But even more generally: Armstrong's profile on Twitter includes his (ostensible) mission of "creating more economic freedom in the world." That's a very political mission, even by milquetoast American standards!

Anybody who works there and disagrees with what the company is doing can quit and go work somewhere else whenever they please.

You need to pull your head out of your belly button. The navel gazing you were taught at university is going to ruin your life and make you perpetually miserable.

The farce here is in claiming that Coinbase's mission is somehow "apolitical," even beyond the standard (& correct) observation that everything is political: they are explicitly a financial services company with a political message of economic freedom. They are explicitly advocates for an explicitly political form of monetary exchange.

When Armstrong says "mission focused," he really means "consistent with Coinbase's politics." And that's okay. But it's ridiculous to dress it up as some kind of apolitical position.

This idea that because everything is touched by politics, you should be free to bring every aspect of politics into any organization is ridiculous.

Coinbase should be involved in the the political discourse surrounding crypto (and other finance-related) legislation. They should not be involved in the discourse surrounding a woman's right to abortion (just an example).

If you think crypto should be banned, you probably shouldn't work at Coinbase. On the other hand, your opinion on abortion should have no bearing on whether you work there. It has nothing to do with their company mission.

I don't agree with this, but to be clear: you're arguing for something very different than Armstrong is. Armstrong is saying that Coinbase isn't besmirched by any politics, which is patently false -- their entire mission is explicitly political.

As for why I don't agree: political positions are not hermetic. It wasn't acceptable in 1961 for lunch counters to "not be involved" in desegregation, because "not being involved" is tantamount to support for segregation in a segregated society. But again, to be very clear: this is above and beyond the claim that Armstrong is making.

There's actually no point in time where the opinions of the actual proprietors of lunch counters mattered either way. The Jim Crow laws legally mandated segregation until the Civil Rights Act legally prohibited it. The lack of personal choice in the matter is more or less exactly what makes it political in the first place.

I’m sorry, but what do you think provided the political impetus for the Civil Rights Act? It was years of concerted protesting and civil disobedience, one form of which was sit-ins at lunch counters.

Yes, they were. The Greensboro sit-ins began at Woolworth stores because they had explicit policies that went above and beyond those required by Jim Crow laws. They even sent a letter to Woolworth’s, not the state[1].

Edit: And, you’ll note: the Greensboro sit-ins didn’t provoke asymmetric police retaliation. What the students did wasn’t even illegal, it was merely against Woolworth’s store policies.

[1]: https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/greensboro-nc-stud...

Focus on building a successful profitable company.

Surely you just pretend to not know this?

Through what means, exactly?

We're not talking about a candy company here. This is a company that explicitly includes political messaging in both their mission and in their choice of means (i.e., cryptocurrency) towards that mission. Why the double standard?

Why do people find this so hard to understand?

The only claim is that their mission is a political one, and not even for the trivial reason of "everything is political."

But you’re right: Brian gets to decide what is and isn’t political, and he’s decided that he isn’t being political, so he isn’t. Which is an… interesting power to hold over your employees, hence my original post.

I disagree and have a much more simple explanation. Activists naturally want to involve as many people as they can in their cause/struggle. By framing everything as political, they open up opportunities to proselytize in areas traditionally not appropriate for 'politics'.

If you couple that with a cultural expectation that people must take a side, and, that simply not being a [bad thing] is not enough, you must be actively anti-[bad thing], and you've got the current climate Brian Armstrong is trying to avoid.

One must remember that things can always get worse.

Just because there exist concrete problems in society does not mean that you, or activist coworkers get to assume that you're/they're automatically right nor that you/they have workable solutions.

[1] https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/coinbase-ceo-bitcoin-surpass-dolla...

To think otherwise is just an expression of privilege. There is no being apolitical.

The challenge I have with this line of thinking is that you can literally apply it to any and all issues. The number of problems in the world are effectively infinite but our ability to take a meaningful position is finite and extremely limited. The default state of being is to not have taken a position on something.

To insinuate that someone is privileged for not getting involved is a cudgel and a guilt-tripping tool being used against someone who doesn't share the same priorities as you do. It strikes me as "if you're not with us, you're against us", a sentiment that used to be loathed in the early 2000's but is now accepted and expected.

Like you prioritize not hearing activists talk about their priorities, and they don't care about your priorities and thus talk about theirs.

Is griping about this going to change anything? Of course not.

That's not a challenge to this line of thinking, it's just another way of wording the exact same thing.

