Because that's part of the premise of a society governed in large part by the free market. That's an idea I support, but it only makes sense if market power isn't amoral. Tech company employees wield some of the most important power in our markets.
>"a society governed in large part by the free market"
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.
The status quo is not necessarily a bad thing, for instance if you have a lot of activist coworkers who want to "burn the system to the ground," then I, for one, become a huge supporter of the status quo.
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.
Brian Armstrong has literally said he has a plan for Bitcoin to surpass the dollar as a reserve currency within the next decade [1]. That, to me, is an activist who wants to “burn the system to the ground”.
>"just another political position itself - complicity with the status quo." / "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.
I mean yes and no. Yes there are infinite problems and there will always be worse of people who I could do things for. Guilt tripping someone into addressing all of them is unprodictive.
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.
I doubt quoting MLK will change your mind, but considering what the Black community in America went through for 100’s of years; it’s worth consideration…
>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.
Change my mind about what? I was merely explaining how you can't draw strong conclusions based on silence.
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."
Maybe I don’t have the privilege of time/resources/position to get involved. I have to keep my head down and GSD, not looking to rock the boat, endanger my position, or forgo income by spending time on such issues.
Take one step back. The interaction might not be political in itself but the desire to be able to engage in it might be. As others said, buying a lawn mower isn't political. Demanding that the product you are buying is safe and that economic transactions are done with USD or Bitcoin is definitively political.
If I take a dump I have to ensure to dispose it properly, because the fecal disposal is tightly regulated by many states, therefore taking a dump is a political issue.
> How about this: Every economic interaction (which includes employment) is political.
“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.
I agree, a lot of free market arguments just boil down to maintaining an imagined status quo. What I take issue with is that the real status quo is an unspoken rule that everyone understands but nobody ever talks about. Most of it boils down to appeal to nature in the form of "the strong rule over the weak" and actual freedom for all people is basically irrelevant.
When I go for a walk with a friend, is that political? When I play a puzzle game on my computer? When I read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? When I cook dinner?
I suggest that there is much activity in life that is not political.
I think it's pretty clear that when people say "everything is political" the "everything" is scoped specifically to scenarios where there is a decision to make and people disagree on how to make that decision.
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.
It's not at all clear to me. What's the point in saying "everything is X" if you implicitly mean "everything is X except all the things that obviously aren't X"?
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.
It’s just how people talk. They’re not making a universal quantification in first-order logic. If you ask someone what kind of food they want for dinner and they say “I like everything” you don’t conclude that they like genocide.
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!"
Do you by complicity [1] mean the critical social justice concept that all white (or people that believe in classical liberal culture) people are complicit in the maintenance and harms of systemic racism (stopping a perfect equity utopia) and white supremacy (continuation of individualistic western liberalism, instead of collectivist group-based critical social justice)?
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.
I'm not as concerned about identity politics as I am about class issues.
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?
Exactly. A great thing about cash is that dissenters can use it anonymously in a way that no institution can legislate unmasking the transactors. Crypto should gain that capability
To expand upon your point about the greater political moment: these revolutions have never been good for the working class, because those with little power in order to gain a powerful voice need to organize into powerful interest groups using voting (with little cheating) plus free speech plus a way to overthrow a corrupt regime. These groups of people may strongly disagree on other issues, but unite on work. Notice how all of these are under attack by critical social justice activists.
Identity politics is just a tool to divide the people into unchosen cuts that are too small to affect change or fight back against a corrupt elite.
In the US a minority of people comprising both sides of the “horseshoe” are uniting together to push towards a China like system. No communist (Soviet Russia), fascistic (hitler Germany), communist fascist merge (China) has ever had the means for the working class fight for themselves. In all of these systems the political elite have much greater access to wealth than any other group of people, and the working class paid the cost and lived a basic living style.
> A great thing about cash is that dissenters can use it anonymously in a way that no institution can legislate unmasking the transactors. Crypto should gain that capability.
Replace "dissenters" with "capitalist robber barons" and "great" with "problematic" and I'm with you.
>these revolutions have never been good for the working class
Cuba has a higher life expectancy than the US TO THIS DAY. From 1953 to 1962 their literacy rate went from 56% to 96%, one of the highest in the world.
Yugoslavia had the best passport in the world and Yugoslavs were the only people who could travel freely in both Cold War blocks.
You're just parroting propaganda.
The main problem is capitalist overlords trying to establish neo-feudalism (Erik Prince and his private army come to mind). The only institution that's strong enough to fight that trend is the state, and taking power over money away from it seals our neo-feudalist fate. Our only chance is to take control of the state before it gets to that, be that through peaceful democratic means like Salvador Allende or through a more direct struggle like Castro or Josip Broz Tito.
Thank you for being honest and straightforward about your communist sympathies. So many that agree with critical social justice play word games to obfuscate their radical position as a classic liberal position.
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'm trying to avoid any association with "classic liberals", cryptofascists by another name.
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.
Yeah, I agree with you that the group must be balanced more with the group to be a human system. However, I believe communism relies on a fictitious concept in the state to be a proxy for the group and the fiction when unchecked turns tyrannical. The US system was designed with competing hierarchies that would check each other in order to “stop the group from consuming the individual” through state tyranny, although that’s largely broken down. Turns out the state don’t like boundaries, equivalently to how marvel evolved Superman from a fast running strong man to being a flying laser eyes G-d.
