#15: Basecamp's New Policy
Basecamp has made a name for itself in the past for taking contrarian views from the rest of the tech industry. So it should be to no surprise that Basecamp was making headlines once again yesterday after co-founder and CEO Jason Fried released a new blog post outlining a number of new company policies. However, much of the focus was on the policy around “no more societal and political discussions” on the company account. It drew comparisons to Coinbase’s announcement back in September 2020.
The initial reaction on social media and in media outlets has been overwhelmingly critical. Curiously, Stratechery's Ben Thompson mentions that in private emails and messaging, the reaction has been much more positive, a similar behavior to what happened when Coinbase made its announcement to not focus on anything outside its core mission.
Earlier tonight, Casey Newton published a wonderful piece in his newsletter, Platformer describing the backstory of why Basecamp moved to the new policy:
The controversy that embroiled enterprise software maker Basecamp this week began more than a decade ago, with a simple list of customers.
Around 2009, Basecamp customer service representatives began keeping a list of names that they found funny. More than a decade later, current employees were so mortified by the practice that none of them would give me a single example of a name on the list. One invoked the sorts of names Bart Simpson used to use when prank calling Moe the Bartender: Amanda Hugginkiss, Seymour Butz, Mike Rotch…
Discussion about the list and how the company ought to hold itself accountable for creating it led directly to CEO Jason Fried announcing Tuesday that Basecamp would ban employees from holding “societal and political discussions” on the company’s internal chat forums. The move, which has sparked widespread discussion in Silicon Valley, follows a similar move from cryptocurrency company Coinbase last year.
I’d highly recommend reading the article in its entirety, but the highlight of Newton’s excellent piece is below:
On April 13, two employees posted an apology on the internal Basecamp for having contributed to the list in the past. The employee responsible for initially creating it had left the company. But while previous versions of the list had been deleted, copies had resurfaced.
The employees noted that there had never been an internal reckoning over the list, and said it was important to discuss why making fun of customers’ names had been wrong. The apology included an image of “the pyramid of hate,” an illustration created by the Anti-Defamation League to show how the most extreme acts of extremist violence are enabled by a foundation of biased attitudes and acts of bias.
A day later, Hansson responded with a post of his own. He had conducted a forensic analysis of who created the document and how it had spread around the company. He called it a systemic failure on the company’s part. In a conversation with me today, he acknowledged that he and Fried had known about the list for years.
“There was some awareness at the time within the company that that list had existed and it wasn't acted upon. That is squarely on Jason’s and my record.” The list, he said, “in itself is just a gross violation of the trust … It’s just wrong in all sorts of fundamental ways.”
Employees responded mostly positively to the first part of this note. But Hansson went further, taking exception to the use of the pyramid of hate in a workplace discussion. He told me today that attempting to link the list of customer names to potential genocide represented a case of “catastrophizing” — one that made it impossible for any good-faith discussions to follow. Presumably, any employees who are found contributing to genocidal attitudes should be fired on the spot — and yet nobody involved seemed to think that contributing to or viewing the list was a fireable offense. If that’s the case, Hansson said, then the pyramid of hate had no place in the discussion. To him, it escalated employees’ emotions past the point of being productive.
Hansson wanted to acknowledge the situation as a failure and move on. But when employees who had been involved in the list wanted to continue talking about it, he grew exasperated. “You are the person you are complaining about,” he thought.
Employees took a different view. In a response to Hansson’s post, one employee noted that the way we treat names — especially foreign names — is deeply connected to social and racial hierarchies. Just a few weeks earlier, eight people had been killed in a shooting spree in Atlanta. Six of the victims were women of Asian descent, and their names had sometimes been mangled in press reports. (The Asian American Journalists Association responded by issuing a pronunciation guide.) The point was that dehumanizing behavior begins with very small actions, and it did not seem like too much to ask Basecamp’s founders to acknowledge that.
Hansson’s response to this employee took aback many of the workers I spoke with. He dug through old chat logs to find a time when the employee in question participated in a discussion about a customer with a funny-sounding name. Hansson posted the message — visible to the entire company — and dismissed the substance of the employee’s complaint.
Two other employees were sufficiently concerned by the public dressing-down of a colleague that they filed complaints with Basecamp’s human resources officer. (HR declined to take action against the company co-founder.)
Less than two weeks later, Fried announced the new company policies.
Newton’s piece illustrates that the policy was more or less implemented as a cover-up for a past situation rather than a preemptive measurement.
My personal reaction to the Basecamp news was similar to my reaction to when Coinbase made its announcement. I fundamentally disagree with the sentiment, but I think the move can still be successful for the company, depending on its goals. Let me explain my rationale.
Coinbase and Basecamp have made it clear now that they don’t believe societal and political discussions belong in the workplace. While you may strongly disagree with that sentiment (like I personally do), it also is likely true that there is a group of people that similarly strongly agrees with that sentiment. And therefore, now this group of people have companies where their personal values of wanting to work in a place that is apolitical is available. While ~5% of people at Coinbase left after Armstrong’s announcement, and while some told Newton they would consider leaving Basecamp after its announcement, there are going to be people that are attracted to companies that are focused solely on an apolitical mission. When you are doing something different than everyone else, that naturally creates a value proposition, and that’s what we’re seeing here.
Basecamp would argue it is not saying that politics or your social beliefs don’t matter; rather it is saying who you are at work is only a part of who you are—you’re welcome to be yourself outside of work, and we will give you time to do that. This may sound okay, in theory, but in practice it is unrealistic.
The crucial challenge with creating a policy that is apolitical is that it is hard to define what actually constitutes a social or political issue. Let’s say you agree that almost everything is political these days. That’s precisely the problem with such a policy! If everything is political, then where do you draw the line? Can you talk about sports? Can you talk about your kids’ daycare or their school? Can you talk about the Oscars? For all Coinbase talked about being mission-focused, their mission is to increase economic freedom in the world. What doesn’t fall under that mission?
If you can’t talk about sports or your kids, it seems like the company might be being overly mission-focused. But if you can, then it raises the questions of why “political and societal discussions” are being called out specifically? People will still read about societal and political issues at their desks, they can still post it on social media on their laptops, and they can still discuss it on their messaging apps at the office, and in fact, they’re being encouraged to do so by Basecamp. People may continue having these conversations freely in person rather than email or Slack channels. It seems to me these policies tend to be about choosing which distractions Basecamp wants to avoid rather than actually keeping people on track. Otherwise, why not write an internal blog post rather than a public one that paradoxically serves as a company-wide distraction?
Again, as a private company, Basecamp absolutely has the right to do this, and I do respect the conviction it has for doing. You cannot disagree that they are independent-thinkers who think differently than most of Silicon Valley. It just seems hypocritical.
Why hypocritical? Basecamp made this move because they didn’t want societal or political views influencing their workplace discussions. Given in the tech world, those opinions tend to be influenced by liberals (often progressive liberals), they may have feared they’d have to choose a political side or face backlash due to optics. It seems Basecamp just didn’t want to take on the accountability of having to deal with the difficult conversations—the same types of uncomfortable conversations Newton’s exposé uncovered. Thus, it’s hypocritical that it is making a sweeping policy change without allowing for a venue to dissent.
Imagine if the products Basecamp was making and selling were built by un-opinionated, dispassionate, and simple-minded people. They wouldn’t have built original or innovative products, and they wouldn’t have impacted or changed the world. I’ll leave you with this tweet, which just about sums it up: