Reading these comments I feel like the root of the issue is the collapse of American democracy. It's a bit grandiloquent but that's definitely how it looks like. If workers trust that "We, the people" are still in charge on the big picture then it doesn't make sense to bring politics at work. Just vote.
Now if you feel like your power as a citizen has dwindled and you can't meaningfully enact change through democratic means, it makes sense to try and "weaponize" your job, especially if you work for a powerful company and you're a valuable highly skilled worker.
But in the end if you're dissatisfied with your company and you know that there's a fundamental ideological incompatibility it probably makes more sense to just quit, especially when you're a software dev and you can probably find some other job fairly easily.
I guess an other possibility would be to have proper unions but for some reason I don't see that happening in the USA any time soon...
This is why I'm frustrated with the idea that we need to enact change and policies at the federal level. The federal government should just exist to protect our liberties and organize national defense. Everything else should be organized more locally at the community level where voters actually have some skin in the game.
It's the same idea as how modern agile companies run, small teams that work in the same environment, have more empathy/trust of one another, and are able to make compromises in order to have stability and direction within the team.
Additionally, we shouldn't be trying to put all of our eggs in one basket. Should we have single-payer healthcare nationally? No one knows if that's the most appropriate solution for all of the US, but why not let cities or communities try various localized healthcare strategies out for themselves. Each may try things differently. Some may work and some may fail. Other places can see how things worked elsewhere and either decide to improve, not implement, or take verbatim what another local government has done. You influence change by setting an example and letting others decide for themselves, not by trying to force the world to behave as a small subset of people want.
Having multiple baskets is essential for enabling different ideas and perspectives, especially if the bad ideas were to win out. I firmly believe humans are not meant to have such large scale societal structures where communities are expected to encompass an entire nation. You care more about and think more similarly to your neighbor than you do someone three thousand miles away.
> This is why I'm frustrated with the idea that we need to enact change and policies at the federal level. The federal government should just exist to protect our liberties and organize national defense. Everything else should be organized more locally at the community level where voters actually have some skin in the game.
You'd think that after months of "locally led" covid responses in the US that this naive take would somehow become less popular.
Whether small-government enthusiasts like it or not, the US is highly interconnected on almost every level. There are certain things that absolutely require federal responses. Things like pollution and viruses absolutely need to be handled from a nation wide perspective. How would healthcare work as a piecemeal implementation across local lines? Its almost as if "letting localities decide" is a nice way of ensuring something will fail without forcing it outright.
Your argument is implying that the federal government is somehow ineffective, but given the federally led improvements across the last century - from roads to environmental regulations, public health and even the internet just shows that you're either ignorant of intentionally dishonest.
None of this is unique to the US — the EU is similarly "interconnected", as is Switzerland. Subsidiarity and decentralization aren't new ideas, and are generally the prescribed solution to unlock governance in a large & heterogenous polity.
> from roads
The Interstate Highway System, while technically impressive, essentially entrenched the US as a car-centric society from the top-down.
> public health
The vast majority of our healthcare problems can be attributed to the fact that it's tied to employment, which was caused by Federal policies.
> even the Internet
DARPA falls under "organize national defense". The EU also has EU-level agencies that work on space research (ESA). Advanced research can also be organized among the States in a CERN-like model.
> The Interstate Highway System, while technically impressive, essentially entrenched the US as a car-centric society from the top-down.
Its been effective. It achieve the goals it set out to do. We discovered that focusing on highways and cars was ultimately not very good. But it achieved the goal it set out to do, so I don't get what your point is.
> The vast majority of our healthcare problems can be attributed to the fact that it's tied to employment, which was caused by Federal policies.
This is an absurd argument. What are you even trying to convey? That the Federal Government should take charge of providing healthcare? OK then.
Medicare/Medicaid/ACA are all Federal policies and provide healthcare to millions who wouldn't get that otherwise.
> DARPA falls under "organize national defense". The EU also has EU-level agencies that work on space research (ESA). Advanced research can also be organized among the States in a CERN-like model.
Again not sure what your point is. EU has Federal agencies too, yeah, so what?
> Insofar as "localities" are ill-suited to governing, the States are a sufficient mechanism for top-down control.
Hard disagree. While States have been great for introducing and experimenting with new ideas, spreading those ideas across the country requires Federal Investment and oversight. Obamacare traces its origins to Romneycare in Mass, but it required Federal dollars to bring it to the rest of the country.
