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> The biggest lesson I took away from the whole ordeal is that if you believe something is the right path, it's worth speaking up about it, even if it's controv
by justinsaccount 5y ago
> The biggest lesson I took away from the whole ordeal is that if you believe something is the right path, it's worth speaking up about it, even if it's controversial.
Unless you work at Coinbase, right?
- afavour 5y agoYeah that made me laugh, too. Feels like the word “politics” is very effective when used to limit your employees: you have something you feel strongly about in the workplace? Fantastic! Oh, it’s “political” (and yes, I’ll be the one determining what qualifies)? Well then no bueno, sorry. We’re mission focused.
- rglover 5y agoHe's not being political, he's getting his company to focus.
- malermeister 5y agoFocus on "the mission", which is itself an ancap political project.
- woodruffw 5y agoFocus on what, exactly? Bitcoin is not exactly an apolitical industry. 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!
- BurningFrog 5y ago> Focus on what, exactly? Focus on building a successful profitable company. Surely you just pretend to not know this?
- woodruffw 5y ago> Focus on building a successful profitable company. 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?
- gorwell 5y agoThey have chosen a specific mission. The point is to focus on said mission, not N missions. If you want to work on a different mission, work at a different company. Why do people find this so hard to understand?
- woodruffw 5y agoNobody is saying that they have to focus on N missions. The only claim is that their mission is a political one, and not even for the trivial reason of "everything is political."
- rglover 5y agoFocus on building a company that generates a return for investors and makes it possible to pay all of the people who work at Coinbase. 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.
- woodruffw 5y agoNobody disagrees about his basic financial mission! He's a CEO, and that's what CEOs (are supposed to) do. 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.
- dntrkv 5y agoCertain politics are relevant for certain companies. 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.
- woodruffw 5y ago> 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). 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.
- afavour 5y agoDeciding what your employees are and are not allowed to discuss at work feels pretty political to me! 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.
- woodruffw 5y agoPrecisely what I thought, thank you. What a stunning lack of awareness.
- ohazi 5y agoUnless you're labor. Capital can speak up about whatever it wants (so long as it doesn't start sympathizing with labor, of course)
- ianbutler 5y agoYou're paid to do a job. Politics is for your personal time. We need to work on getting more personal time for people so people can focus on those passions instead of further blending work and personal life.
- emsy 5y agoThat’s actually an insightful comment. Of course if you do sports, eat and socialize at work so that the company can keep you there for 12 hours people have no other possible outlet for their political activism.
- clumpthump 5y agoWant workers to have more personal time? Encourage people to "be political" at work.
- rhcom2 5y ago> We need to work on getting more personal time for people Which was the original goal of unions, something I would think would count as being "political" at work.
- MisterBastahrd 5y agoWork time ceases to be work time when your hours on the job take up more than a quarter of the time in a calendar day, and that's probably the maximum upper limit, in honesty. As societies we have structured our adult lives around a window from 9 to 5 in which we are supposed to work and also interface with every other adult that works. It's an untenable situation at best.
- woodruffw 5y ago> You're paid to do a job. Politics is for your personal time. It's remarkable how easily we've forgotten that the very concept of "personal time" took decades of sustained political effort at the workplace.
- emsy 5y agoWhy do people think work is an appropriate place for political activism?
- jiscariot 5y agoIf I had to pick one cause, it is google's "bring your whole self to work" policy.
- woodruffw 5y agoThat's a great question for the Coinbase CEO!
- malermeister 5y agoEverything you do is implicitly political. To say you're non-political is just another political position itself - complicity with the status quo.
- disneygibson 5y agoWithout food, you can’t survive, therefore everything is implicitly about food. This line of thought is absurd. Words have definitions and boundaries for a reason.
- ygaitonde 5y ago> Without food, you can’t survive, therefore everything is implicitly about food. This, but unironically.
- mechanical_bear 5y agoHard disagree. Sometimes being apolitical is just a desire to not get involved and has nothing to do with supporting status quo.
- malermeister 5y agoNot getting involved always means at least tacitly supporting the status quo. To think otherwise is just an expression of privilege. There is no being apolitical.
- m_ke 5y agoIt’s only ok on Twitter https://mobile.twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/1445604556121919492 https://mobile.twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/1445604556...
- augustl 5y agoHe said this on Twitter, and I believe Coinbase employees are allowed to say whatever they want on Twitter?
- young_unixer 5y agoYou wouldn't go to a PETA meeting and complain that there's no meat. 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.
- xibalba 5y agoIt's pretty easy to dunk on people when you divorce their words from the surrounding context. 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.
- tshaddox 5y agoThat's exactly what the parent commenter is saying: that this principle apparently holds true unless it's in the context of certain things that Coinbase doesn't want its employees talking about.
- asabjorn 5y agoYou are still free to speak up about anything relating to work responsibilities. However, if your goal was to do activism to institutionalize and enforce critical social justice (CSJ) dogma into the company you are correct that is not allowed. 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.
- jokethrowaway 5y agoYou missed the point, he doesn't want employees to bring political activism (I seem to remember BLM was the trigger), controversial company politics is well accepted