If, as a politician/party, you wanted to exert complete control over a population, then banning talk about politics at work (where lets face it the majority of people spend the majority of their lives), and ensuring companies don't talk about politics themselves either, would probably be an essential step.
It would be very concerning (and in violation of the First Amendment) if the government forbade you from talking about politics at work. But this is not that — it's a company saying that at their company, they don't have political debates on their internal communication systems. This is different in both degree and kind.
Are you concerned that if too many companies take this approach, it will become the norm, like it was before about 10 years ago, and that then there will be attempts by politicians to codify it into law?
If it became the norm, politicians wouldn't need to encode it into law - they'd have 'won' already.
The question I suppose really is to what extent society (through the agency of the law and elected representatives) can police (or more precisely in this case to prevent the policing of) private forums like company internal communication systems. I'd argue that simply being privately owned does not put up a perfect barrier to society, and that society does have a legitimate interest in how such forums are run.
There seems to be this idea in the US that any form of tyranny and oppression is ok, so long as it is not the government that is doing it.
This was voluntary, and there is no evidence that it was anything but internal.
Do you have something that would point to a specific politician or party being involved?
As a counterpoint, the liberalization and allowing of corporate lobbying and speech has made it much easier to manipulate political agendas, and remove agency from the population.
I seriously doubt it. I don't know of anything interesting that has come from discussing non work-related politics at work. What needs to be preserved is the ability to discuss work-related politics at work, which can currently easily get you fired (but for a made-up reason.)
As for companies not talking about politics, I don't care what companies have to say. They're the mouthpieces of their owners. As can be seen in this case, when the owner dictates that the company doesn't participate in politics unrelated to its business. Should companies have the right to speak about arbitrary subjects, but not the right to silence? How can an employee feel like they'll be treated fairly if they don't agree with the company line (issued yesterday) about apricots in Africa?
I'd go farther and say that the list of subjects that a company opines in public about is the same as the list of subjects an employee can feel like they're not free to have an opinion on that anyone at their job could hear about without risking their livelihood.
The fact that DHH goes on and on about politics in his personal life but keeps it away from the company is a positive indicator that it's not opinions that are being suppressed, but opinions about business-unrelated political matters on internal systems.
edit: I feel that a priority for any sort of socialism, or civilization for that matter, is to figure out how to work productively with people you don't like or agree with. And psychologically, not being able to cooperate with people who differ from you is an issue of autonomy and boundaries.
Whether it is through law, custom, or company policy, anything that stifles political debate weakens our democracy. To be clear, that does not include or allow hate speech or incitement, which are identifiably different.
Of course we should balance this with the needs of the business in keeping company communications 'on topic' as it were, and to avoid damaging professional relationships.
Right, it's an explicitly political stance. I think there are plenty of ways to speak to the need for collaboration, kindness, respecting difference without drawing artificial boundaries around what is and isn't politics. It's pretty clear that DHH is doing politics all the time, just that his politics are conditioned on understanding itself as "not political."
Additionally, DHH somewhat regularly blogs about political things. While I understand it's his "personal" blog, can you really have a personal blog separate from work when you're the CTO of the company and the creator of Rails?
I don't see why not - and notably they don't seem to attempt to ban other employees from having personal blogs or engaging in activism outside the workplace either.
It's complicated if you have personal but identified channels and are also a somewhat public figure in the context of various communities, including companies and tech projects.
I guess my take is that if you want to have a truly personal blog or social media channels, it should be as anonymized as possible. (Which has pros and cons.) Certainly, there are a ton of things I wouldn't write on a public channel even if I weren't technically violating any company policy because they would bite me.
When I was an analyst, I would absolutely not write anything about a CxO that differed from what I would put in a research report.