On the other hand, the fact that I can choose which struggles I engage with, and am able to avoid ones I don't want to involve myself in is absolutely a privilege. Someone who may need an abortion may not be able to avoid caring about that issue. Someone less economically secure may not be able to avoid worrying about unemployment or healthcare policy. There's countless similar examples.

You can absolutely acknowledge that you don't have the spoons/time/interest to deeply invest yourself in every social cause or issue. But you should also recognize that there are tons of people who also don't have the spoons/time/interest either, but have to anyway because the issue affects them and they can't afford to ignore it either.

Silence means just that, silence. It could mean anything: I don't know. I don't care. I might care but don't have time to look into it. I care but it's not in my top 10 issues.

None of these options support the status quo.

>Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

>Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

>The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.

>The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

>The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.

>We will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

>Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one’s soul.

>Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.

>The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” But… the good Samaritan reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”

>In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

>He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

>History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

>Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

But I do love MLK quotes:

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

You can see this that the more privileged you are the more likely you are to vote, to petition and engage yourself etc.

This is how you get "water is racist" and the entire movement of social justice becomes a thing of ridicule. The strategy harms, it doesn't help.

“Economics” and “politics” are just different lenses for viewing interactions relating to the distribution of power (equivalently, control of scarce resources.) They are the same thing; economic interactions are political and vice versa; economic power is political power and vice versa, etc.

This is also why capitalism (enabling the private accumulation of economic power) and democracy (involved the egalitarian distribution of political power), despite both initially being advanced by the same moves away from the particular structure of the monarchic/feudal concentration of both, are fundamentally in tension and ultimately incompatible.

It's not political, it's fashion.

When someone says something like "meat is political" I don't think they mean that the physical substance on the dinner plate has this property, but rather that there are decisions to make that directly involve meat which people disagree about, and that politics is the (or at least one of the) processes by which decisions get made by groups of people when individuals in the group disagree.

If we all agreed on what was not political then no one would need to argue that "everything is political" in the first place, so if you want to have any interesting discussion at all then you need to actually say something about where the boundary is between political and non-political. Because it's that boundary that's contentious and might actually lead to some insight when discussed freely.

The statement "meat is political" is a different case, because it is specific. It doesn't rely on an implicit clause that hides the actual concept of interest.

This is a non-argument because "status quo" can be construed as anything and everything. It boils down to "you're either with us or against us."

"If you don't actively support my pet cause on women's rights to own hand guns in California, it means you support the status quo. You support women being murdered and victimized without any recourse because you want to disarm them when they need guns the most! Supporting the status quo on gun rights is supporting women victimization!"

[1] https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-complicity/

Edit: changed terminology from "classical white" to "classical liberal" culture. It diverges from critical social justice dogma by doing this, making my attempt at communicating with a Critical Social Justice adherent less in their language, but is hopefully clearer.

Bitcoin is an ancap political project designed to make exploitation of the working class, independent of skin color, easier.

Identity politics themselves are a neoliberal ploy to distract from the real struggle at hand.

Also, what even is "white culture" other than a racist dogwhistle? Whats the common denominator between Russian, Portuguese, Hungarian and English (all white) cultures?

I agree that instead of the transition from a tyranny of the proletarian communist leaders, those with gnostic knowledge of communism, to communist utopia communist revolutions have a tendency to fall into feudalism. I disagree with your assertion about Cuba, your example, where the political elite and Castros family has much more access to food&resources than the people.

However, considering that communism remove all checks and balances on state power transitioning into feudalism ruled by a political elite seems like its natural outcome. I therefore disagree with your assertion that the communist process to achieve utopia could ever result in a different outcome. “Trotskyites face the wall first”, those were the communal ideologues and opportunists took over

Instead of looking back I think we should look forward and learn how to harness technology with a healthy fear in order to not “burn” ourselves again, and try something different

I think Yugoslavia is the better example fwiw - a society where there was high living standards and high degrees of freedom, arguably higher than in the West. They had greater economic freedom as all companies were worker-run coops with leadership elected by the workers competing in the marketplace; compare that to the autocracy of the modern capitalist workplace! They also had the freedom to travel both the Communist and the Capitalist blocks, but that's not as relevant today anymore.

I agree with your comment about having to look forward though. I think the ideal scenario would be fully automated space luxury communism - e.g. Star Trek, but baby steps ;) We'll have to make sure to avoid falling to deep into capitalism and its systemic descent into corporatism, then fascism though as has happened every time that system has been tried.

I know people that lived in communist Yugoslavia. It was little better than Cuba and Soviet Russia, and a small elite lived well like feudal lords. Everyone else was dead poor with basic living standards at best.

> Space luxury communists.