> We discovered that focusing on highways and cars was ultimately not very good. But it achieved the goal it set out to do, so I don't get what your point is.
That's exactly the thing we're arguing against — a monopoly/monolith doesn't necessarily know whether the goal is the correct one. Enterprises rely on competition to arrive at the "correct" goal. The argument is to allow State actors to do the same. Discovering that something is "not very good" after experimenting on 300+ million people is worse than running those experiments and observing those failures more locally at the State level, where failures impact fewer people. GP commenter made the same argument, as follows:
"Additionally, we shouldn't be trying to put all of our eggs in one basket. Should we have single-payer healthcare nationally? No one knows if that's the most appropriate solution for all of the US, but why not let cities or communities try various localized healthcare strategies out for themselves. Each may try things differently. Some may work and some may fail. Other places can see how things worked elsewhere and either decide to improve, not implement, or take verbatim what another local government has done. You influence change by setting an example and letting others decide for themselves, not by trying to force the world to behave as a small subset of people want."
I don't know that I agree that healthcare systems should be fragmented at the city level, but there's really no reason why States shouldn't drive healthcare policy and try different approaches. Switzerland, Denmark, the UK, Singapore, and Germany all have wildly different healthcare systems — all with their own merits and demerits. There isn't a single system that is objectively "the best". States can enact the policies that the citizens want the most, and we can see for ourselves how they do.
> This is an absurd argument. What are you even trying to convey? That the Federal Government should take charge of providing healthcare? OK then.
And this is an absurd reading of that argument. The argument is that we got to where we have because the Federal government started off by 1) imposing wage ceilings that resulted in employers offering health insurance to get around those, 2) enacted a tax deduction to incentivize employers to keep doing this after the wage ceilings were lifted, and 3) instituted a mandate for employers to provide health insurance. These are all terrible policies, all advanced at the Federal level. It should then follow that we should reduce the degree to which the Federal government makes these decisions, not increase them. You don't promote a bad decision maker, you fire them.
> Medicare/Medicaid/ACA are all Federal policies and provide healthcare to millions who wouldn't get that otherwise.
Medicare subsidizes healthcare for overwhelmingly rich people (old people are the richest cohort in America, owing to a lifetime of accrued income). Does that mean we shouldn't subsidize healthcare for any old people? No, not at all — Medicare was just local optima. ACA entrenched employer-sponsored health insurance via the employer mandate. Are individual mandates bad policy? No, not at all, that's how Swiss healthcare works. But ACA was more than just that, and got us stuck in local optima.
Again, that's the entire point — when we give a monopoly sole decision-making power, it's very difficult to get ourselves out of local optima, especially when the polity is as ideologically polarized / heterogenous as ours.
> Again not sure what your point is. EU has Federal agencies too, yeah, so what?
Exactly. The argument is not that the US should have 0 Federal agencies, it's just that it should look more like the EU, writ large. One of the foundational principles of the EU is "subsidiarity" -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity_(European_Union). I (and ostensibly, also GP) argue that the US ought to follow this model.
> Hard disagree. While States have been great for introducing and experimenting with new ideas, spreading those ideas across the country requires Federal Investment and oversight. Obamacare traces its origins to Romneycare in Mass, but it required Federal dollars to bring it to the rest of the country.
Yeah but that's just because most of that taxation goes to the Federal government. There's no reason that can't change, and for the majority of one's taxes to go to their State government. Today, I pay around ~30% of my income to the Federal government and ~10% to my State. The argument is to make that the other way around, so that you don't need Federal dollars to bring things at the State level. This is exactly how it works in Switzerland, where the top marginal rate at the Federal level is ~10%, and Cantonal rates vary between 16-30%. Switzerland isn't some "libertarian" hell hole, it's one of the most prosperous nations on the planet. Likewise, the EU's leaves taxation entirely to its Member States, and not only do they do just fine, some of their States are arguably more prosperous than the US.
Pointing at Greece kind of makes the point: you get to isolate the failures, and Greece doesn't get to hold back Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden, et al. On the flip side, EU Citizens aren't at each others' throats about everything because they are largely enfranchised at the Member State level.
You can't say either of this about the US.
> Irish financial crises
Yeah but then as of 2015, Ireland became the fastest growing economy in the EU. As of today, it is among the top 10 wealthiest countries in the world.
