Changes at Basecamp

1. This was announced on social media, apparently catching Basecamp employees by surprise.

2. Several employees (going by Twitter accounts) are looking to lawyer up or even exit the company.

3. This appears to be result of some long-running debate over a list of "funny" customer names. If so, the over-reaction shows a lack of maturity among the founders.

While Basecamp-the-company might be just an "apolitical" project/email set of apps, the founders - particularly DHH - are leaders in the Rails community and they also publish a number of bestselling books on management. These actions - whether well-intentioned or not - are both a middle finger to many, many people in the Rails community, particularly those in marginalized groups, and make one question their wisdom as management thought-leaders. Rails and ShapeUp are priceless marketing that have given their company exposure and goodwill other small companies would have loved to have, and this whole event has single-handedly killed that goodwill. It may result in the loss of key employees a company their size cannot afford to lose.

Furthermore, it comes across as hypocritical given DHH's frequent public tirades against Apple, monopolies, government lobbying, and support of controversial figures such as Glenn Greenwald. One rule for me, another for thee?

This is the kind of PR/HR disaster even an average newbie junior manager in a mid-size company would have avoided, and shows the danger of getting high on your own supply.

I'm not sure if it was an unspoken agreement or just lucky, but we made damned sure not to bring it up at work ... and we managed to work effectively together.

My gut here is that the founders just botched the delivery of these policies, but I'll keep thinking about it.

> I consider my relationship with my husband to be a core part of my identity (certainly not the only part, of course). It's a major part of who I am and how I move about the world; how I exist within it and relate to it. And this is what straight people do, as well - and for them, it's considered absolutely normal (and society even encourages it in some ways).

> What's unfair, to me, is to say that my "existence" is only relegated to physically living - life is about a lot more than that. We're not talking about killing the gays, here. We're talking about people who'd like to force the gays back into the closet so that they don't have to hear about relationships that they think are an affront to their religion.

There's two senses of the word "existence" here - one is physically living and being present in the world (ie: not dead). The other sense is "projecting outward from yourself," as in interacting with others and having relationships with other people in your life, moving through and impacting the world somehow around you. The latter sense is what I'm talking about. It's philosophical, but important.

To move it out of the realm of your personal relationships and fully into mine, let's replace your Aunt with my Aunt. My Aunt has expressed to me that she doesn't want to ever hear about me being gay, to the point of asking me not to bring a significant other around her children, lest they know that I am not straight.

That's the kind of "opposed to my existence" that I'm talking about - they don't want to kill me, but they want me to be entirely muted and silent; present but not really participating as a human being. Preferably, they'd like me to pretend to be "straight" if at all possible, including therapy to change myself. It's not for my benefit, obviously.

That's what I'm trying to get at, and I still think it's fair to say that people professing conservative political values like my Aunt (maybe yours too, who knows) would very much like me to be "seen, and not heard" - back in the closet pretending the actual substance of my life doesn't exist because it's more convenient for their worldview, and changing myself to suit their narratives whenever possible. I very much see that still reflected in modern conservative politics - see the debates about whether or not cruelties like "conversion therapy" should be banned, whether or not trans people are allowed to live their lives openly, etc.

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Please note: your Aunt only came up because you brought her up, but I'm not trying to bash on her repeatedly. We can talk about mine instead for a handy point of reference, or someone else entirely. Bringing family into this makes it a lot harder to talk about, and we can instead pick a different point of reference. Denigrating family members isn't what I'm trying to do here, and I hope that much is at least obvious.

I presume the downvote is from someone who similarly sees this as just a group of like-minded people making jokes.

But this same kind of talk would be considered unacceptable if made about anyone other than a political orientation.

And while you've had a very measured and respectful response, even your response is accompanied with labels of "anti-intellectualism" and "science denialism". I'm sure you don't mean this as a personal attack on me, and I in no way equate it to what my colleagues were saying in my provided example.

But if I have what I believe to be well-reasoned justification and context for my opinion that isn't being represented, being labeled as "anti-intellectual" before I even have my say doesn't feel too good.

The protest my colleagues were joking about, at the time, was about businesses being allowed to open at all, not about mask wearing or distancing. My boss, just weeks after this incident, in a moment of Zoom frustration, lamented that at some point "we just need to accept the risk and open up". His opinion is afforded nuance by his peers, but the "other side" is not.

I could just as well point to polling that showed that liberals significantly overestimate the likelihood of dying from COVID as science denialism. A NY Times article on this subject classified it as such.

I could point to people physically attacking a woman in a sparse park for not wearing a mask while jogging alone as anti-intellectualism.

Or to the woman who went to great expense to set up properly spaced outdoor dining who was prevented from opening her restaurant while a film crew across the street was allowed to host a jam-packed gathering inside tents as a perfectly justified reason for joining such a protest.

How does all this relate?

Because whether my colleagues use bullying language, or more reserved language like "anti-intellectualism", the result is the same - one group is marginalized as lesser and put into a position where attempting to come forward and join the discussion immediately puts them into a box that is seen not as just a difference of opinion with proper reasoning to support it, but instead as something that intrinsically makes them inferior and less abled.

Even though, I suspect, if an actual discussion were allowed to happen, and we could remove many of these labels, we would find ourselves largely to be in agreement on most issues, and could empathize with each other even where we disagree. I highly doubt you condone the crazier examples of the left, and I can assure you I don't agree with many of the fringe ideas on the right.

This leads back to the issue at hand - if political discussion is allowed, in the current climate, then it will quickly lead to bullying and marginalization of whichever group is in the minority. Dressing it up with nicer words doesn't really help - if one side is quickly painted as intellectually inferior without respect for their own life experiences and reasoning, then it will not lead to a productive or respectful work environment.

I'm still not sure banning all political discussion is the answer, but there is clearly something wrong with the way we see each other and talk about each other that has to change before political discussion can return to being as benign in the workplace as it probably should be.