Youd be excused for not following the recent brouhaha associated with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrongs announcement that the company would no longer play politics. The statement, posted to Medium on Sunday, is a doozy.
In short, I want Coinbase to be laser focused on achieving its mission, because I believe that this is the way that we can have the biggest impact on the world. We will do this by playing as a championship team, focus on building, and being transparent about what our mission is and isnt, Armstrong wrote.
He rattled off a number of examples of this, culminating in something that gave many pause: We dont engage here when issues are unrelated to our core mission, because we believe impact only comes with focus.
Armstrongs post is a direct reaction to the Black Lives Matter movement, the pandemic, the election, and the civil unrest that has become a focal point in a extraordinarily tumultuous year. In June, Coinbase employees clamored for Armstrong to vocally support BLM, which he finally did on Twitter. The reaction from so-called CryptoTwitter, a loose association of weirdos and anti-goldbugs who basically pump and dump tokens all day, was swift and angry.
I want to say unequivocally fuck coinbase, wrote one trader.
Armstrong, for his part, tapped into a growing movement inside Silicon Valley, a movement that basically says, Fuck your feelings. Based on his statement on Medium, Armstrong believes, probably incorrectly, that his army of coders wants nothing more than to produce clean, usable products for the cryptocurrency community.
There are three types of crypto users who love Armstrongs argument. In order of odiousness, we begin with the bored coder who once wanted to try microdosing and enjoys the thrill of feeling like a rebel. Then we have the troll who believes that crypto will destroy all governments and allow them to become kings of a new worlda world where unpopular opinions can be shared freely. And finally, you have the rich kids whose parents told them to invest in crypto somehow and, thanks to family connections, are not in jail. All three of these groups are just fine with Armstrongs opinions cutting political discussions out of the Coinbase workplace.
The rest of the people at Coinbasethe marketers, the designers, the coders who just wanted a job and dont care about the missionare probably not as happy with his commentary.
Because Coinbase is offering a generous severance package to employees who dont like this no-politics mission, there is a suspicion that this allows Armstrong to lay off people without making the company seem weak. There is a certain twisted logic to it: Act like a robot to get rid of all the soft meat bags off the payroll, leaving only the other robotic true believers. But a company like Coinbase isnt a tech company anymore. Its a living, breathing entity with needs, and these needs include not posting ham-handed screeds against woke culture and quickly alienating a wider audience.
Dick Costolo, the former CEO of Twitter, weighed in on the move. He was peeved.
This isnt great leadership. Its the abdication of leadership, he said. Its the equivalent of telling your employees to shut up and dribble.
Tech companies used to welcome lively debate about ideas and society. It was part of the social contract inside the company, and its what differentiated tech culture from, say, Wells Fargo culture, Costolo continued.Now its considered a distraction. Me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. Ill happily provide video commentary.
Yeah.
This argument isnt really about crypto. Its about the old saw that Silicon Valley is changing the world for the better. The early venture caplitalists funded earth-shattering innovations, from the original integrated circuits to the internet. Now they fund image-sharing apps that let you show your face to millions of people who hate you. Even cryptocurrency is a dud, a slow-burn trainwreck whose promise of egalitarian banking for all turned into millions of dollars of dirty money for a few. There is, if you havent noticed, very little innovation coming out of Californias innovation economy these days.
You might think, maybe Armstrong is right. Maybe everyone needs to buckle down and code. But that ignores reality. All politics is tech now. Free speech? Tech. Inclusion? Tech. Equity? Tech. The support of the needy and unbanked? Tech. Plus, as many have noted, an absence of overt political discussionallows for wacko political ideas to flourish.A Coinbase programmer can quietly go through life arguing that women are genetically inferior to men, that eugenics was probably a good idea, and that women wont date him because hes too smart. And, in a vacuum, those beliefs will be embedded into company culture like cancer. Under this new no politics regime, no one will tell him to shut up.
To be fair, many early innovators were gross weirdos. Without naming names, the open-source movement is populated by some of the dirtiest old men imaginable. The same is definitely true of crypto fanatics. After all, transferring money to and from shadowy, anonymous wallets using a command line and encrypted chats probably isnt the user experience 99% of humanity wants to deal with right now, but guys who think they are cyberpunks love it.
Coinbases refusal to allow politics to sully its employees feverish programming sessions is an admission that it doesnt want to deal with the humanity of its employees. If you want to be woke, Armstrong says, go do it outside. Thats his perogative. But innovation raises all boats, affects all people. And some of those people might like to know the companies they work for and use are on their side. And ultimately, in a world where innovation is thin on the ground and the biggest news out of SV is a filter that makes you puke rainbows, wouldnt it be nice if SV did something that mattered?read more
Silicon Valley Is Fighting a Losing War Against Politics