> and Brexit
Yes, and now the UK no longer gets to sabotage the EU.
>If your argument is that there is variance within the EU, you can make the argument that there is just as much variance within the US
No, my argument is that the EU tries to "have it both ways" by taking away fiscal and monetary sovereignty but leaving cultural sovereignty intact. The result is that Greece, Ireland, Spain, etc were not really able to regulate their economies in any meaningful sense to prevent the kind of blow-up we saw in 2008, particularly because, when you share a currency and trade zone with a heavy exporter like Germany, their surpluses are your deficits.
The Spanish, Irish, and Greek housing bubbles were underwritten by the profits of German exporters. Greek fiscal malfeasance was overlooked because it was considered politically more important to grow the EU and the Eurozone than to let anyone at all have the authority necessary to enforce healthy fiscal and trade balances.
The United States does not actually work this way, because the federal government engages in countercyclical transfers between the states. The wealth of New York and California gets recycled, through taxes, to pay for military bases in Maine, pensions and Social Security checks in Florida and Arizona, and timber conservancies in Idaho.
> None of this is unique to the US — the EU is similarly "interconnected", as is Switzerland.
I live in Switzerland, and the response here to the virus and most other incidents are far more federally managed than the cantonal system would imply to someone accustomed to US states, in my opinion. If forced at gunpoint to generalize, the simplest explanation I would use having lived in both countries is that in Switzerland the cantons have more independence in execution, while in the US they have more freedom in legislation.
It's not so much about locality - it's about competition. Locality is just the means to that.
Everyone wins when competitors try different things and find out what's efficient and what works well and what doesn't. Marijuana legalization and gay marriage started as experiments by states and localities, which could find and set the example to be adopted federally.
Everyone loses when an entrenched monopoly (here the federal government) can forcibly impose one way of doing things with no room for deviation.
Not to say that competition isn't also relevant, but I think locality is still necessary for osmosis of ideas/thoughts.
I think both Marijuana and gay marriage legalization started because of a small group of like-minded people that found it acceptable and were able to spread that ideology enough so that eventually the state could vote on them. For those particular examples, competition doesn't really kick in until it's already been experimented with, but then it really speeds up the spread for sure.
Looking at the timeline of cannabis laws [1], recreational use in particular, Colorado basically tipped the ice berg. My point is that the organic spread of new and/or controversial ideas is localized before competition kicks in.
Everyone doesn't win when competing localities of government try different things. What actually happens is Amazon shops around for enormous public subsidies for its HQ, bankrupting local and state govnerments. We're in a world of globalised companies and expecting some backwater county in Arkansas to negotiate with Huawei is just absurd.
For the same reason that Google tells Congress 'You need to let us run free to fight those Chinese giants', the US needs federal level regulation to play on the same level as those companies, if it had the guts.
> What actually happens is Amazon shops around for enormous public subsidies for its HQ, bankrupting local and state govnerments.
I'll offer a different take: taxation (and budgets) are just the price we pay to society for a basket of services. There's some optimum price / optimum basket. This competition allows different societies to lower their price (taxes) or lower their basket of services based on the democratic needs of that society. Some societies will value job creation more than short-run costs to the budget, and others will not. It's not surprising at all that the city that didn't have a whole lot of jobs chose the former (via the democratically elected government), and the city that already had a lot of jobs (NYC) chose the latter, also via a similarly selected government.
The libertarian "Minimize the federal government" is an extremely misguided fanatical view which is devoid of any fact-based reasoning. Federal investments have lead to transformative change in most sections of the US economy. Federal Reserve keeping the interest rates low and providing unlimited liquidity is whats keeping the stock market from tanking today. Federal investments will be key to de carbonizing the US economy and reducing income inequality (e.g. by increasing the minimum wage).
Careful criticizing libertarianism on here. This is the hive.
A lot of survivorship bias on here and folks who want to think everyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, get rid of taxation and large government etc etc
Well, democracy is not just voting. Most of it actually happens before voting. I mean Russia has voting, Belarus has voting, USSR had voting, Iran has voting, I'm not sure whether North Korea has voting but they certainly could have. To have properly functioning democracy you need the support system that leads to responsible, informed voting and that provided feedback mechanisms between the government and the population. Which includes a vivid and robust public discussion of the topics important for people.
