The mess at Basecamp is reinforcing a consensus in tech that the reasonable thing to do is to have a workplace that encourages political + social discussion, and that workplaces which discourage that are going to struggle diversity and inclusion. I suspect it's more complicated.

Obviously one reason employees want to talk politics at work is that they're directly impacted by social injustices and can't feel fully invested in a work environment where they're expected to set it aside.

But that doesn't describe everyone impacted by injustices! Lots of people, precisely because their life is impacted by injustice, *don't* want it to come up at work and prefer non-discussion to the kind of obliviousness of large corporations maneuvering to take a political stand.

Like...have you been in a large corporation? Everything they do swings between focus-grouped and tone-deaf, there's sincere good intentions mixed w/ insincere good intentions mixed with naked cynicism. At risk of embroiling myself in another recent Twitter spat, it's exhausting.

There is not some uniform class of people experiencing injustice who all want the same kind of work environment. (People on Twitter are of course going to be disproportionately the ones who want to talk politics.)

I think this is why Coinbase was reasonably successful with a no-politics policy. There are lots of employees that's not right for, but there are employees (including marginalized employees!) it's a perk for, and they can self-sort.

What's wrong at Basecamp, in my opinion, isn't that you can't run a functioning inclusive company that limits politics-at-work, it's that your policy on that can't look like a nakedly cynical bid by your founders to make their employees shut up.

There are many paths to a functioning inclusive workplace, but none of them look like 'the founders fuck up, get defensive, and make a hard turn towards banning the kind of conversation that got them in hot water'. That's going to make your employees rightly distrust you.