[civilized]

Basecamp's angry worker faction was demanding the company apologize for contributing to a white supremacist, genocidal culture... because some customer service folks had a funny customer name list that included names from all backgrounds.

That had absolutely nothing to do with basic dignity for marginalized groups. It was simply a grab for power and status. One of many. We who have been watching are very familiar with the game.

The framing of it as merely about basic dignity is deeply disingenuous, but is itself familiar and another part of the game. What about the dignity of customer service workers? Is it upholding their dignity to frivolously condemn them for a mildly immature in-joke that showed no racial bias and harmed no one?

Some of us, you will find, are not so easily played for fools.

[poszlem]

Unfortunately it's a discussion tactic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

The motte-and-bailey fallacy (named after the motte-and-bailey castle) is a form of argument and an informal fallacy where an arguer conflates two positions that share similarities, one modest and easy to defend (the "motte") and one much more controversial (the "bailey").[1] The arguer advances the controversial position, but when challenged, they insist that they are only advancing the more modest position

[remarkEon]

The other I've seen deployed more and more often is the Kafka Trap, and with increasing degrees of complexity.

[schneems]

At least a third of the company quit. That is not something that happens over something “deeply disingenuous”.

I’ve got a timeline put together on it https://schneems.com/2021/05/12/the-room-where-it-happens-ho... the post also goes into detail about Rails governance internals from my experiences as a contributor over the last decade.

[Jensson]

> At least a third of the company quit. That is not something that happens over something “deeply disingenuous”.

You leave out that basecamp gave 6 months of salary to each person quitting. I'd assume that most of those would have quit under those conditions even if there wasn't an incident at all. As we can see here at the Coinbase incident where they didn't give a ton of money basically nobody quit, basecamps case would probably look similar.

[schneems]

Your original characterization of the issue is dismissive and deeply disingenuous.

[civilized]

Half the country voted for Trump. A small percentage of those, but still millions of people, voted for him in part because they believed he was going to save them from a satanic ruling class of pedophiles.

"A lot of people did something" is not a solid reason to respect what they did or why they did it.

[brodo]

The big problem with diversity in corporate settings is that it is often fake. It is not used to help marginalized people. It is used for internal power grabs and for “woke-washing” evil organizations. Like the “I’m a Latina with two moms” CIA ad.

[babyshake]

If you work in customer service, just don't make fun of your customers. It makes it harder to do your job well.

[joshuamorton]

This is a fantastically creative misrepresentation. No one demanded anyone apologize for contributing to a genocidal culture for anything. And yes I know you're referring to the pyramid. It also misses out on plenty of other content too, but that bit was fantastically creative, really.

[civilized]

Nah.

I was slightly off in my memory, but I went back to some of the original blogs [1] and news reports [2] and there was indeed a specific employee demand that leadership acknowledge the customer list as something to be included in the pyramid of hate, as contributing to a colonial, genocidal culture. That this would require an apology was not explicitly stated, but it goes without saying, since there had already been apologies all around for the lesser offense, the general inappropriateness of the list.

In his blog post, DHH pointed out exactly where the dispute was: "It's still inappropriate for us to be laughing at individually named customers in our company Campfires, but not because there are any racist or colonial overtones to it." [emphasis mine] DHH simply didn't want the list spuriously connected to the serious moral offenses of bigotry and racism, with all the consequences that would open up.

This isn't to deny that a completely different sort of list, in a completely different context, could be validly cited as within the pyramid of hate. And it's fine to bring that up, so long as you note that what happened obviously wasn't that. But the angry employees didn't note that, because it wasn't part of their game. In fact, demanding that leadership frame the list as the sort of thing that contributes to colonialism and genocide, rather than merely being immature and inappropriate in the workplace, was a first step in setting off a moral panic where the instigators would call all the shots. Again, those of us who have been paying attention have seen many examples of this.

Other points of controversy, like the implicit demand that leadership take sides on the existence of white supremacy within the company precisely because an employee denied it was present [3], present even clearer examples of the Kafka-trapping and moral panic-mongering that was unfolding within the company.

Hansson and Fried were smart to nip it in the bud, and nip it in the bud publicly. They set a great example of how to show these people the door.

[1] https://world.hey.com/dhh/let-it-all-out-78485e8e

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22406673/basecamp-politic...

[3] https://www.platformer.news/p/-how-basecamp-blew-up