This is what is breaking down I feel. And what we're seeing is just a symptom - employers want to ban workplace politics not because politics and participation is bad per se, but because it has become so dirty and vicious that allowing it can literally destroy the company. You can't efficiently work together with people you hate, and I definitely feel like hate has become the primary weapon and the primary drive of US politics. It is basically required from anybody who plays in it to hate your opponent, and to hate everybody who doesn't march in lockstep with you. If you don't, you're probably secretly in league with "them" and must be targeted for hate yourself. There's no respectful disagreement, there's no difference of opinion allowed, there's no assumption of good will and willing to work through disagreements. The slogan of the day is "burn it all down". Of course there's only two ways for the company to survive in such environment - either everybody thinks the same and wrongthinkers are expelled - thus ensuring all hate is directed outside the company - or ban the politics and keep the hate outside the place of employment. Third way would be to actually remove the hate from the equation, but it doesn't look like there are enough grownups around for this to happen.
> I guess an other possibility would be to have proper unions
I don't see how the unions - especially US unions which are completely partisan - would help anything, except making the union shop inaccessible to those who isn't willing to join union's party.
You know ... there's a reason that US Unions are partisan, which is that the Republican party has been on a mission to destroy them since Reagan and has largely succeeded.
It's more like that centralized top-down economy is much more comfortable for the union leadership than chaotic horizontal competitive economy. It's much easier to enforce certain policy by the power of the government than negotiate it privately with each employer. That makes unions a natural ally of socialists. And of course there's nothing like government subsidies and regulations - which can be exchanged for votes and donations - to hide the inefficiencies of inflexible unionized setups and deflect the competitive threats from more agile and enterprising newcomers. Again, here the unions are the natural allies of centralized regulatory state. And the effects of this are pretty obvious:
https://nypost.com/2018/08/25/why-nyc-is-priciest-city-in-th...https://www.nj.com/news/2018/06/money_for_nothing_working_th...
(And Zerohedge is a trashbag of libertarian fanfiction and russian govt talking points - with the exception of their currency coverage - which is great stuff.)
>I guess an other possibility would be to have proper unions but for some reason I don't see that happening in the USA any time soon...
I think this will happen sooner rather than later. As the market gets flooded with more and more engineers, tech workers will continue to get more and more proletarianized. Unionization will be the natural avenue for workers to get a slice of the pie.
I don't think people earning 5x-6x median wage, not counting stock incentives, are what Marx mean when he wrote about proletariat. Outside of Hollywood stars and top sportsmen, one would struggle to find a less oppressed category of workers.
> If workers trust that "We, the people" are still in charge on the big picture then it doesn't make sense to bring politics at work. Just vote.
This is a bizarre, ahistorical sentiment. Go read about the history of labor struggle in the US. Even when everyone could vote, the organizing of workplaces and response by their employers was far more contentious and violent than anything that’s going on today.
Part of Coinbase's purpose is to provide its workers with a safe environment and fair compensation, even if it's not explicitly written in their mission statement. As such, protesting dangerous work conditions and collectively asking more pay is directly related to a company's mission. What happened at Coinbase was that workers walked out because their CEO didn't want to Tweet about the latest social issue du jour. It's very difficult to imagine what anyone seeks to accomplish with this.
Can you give an example of what you have in mind? I must admit that, being
European, I don't really have a good grasp of the history of American worker
struggles.
Here in France I can't quite think of something really similar to Silicon Valley
activists. When I think about worker-led revolts I think of Germinal or Mai 68,
when the proletariat (and, in the case of Mai 68, the students and then the
proletariat) fought for better working conditions and more rights.
I don't think that's very similar to the time of activism we're talking about
here. For one thing IT workers are not exactly the lowest dregs of the
proletariat, it's a very privileged position with much better working conditions
that most. Beyond that the fight is not usually for the direct benefit of said
workers ("higher salaries!" or "fewer hours!" or "better food at the corporate
restaurant!") but more ideologically motivated. An obvious instance of this is
the very polarizing firing of Brendan Eich from Mozilla (that's still making
waves all these years later). Doing that didn't directly change anything
material for Mozilla's employee, it was motivated by ideology. The only thing that comes close I think is videogame devs complaining about their bad working conditions, but I don't think that's what we're talking about here.
Conversely the 1984's UK miner strike wasn't triggered because the National Coal
Board had said something homophobic. It's just not comparable, IMO.
