How Basecamp Blew Up

> Denounce white supremacy? If your coworker demanded it, you might roll your eyes a bit but you'd do it? Right?

Would you though? Having a co-worker insist that you denounce white supremacy says far more about the co-worker than any refusal to play their little games says about you.

I was debating about whether to comment on this--whether I could add any useful signal to the noise. My thought is that is a tragedy. Let me start with the business case. It resulted in around 30% of the company resigning. As a client, that would disturb me. What is the likelihood of new features being added? Security patches? Maintenance? Also, AFAIKT, Basecamp isn't just a product, but a brand, with the founders writing several books on work and this basically wipes out that brand.

But to the issue itself. I've read what I can about it and it's tragic. I'll start by saying that I believe the founders had the right to make the call that they did and give them credit for offering severance packages to those who disagreed with their decision. However, the whole affair is a disaster and a cautionary tale. It seems to have started out with good intent. A group of employees wanted to create a more equitable workplace. They found a list of "funny" customer names and realized that this was a bad thing to have. The founders agreed--mocking your customers is a bad idea. The question is what happened next. I was unaware of the idea of the pyramid of hate. It kinda reminds me of Yoda “Fear is the path to the dark side … fear leads to anger … anger leads to hate … hate leads to suffering.” It looks like the implication is not that funny names === The Holocaust, but rather that a certain context is required for something like The Holocaust to occur. I believe that idea is true, but am not sure if this was a productive path to take. It seemed like the company had decided that the list was bad, to discontinue it, and to move on. The call not to fire whoever made the list doesn't seem to be a bad one. Contexts change and people make mistakes. If people evolve that should be encouraged. Where it seems that things fell apart is in how the CEOs responded to this. It's a really difficult issue and it would seem that discussion could have led to some mutual understanding. Moving to cancel social-political discussion in response (and to announce it in a blog post instead of internally) strikes me as where things took a tragic turn. While it's possible to have a policy of not discussing partisan politics at work (for example, it's not allowed for federal employees), not having discussion of equity issues at work is more problematic. Because for some employees, it's not just a question of doing their job and talking about these things in their own time--because for some, it effects their ability to do their jobs. For an in-person company, there can be something as simple as bathrooms. I'm a heterosexual male and never thought about there being a need for unisex bathrooms until an LGBTQ+ group at work pointed it out. Now in our building we have some. It doesn't effect me, but it means a lot to them. I can picture a woman wondering if she didn't get a promotion because there was something that she wasn't doing at work or if it was because of her gender--for her, it's not an abstract sociopolitical question--it's a question that has an impact on her ability at work. Or, if she's in a meeting and she finds that she's being ignored when she speaks, but men of similar ability are not, then it's not just an abstract issue, but a question of how she gets her job done. I am not even saying that if it happens that men are doing this that they are sexist--they might simply be oblivious to it. By my personality, I have a tendency to talk over people and have to remind myself to let other people talk (I think it's a good idea because then I can hear ideas that I might not have considered and sometimes save myself from doing something dumb). I hope that it's something that I never get called into HR about and would much rather a coworker told me if it was a problem. I think there's a worthwhile set of discussions about workplace culture that are worth having about what it means to be professional in the workplace. Of course there are cases that can go too far. But, a lot of it just strikes me as being polite to people. If someone wants to be called Robert instead of Bob, then if it makes him happy, ok. Other things are related to questions of cognitive bias. For example, if if I want to hire someone, it's pretty natural to use my network. However, maybe I can surface better candidates by searching more broadly. Am I using a good set of criteria in hiring?

But, back to the list. Without seeing it, it's not possible to judge whether was it just in bad taste to mock customers period, or did it have racial overtones in the "funny" names for some racial groups. A lot of the interpretation hinges on that. Also, the perception of whether it was racially motivated or not (unless it was particularly blatant could also vary depending on if one was a member of the targeted group or not. But from the exchange on white supremacy to occur and for such a large fraction of the company to quit, then it would suggest that there were deeper issues at the company and that the CEOs didn't want to engage with those issues.

I agree. For the record, I am pro-remote work and was fully onboard long before COVID, but I also suspect that the erosion of social trust can be accelerated in a company by fully remote work. It's a tradeoff that a company can either handle badly or well.

Did you read that comment about Basecamp employees "crying and screaming at their screens" after the Zoom meeting? That just sounds so much like people who are both venting their spleens and at the same time have no connection to their workplace.

Oh come on, that is so not what I said. If only jokes were made the genocide wouldn't have happened. The jokes weren't the cause of anything, they were just a symptom/result of a widespread hate campaign that certainly didn't start with jokes.

Context and details matter a lot. A joke about "niggaz in da hood" by a white person is very inappropriate and insensitive, but it's not the same as some joke where the punchline is that "niggaz too lazy to work" or whatnot. The second does express hatred, the first doesn't, in spite of being misguided.

This is essentially the same argument as {comics,music,TV,films,games} causes {Satanism,murder,drug use,what-have-you}.

Context always matters but context isn't fixed at your national level.

If you get jumped by several guys from an oppressed group at that moment in time and in that place they have a lot more power than you do. Just like in code that context exist within the broader global context where you correctly point out that there are power differentials.

I also grew up in the south like you did but I grew up in a trailer park. Kids like you with houses on the bus made fun of kids getting on from the trailer park.

My point is that socioeconomic status is dramatically more predictive of failure or success in the United States than race is. Geographic location is also a huge predictor. If we're going to reduce things down to one dimension we should focus on class.