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
Because I was communicating with someone I believe is a critical social justice (CSJ) adherent I was trying to use the language from that faith. However, I changed it as it may overall be confusing.
What I meant was classical liberal culture, which by CSJ adherents is termed as white culture by perpetrating whiteness. Whiteness is not about color, although its assumed all white people by default are this, but is about you adhering to liberal western culture instead of CSJ dogma.
> USA has this strange notion where they group people by skin color and call that race
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.)
>> USA has this strange notion where they group people by skin color and call that race
>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.
Because mercenary motivation is in and of itself a choice. If everyone was motivated by money alone there wouldn’t be non-profits. There is clearly a market for occupations with different incentives.
Absolutely! You spend the majority of your awake time at work. Some people optimize for money, others optimize for status, happiness or any other objective humans can have.
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.
I went to work for an HFT largely for non-compensation reasons. I had friends I liked working there and the technical challenges were extremely interesting. I learned a ton that has been really helpful sense in my career outside of HFT. Most of the engineers I worked with had similar motivations. I actually think my time in Silicon Valley startups has had me interacting with people more interested in compensation than any of my time in trading.
(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 is impossible to remove politics from your work. If you try to ignore everything except the mission of making money at work, that ALSO is a political choice…
> It is impossible to remove politics from your work.
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.
Give me any job, and I am certain I can think of a way politics is inextricably involved.
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?
Genuinely asking because I never got this: how do you remove politics from your work if your work provides healthcare? Like what if you or your dependents want birth control or need an abortion or get a blood transfusion that happens to be from a black person or take hormone replacement therapy or take AIDS drugs or get a vaccine or whatever is the political medical controversy do jour?
Because managers and directors feel that it is. They generally feel that it's an appropriate place for pushing their politics. (And complain loudly when employees do the same.)
Because liberal arts higher education has been completely usurped by Postmodernism and Marxism, and it indoctrinates students with the belief that everything everywhere is politics, always. This mentality has infected "liberal" intellectualism outside the academy, to the point where it is, essentially, the "culture" of much of the Left in the U.S.
Have you considered that people have reached those beliefs after observing and reflecting on how they perceive the world to work? Why are you so sure it’s “indoctrination” when people come to a conclusion that doesn’t comport with your worldview?
"Usurped" as in : never ever there was this much progress in history and linguistic since the postmodern invested the fields, and now that postmodernism is present in the archeology field, we have done discoveries that were not even envisionned before. For some reasons it was taken a bridge too far (imo, but i can be wrong, i'm not really interested in the field) in sociology, but still, never read anything better than Bourdieu.
Also, Postmodernism in philosophy and sociology is built against Marxism (and Freudism), so i don't really understand the association here.
Postmodernism: "Everything is a construct. Everything is relative. There is no base reality or ground truth."
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
I define Marxism broadly as the initial poisoning of the left-leaning mind with the concept of the ubiquitous class struggle. It has mutated into a belief system under which there is always an oppressing class and an oppressed class. It can be the landed gentry (oppressors) vs. the commoners (oppressed), capital (oppressors) vs. labor (oppressed), racial majority (oppressors) vs. racial minority (oppressed). But at its core, it is unable to view the current state of the world, or any subdivision thereof, in terms other than oppressed and oppressor, whether any reasonable person would agree or not. And, as can be seen with all Marxists (operating under there many self-ascribed labels), the only cure is revolution and purification. Of course, for those of us with a passing grasp of recent history, its quite clear that both of those will lead to mass violence and death. See also, the Bolshevik Revolution and its ensuing horrors, Mao's revolutions and their ensuing horrors, the Cuban revolution and its continued mass oppression, the French Revolution and all of its violent insanity, etc. etc.
> 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.
> Because liberal arts higher education has been completely usurped by Postmodernism and Marxism
Having actually gone through an undergraduate philosophy program in the United States: Marx is a blip. He's barely taught in analytical programs, which are (overwhelmingly) the dominant discipline in American colleges. Postmodernism isn't even mentioned. I spent more time reading Nozick and other politically right-of-center philosophers than I did reading anything resembling left philosophy.
It's not that anyone thinks it is appropriate - they know it is inappropriate. It's more that they don't care, and are willing to do whatever it takes to leverage the power of institutions (such as companies, universities, and government agencies) to fulfill their personal political and ideological goals. This is a well-known strategy for activism, particularly on the left, and even has a name - "long march through the institutions" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_march_through_the_institu...). Some call it "entryism" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entryism). As we've seen in American tech companies, once a foothold is gained, these motivated activists immediately start to loudly push for the aggressive exclusion of opposing views, and cancellation of all who belong to a different political group. Signaling consequences for opposition leads to self-censorship from others, which in turn helps further cement the perceived institutional consensus around the activists' platform. This strategy is ultimately effective, both because institutional takeover can build silently and become visible suddenly, and because company leaders are often too timid in exercising their power to shut down or fire such disruptive employees.
> As we've seen in American tech companies, once a foothold is gained, these motivated activists immediately start loudly push for the aggressive exclusion of opposing views, and cancellation of all who belong to a different political group.
Reminds me of a cryptocurrency exchange with an activist CEO who forbids dissenting political views in the workplace. Can’t remember his name.
