it—which is why, regrettably, we all gain something by paying an amount of attention to the world, deciding where and how to take a stand, and ideally keeping ourselves open to the possibility that, in this overwhelming existence we call home, we may just have overlooked something from that stand of ours.
Hopefully Jason and David will be open to that themselves: like I said, they're good folks, when they remember how to be. If they don't learn their lesson and Basecamp suffers, well, that'll be politics. Though if they fail to learn their lesson and suffer no meaningful consequence, and their policy stands, that'll be politics too. Nobody said politics was satisfying or fun. Or at least the ones who did had strange curves in their lips, and fevered gleams in their eyes, and we all did our best to leave them at the bar, and return to our beloved friends, whose rules were at least oppressive in ways that we could understand, and over years had grown to think we loved.