The lack of violence is also easy to explain: violence is the weapon of those
that have no other way to be heard. Developers in the silicon valley can make
themselves heard without having to burn their company-provided MacBooks and
taking their managers hostage at the next SCRUM Sprint planning.
There was all kinds of trade union opposition to the Vietnam War, which is really no different from tech workers protesting against collaboration with the military and other violent state forces. Many of the leading figures in the Civil Rights Movement also came from labor organizing backgrounds, and while unions like the AFL-CIO have mixed records, support from organized labor was crucial to it success.
The cleavage you’re describing between ideological and material concerns is one that was introduced as part of the neoliberal ideology of the 1970s, in which Capital intentionally carved out a narrow space for identitarian claims to better defend itself from the multi-constituency groups that were attacking it in the 1960s. But it doesn’t reflect the real history of how solidarity functioned in the period.
There is certainly a shift in white-collar workers beginning to understand themselves in terms more akin to their working class predecessors, especially as it relates to hierarchy and power dynamics in companies. But this is not too terribly surprising given that massive wealth inequality has produced an even greater degree of proletarianization, even among the highly educated workforce. Google has more contract employees than regular employees now, for example.
I'm old enough to remember the Vietnam War and the AFL-CIO of the day was staunchly anti-communist and pro-war. Most of the opposition to the war before Nixon became president came from the pacifist left and student led organizations like the SDS.
I already cited the AFL-CIO’s conservatism. Under McCarthyism, most real leftists had been purged from the leadership of large unions. What you say about the students is true, but an incomplete picture. If you want a better one, check out Philip Foner‘s US Labor and the Vietnam War.
Most of the current tech activism is for things like salary transparency and employee representation/governance.
These are progressive ideals pushed usually by people who share other progressive ideals, but employee representation is not itself ideologically motivated.
> I don't think that's very similar to the time of activism we're talking about here.
I think that was exactly the OP's point. The kind of activism we're talking about here is low-key activism by privileged people. I can't think of any examples either - that didn't mean they didn't happen, it just means they weren't important enough to make the history books because they were settled without any violence.
> Now if you feel like your power as a citizen has dwindled and you can't meaningfully enact change through democratic means, it makes sense to try and "weaponize" your job, especially if you work for a powerful company and you're a valuable highly skilled worker.
I think you're close, but not quite right. I think what has happened is that ideas well outside the Overton Window have become popular with a couple small, but very vocal, groups. Their ideas aren't very popular with most people, so they can't achieve their desired outcomes democratically. They therefore try to "weaponize" their jobs in influential institutions, like Software companies, to gain influence over the rest of society.
> But in the end if you're dissatisfied with your company and you know that there's a fundamental ideological incompatibility it probably makes more sense to just quit, especially when you're a software dev and you can probably find some other job fairly easily.
While true that you could find "some other job" - it likely won't be a job that pays as well or has some other detestable attribute. If you have a pathological disagreement with companies collecting lots of data - you're going to have a hard time finding a company paying you $400k+/yr as an IC software dev.
If you're not wealthy (bought real estate before the big boom) or come from a family of wealth (they bought you a house) - you're going to have hard time in many cities only going with companies that you can find almost no ideological incompatibility with. And, turns out, a lot of these major cities that are very expensive also happen to have most of the job listings. God forbid you move to BFE and the few places that hire ICs stop hiring. You'll have to upheave your entire life and move - or pray you can find a suitable remote job.
Like most of us - you sacrifice your ideology because it isn't compatible with living in a capitalistic world and you've decided you're also not ready to be a martyr. You stand to lose a lot in the developed world (as you start with a lot more than those in less developed places) - martyrdom isn't worth it then. Only when you're independently wealthy can you truly make decisions based on your ideology. Making the presumption here that everyone wants a middle class to upper middle class American lifestyle (SFH, 2 cars, live in a somewhat desirable area, kids, retirement savings, etc.).
Now if you feel like your power as a citizen has dwindled and you can't meaningfully enact change through democratic means, it makes sense to try and "weaponize" your job, especially if you work for a powerful company and you're a valuable highly skilled worker.
But in the end if you're dissatisfied with your company and you know that there's a fundamental ideological incompatibility it probably makes more sense to just quit, especially when you're a software dev and you can probably find some other job fairly easily.
I guess an other possibility would be to have proper unions but for some reason I don't see that happening in the USA any time soon...