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

I actually think more generic worker's rights is better than expanding protected classes, which will always have holes.

The problem isn'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't somewhere in between. They don't disagree about some facts, they disagree more fundamentally about the question how facts are produced.

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/to you, and you see those rights as fundamental.

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't work otherwise. However, in this situation, its understandable if you skip out, with tensions running that high.

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.

So it seems that talking politics at work is the lesser of two evils? Or is it too late for that and stuff's just gone too far?

Not quite. BLM in particular is called Marxist because the people who actually organize that movement have called themselves "trained Marxists" and the British BLM website for a while claimed their goals involved overthrowing capitalism and the nuclear family. If you don't think BLM is Marxist that's understandable because those facts didn't get much attention, but, they definitely are. Adopting a clenched fist as a logo should be another hint.

At any rate, it's mostly because Marxism is not really an economic ideology, even though communism is often presented as an alternative to capitalism. Communism is arguably not an economic system at all given the absolutely minimal detail Marx provided about how a communist economy was actually meant to work. Marxism is best understood as a packaged set of views about the current state of the world and human nature, the correct/perfect state of the world and human nature, and a plan for how to get from here to there.

A key component of Marxist thought is that the current state of the world is one of "alienation" (today we would say oppression), in which a small minority subtly oppress the majority in such a way that the majority don't realize they're oppressed. But if they were to realize, they could rise up and via a revolution overthrow their oppressors. This would establish a transient state (the dictatorship of the proletariat) that would eventually, once society was finished being transformed, sort of melt away leaving communism as a kind of superior form of existence in which there's no oppression, human nature has fundamentally changed and as a consequence everyone is equal.

It's that last bit that gets the bulk of the attention because, firstly, the rest is kind of vague, and secondly, the socialist revolutionaries were expected to deliver obvious, real-world benefits for their revolution and focused on the "everyone is economically equal" bit as something that could be achieved via large scale government action. But to Marx that was only one part of it. The rest was about human nature.

The modern left, especially in Silicon Valley, is easily identifiable as a new variant of this basic ideology:

- Society is split into oppressors (white men) and everyone else (women, other races). People are always one of these groups and cannot move between them. Many oppressed people don't believe they're oppressed, but that's because they've been deceived and it's very important to make them realize that white men are oppressing them.

- People are either really good, or really bad, and people who are really bad (anyone who doesn't subscribe to this ideology) need to be suppressed, expelled, or silenced in various ways.

- The world is suffering under vaguely defined oppressive forces (Marx: imperialism, the Woke: patriarchy/systemic racism). If these forces are defeated, humanity will be elevated to a superior form of existence.

- Exceptionally aggressive "with us or against us" tactics are legitimate and even required to reach this state.

There are a bunch of other similarities, but that's the gist.

That's not my experience at all. Maybe if you're a junior engineer, then you are told what to do, but generally speaking these companies have many senior people who have to decide for themselves.

The idea that a company has money and that workers are just cogs is an outdated way of thinking. These stories are often focusing on the ethical concerns of senior engineers, often ones whose job is directly tackling problems of ethics (such as ethics of AI, or censorship systems).