If we gain a healthy fear of tech and acknowledge the dual nature of humans, both evil and good, new solutions will open up like when humans stopped burning down stuff with fire by containing it and applying it with a healthy fear.

I think whatever we would have next would be best centered by the individual in the natural and human local community, with a very small central state, in order to not overwhelm the local community and the individual with the centralized tyranny communism has tended towards.

Some people argue that a centralized communist AI world economic forum style will make communist non-tyrannical. I think that is unrealistic because a centralized AI deciding stuff, like the Fabian society dreamed up (see HG Wells “things to come”), will also be tyrannical as it’s still made and maintained by people. A Stalin, Pol Pot or Mao will eventually control it.

Btw, Marcuse that formulated the woke movement thought a communist system could only fund basic living standards. He also thought that for sustainability the state needed eugenics control over reproduction. Only a commmunist fascist merge like China has supported luxury, but that system is indistinguishable from feudalism. Wokism in practice seems like a China like system achieved through communist means

No, we don’t. (There's two races where one of the common, not-generally-offensive names for each refers to a color, but people identified and identifying with each of those races have a wide range of skin colors, overlapping with those of most other races in both cases.)

> and assume same skin color has same culture.

No, we generally don’t.

>No, we don’t. (There's two races where one of the common, not-generally-offensive names for each refers to a color, but people identified and identifying with each of those races have a wide range of skin colors, overlapping with those of most other races in both cases.)

Correct, most people do not believe that skin color define them or their neighbor. The notion also generally does not make much sense, as Americans are incredibly racially mixed.

However, a very aggressive and powerful minority that believe in critical social justice are enforcing racial stereotypes.

To say you are defined by race is a bit like saying you are defined by nose size. It is an arbitrary trait amongst many.

>> and assume same skin color has same culture.

>No, we generally don’t.

That is the Coinbase CEOs experience. People generally falsify preferences in public in order to not offend any Critical Social Justice activist that may ruin their life for saying the wrong thing.

However, generally Americans are friendly and welcoming people that just want to live a good simple family life next to good neighbors of any creed.

This line of thought is absurd. Words have definitions and boundaries for a reason.

This, but unironically.

It’s a very new thought that work should be apolitical.

I think the thing that really upsets people is that the company changed course. People who go to work at a HFT firm are probably all motivated by compensation - and would expect that, because it’s baked into the company culture and business model.

People choose to work somewhere based the reward it offers. If that changes, without their consent, it breaks an unwritten contract.

(None of this matters to the larger discussion but wanted to offer you a perspective of someone who has actually made the choice you are using as an example)

It absolutely is and this statement is either not informed enough or is being argued in bad faith. Unless your job is involved in direct politics or government you can keep the politics out and focus on the work.

I do not need my peers or coworkers bringing in politics to the workspace. Politics is a disease that seems to be seeping in everywhere because a vocal minority thinks every moment needs political involvement.

It does not.

If you are a website and you host user comments, and the government requests information about a commenter. Do you give it to them right away, or do you fight it? What if the country is a known violator of human rights? What if the request is to try to track down a pedophile? What if it is to track down a journalist?

Either decision is political. If you comply, that is a political decision. If you decline, that is a political decision. If you fight it in court, that is a political decision.

What about deciding what to do with user data. Do you sell it to the highest bidder? Do you protect privacy? Do you sell it, but only to certain people? Do you use it internally? Do you store it at all? How much effort do you put into securing your users data? Is that decision purely financial, or do you believe you have a responsibility to protect your users data even if it costs you more than you would lose in a breach?

Also, Postmodernism in philosophy and sociology is built against Marxism (and Freudism), so i don't really understand the association here.

Marxism: "Everything is class struggle. There is always, everywhere and in everything an oppressor and an oppressed. The only cure is revolution and ideological purification."

While the two may have been at odds at their inception, they now work together, initially in academia, but now, increasingly, everywhere in the U.S.

> now that postmodernism is present in the archeology field, we have done discoveries that were not even envisionned before

Citation needed.

And everything is politics. A political system could decide to outlaw computers and the internet. How would your SaaS business survive then?

> And everything is politics

And thus we arrive at Postmodernism. Postmodernism introduces the belief that everything is relative and everything is a construct. There is no base reality, no ground truth–or if there is, we can dismiss it as irrelevant given the all powerful constructs and systems of human life. Thus one can make arguments like, "Everything is always politics" and use such asinine premises as the basis of injecting noxious politics into every facet of our lives. Once again contravening the majority of people's lived experiences and desires.

