[snicksnak]

always pay attention who you hire, especially in HR. Woke and activist HR hires woke and activist people, woke and activist people will cause you trouble and can wreck your whole ship. This is true for every industry but especially for media, just look what happened to the once so prestigious news outlets, all taken hostage.

[seriousquestion]

Smart companies have already been filtering them out. See Coinbase, who literally paid them to leave.

[geofft]

Does this tend to improve the company's financial performance, or is this simply worth doing if you have certain political goals for your company that outweigh financial results? i.e., is this "smart companies" as in those with good financial ideas or "smart companies" as in those who want to build a non-woke world for the next generation?

It seems like most SJW-converged companies have been doing just fine as companies, otherwise the invisible hand of the market would have put a stop to this long ago.

[redmeatforchina]

The ironic part is that even the most liberal anti-republican types are made miserable by woke employees. I worked at a tech company that went through the exact process you described. Liberal Democrat types used to keep politics out of the workplace for the most part. Then they started hiring woke brainwashed college students who aligned with them ideologically but not procedural. Now instead of the daily chat at the water cooler, we have employees screaming at meetings about the latest outrage, taking days off because something happened in the news, and crying when being woke doesn't help their performance reviews. Everybody is miserable and managers are fleeing.

[mullingitover]

The problem with notion this is that 'woke' or 'activist' values are actually pretty reflective of mainstream values in 21st century society. I would worry more about the legal exposure of people who express opposition to diversity/equity/inclusiveness, as these are very likely to be the people who would end up behaving inappropriately and getting the company mired in harassment and discrimination suits.

[refurb]

The very fact these value are called “activist” and “woke” means they aren’t mainstream values.

And it’s not the values, it’s the disruption. If you had anti-abortion Republicans doing the same would everyone be saying how the company should “tread lightly”.

[mullingitover]

The labels 'activist' and 'woke' are generally applied derisively by people people who don't share these values. To the mainstream these traits are generally not even labeled, they're just what we consider common decency in this decade. When my parents were my age it was 'activist' and 'woke' to be in favor of mixed race marriages. Times change.

> And it’s not the values, it’s the disruption.

People want to feel like they're in a career that aligns with their values, and the more in demand your talent is, the more you're able to make demands of your employers to have them be values-aligned. If employers don't need top shelf talent, they're free to ignore that and be less competitive in the market for talent. However, successful companies usually tend to compete. We're talking about Spotify because they competed for and hired high-grade talent, and that high-grade talent wants their company to be values-aligned.

[refurb]

Thankfully silencing opinions you disagree with isn’t mainstream...yet.

[mullingitover]

It's absolutely mainstream on all sides to try to silence people you disagree with, and it always has been. Republicans tried to silence Nike and the NFL over Colin Kaepernick, Democrats tried to silence companies for doing business with the apartheid regime in South Africa, Republicans are trying to silence Coke and Delta for their support of voting rights, civil rights era people tried to silence racist bus companies, evangelicals are constantly trying to silence all manner of businesses all the time. It's a long-standing American tradition at this point.

[refurb]

Sure you can find specific examples, but thankfully the US still has some semblance of celebrating free speech.

And your examples of silence seem fuzzy. Who was trying to “silence” (suppress speech) of South Africa? Suppress their racist political system? Sure, but I don’t recall anyone saying they can’t talk.

[seriousquestion]

That whole premise is flawed. First, they often describe themselves as activists. Second, they are clearly not for diversity and inclusion. It's about conformity and exclusion. They are anti-free speech, pro censorship and bully those who don't conform. You can't square that intolerance with any desire to be diverse and inclusive.

[themolecularman]

I agree with another poster that Spotify employees should stand up on principle in opposition to the internal employees that are now running the asylum.

I listen to JRE on Spotify and am not happy about the decision. Actually the first episode I listened to was an Alex Jones + Tim Dillon episode (Tim being a comic I like) that is now gone. And while I don't agree with Alex Jones, I listened to it because I expected it to be controversial or nutty.

There are people who say once you give in to the woke mob they won't stop there, I wouldn't be surprised if now they know they can get other targets canceled if those targets don't consume their orthodoxy.

[snicksnak]

The Alex Jones and Tim Dillon episode is one of the best ones ever, very sad they pulled it, at least it's still on youtube (for now).