Reminds me of a cryptocurrency exchange with an activist CEO who forbids dissenting political views in the workplace. Can’t remember his name.

It misses the point -- they don't need to be "oppressed" to be justified in talking about politics at work, the same way they don't need to be underpaid to be justified in unionizing. Each is a perfectly sufficient end in itself.

"Shut up and do the work, or GTFO" is a statement that only Capital can make, and it's a statement that can only be directed at Labor.

When the topic being quelled is a conversation about fairness within the ranks of Labor, and between Capital and Labor, the picture is crystal clear: "Capital says no, and you (Labor) will comply."

You don't need to be on the losing side of an unjust system to recognize the system as unjust.

It's remarkable how easily we've forgotten that the very concept of "personal time" took decades of sustained political effort at the workplace.

How about people decide to take action -- regardless of the consequences to themselves instead of worrying about maintaining the scraps they're fed in the process? Why is today so much different than yesterday that people don't want to risk their standing and their lives for their principals and expect it just to happen, to be given? All the whining is just theatre as far as I'm concerned until people start actually making the hard decisions and doing something at risk to themselves for what they believe.

Why do people seem so hypocritical compared to the people during those decades you mention?

The owners of Coinbase made a stand for what they believe in, I support that. Maybe the otherside of the table needs to take that collective action they talk so much about instead of talking.

Edit: And you know I'm not sorry but I just don't feel bad for office workers bitching about their jobs. I feel bad for the front line workers, in the stores in the warehouses in logistics and shipping. They actually have real gripes to contend with being physically worn down everyday yet we lump the person sitting in their office chair reading reddit for 8 hours with these people actually killing themselves to get you a package a couple hours sooner.

Note: This isn't aimed at you directly but very much what I feel is the superficialness of many movements today.

> Maybe the otherside of the table needs to take that collective action they talk so much about instead of talking.

I don't disagree. But to be clear: collective action, broadly interpreted, is mostly illegal in the United States. You can actually be thrown in jail for it and, unlike the CEOs, you probably don't have the money to tie the courts up. The US's labor movement spent decades fighting for recognition, and it's still paltry compared to the rest of the world (and is steadily being eroded). Most workers, including office workers, have strong social and economic disincentives against anything more than talk (at-will employment, absent social services, &c).

The present-day crusaders are attacking their fellow employees (who disagree with them) as well as customers (trying to get customers who disagree with them dropped). They are most certainly not fighting management. Management gets involved in those cases where it tries to stop one of the crusading employees from harassing another employee or customer, at which point there are demonstrations to try to get the enemy coworker or employee dropped.

That is why this is not at all like the unionization efforts of the past.

"Crusaders" already belies where you stand on this, but to be clear: historical labor movements absolutely included hostility against coworkers. The coworker who didn't join you on the picket line was called a scab.

Besides, US labor law places broad restrictions on the ability of labor organizations to call for boycotts (i.e., retaliating against customers). If you take your time to read about this history of workers' rights in the US, you'll find deeper parallels to the current day than you're probably currently inclined to believe.

Edit: Here's a link[1] to a summary of the confusing rat's nest that is NLRA's rules for boycotting.

[1]: https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/se...

Which was the original goal of unions, something I would think would count as being "political" at work.

It's an untenable situation at best.

And then the company you work for takes the profits from that effort and donates it to politicians to further the executive agenda.

Coinbase certainly made itself more viewpoint inclusive by making it impossible to act within the company as a CSJ procelyte is required to do. An CSJ procelyte is expected to try to institutionalize the faith by enforcing the Diversity (hiring activists of all identities - a black conservative is not diverse), inclusion (censorship of people resisting CSJ DEI initiatives), and Equity (redistribution of outcomes based upon identities and adherence to CSJ) agenda.

I work at a company that has heavily institutionalized CSJ, and CSJ procelytization is quite distracting from our core mission and is actively creating a non-inclusive culture to other viewpoints&faiths. Almost every day I get emails about this faith, there are almost daily meetings (services) about it, almost every company-wide meeting spends time preaching about it, every facet of the buerocracy enforce CSJ dogma, and we are demoralizing the workforce by hiring as well as promoting based upon DEI principles instead of trying to achieve meritocracy.

In that same vein, if you join Coinbase, you should know what you're getting into, maybe it's political, but it's a kind of political that you knew beforehand. The problem comes when you try to shoehorn a different set of political beliefs onto something that didn't have them in the first place.

This statement was within the context of advising organizational leaders who are trying to "keep the peace" (and thus, inadvertently enabling distraction and morale rot) instead of creating clarity and focusing the mission.