Breaking news: someone at Google grew a spine. Earlier this month, after a dozen employees locked themselves inside a manager’s office and refused to leave until their company ended the war in Gaza, Google called the cops and had them all arrested. Then, along with dozens of their friends, who also considered it perfectly acceptable to perform various acts of “civil disobedience” within the halls of the actual company where they “worked,” the degenerates were fired. But the real surprise came last week, at the end of another one of CEO Sundar Pichai’s nothing-statements on AI, in which he introduced the company’s new “mission-first” philosophy. Google, he wrote, “is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics.” While a relatively benign statement to the untrained eye, this was in fact a stunning departure for the House That Built Crazy, and so we arrive, some seven years after its clownish incarnation, at the conclusion of tech’s “bring your activism to work arc,” in which a silent majority of kind, hardworking idealists were bullied into submission by a minority of actual psychopaths clawing for workplace power behind a cloak of virtue.

It’s been a long road to sanity, and a little bit of celebration is in order. But the industry remains in great danger of reversion back to tech’s recent Maoist norms, and the mission-first policy, increasingly widespread, has proven the entrepreneur’s most successful tool for self-defense in America’s ongoing culture war. Here, a retrospective on the policy, a brief history so that we don’t forget ourselves, and exclusive comments on the subject from two of tech’s most courageous leaders.

Obviously, everything begins with Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, who famously chartered the industry’s course away from workplace activism back in 2020, at the height of America’s mass hysteria, with a first-of-its-kind mission-first policy. For his courage, he weathered total war from the tech-loathing press. He regrets nothing. Following this recent bit of Google news, I reached out to the man with a mission for comment.

“I'm glad to see Google taking a step in this direction,” he told me, “although I suspect a much bigger step is needed, including exiting a material percentage of staff who aren't aligned with this direction. Google is a gem of American innovation, and it's been sad to see it captured by activists, who have disrupted work and squandered their early lead in AI. A culture of merit and innovation is what made Google great, and I hope they can get back to it. Coinbase is a much smaller company, but our CHRO and I are available to help any company looking to make this transition if we can. I can assure you, life is so much better on the other side, as a mission-first company.”

While still a difficult transition, going mission-first is no longer the danger it once was, which is why a company as weakly led as Google can flirt with the policy today. Ironically, because the tactic receives less blowback than it once did, it’s easy to lose sight of its importance. But it’s worth reflecting back on where the industry was at the height of the culture war.

In late September 2020, America was reeling toward the end of a seven-month period of effectively legalized rioting, a media-enforced ‘cultural consensus’ that would not end until a mob of Trump supporters tried it on Inauguration Day, at which point “mostly peaceful protests” were promptly put to bed. With the country awash in an ocean of little black Instagram squares, politics was injected into every aspect of American life, and the corporate world was no exception. Tech companies were pressured into supporting corrupt charities, releasing gun-to-their-head public statements on systemic racial discrimination, and adopting overtly racist DEI hiring programs ostensibly designed to correct the “white supremacy” (suddenly a common phrase) these companies had themselves — we were told — perpetuated. It was time to read the room, to check our privilege, to do the work.

With every major social media platform totally captured by the zeitgeist, any small departure from the mainstream position — that every company must exist in opposition to Donald Trump, and be refashioned in some significant sense as a political weapon in service of ending “white supremacy,” and “saving democracy” — was ruthlessly attacked. As the silencing of any rational perspective had by then for years been the cultural standard, most of our reality was litigated secretly, in private group chats. Those who failed to find others to confide in were left wondering if they — or the world — had gone insane.

But as was the case throughout the country, most tech leaders had not gone mad. There was no CEO, at a private dinner, or in hushed whispers over drinks, who didn’t understand they had inadvertently overseen the dawn of a wildly hostile workplace environment, or worry their Red Guard HR team’s obsession with open discrimination against white and asian men was possibly illegal. Why tolerate this, I would often ask. You’re in charge, aren’t you? And following a summer Coinbase walkout, Brian Armstrong became the first to answer that question with decision: yes, he said, I am in charge.

Coinbase’s new position, which Brian published to his company blog, was simple: while employees were welcome to their opinions outside of work, the company itself would no longer participate in political conversations beyond the scope of their mission. They were a crypto platform, and that was their focus. Anyone who didn’t like this was not only free to leave, but would be paid to leave. Please, for the love of God, leave.

The press was apoplectic.

From WIRED, FastCompany, Axios, the Verge: this was a shocking aberration in tech, how would we survive a world without product managers hosting struggle sessions over lunch? “Poor little rich boys,” summed up Kara Swisher, with a link to Nitasha Tiku’s piece in the Washington Post framing Brian’s commitment to the work of his company as, somehow, “right wing.” This was accompanied by a piece of art in which a laptop smashed a bunch of tiny little activists attempting to protest, which, unfortunately, I have to concede went hard as hell. According to the Information, a narrow majority of people in tech — who they polled, this was scientific! — agreed that Brian, in stating a company should only speak on issues related to the company, had gone too far.

Predictably, the media onslaught did not conclude with disagreement over Brian’s policy. The goal was his destruction. As the story developed, the New York Times’ Nathaniel Popper connected with the most aggrieved former Coinbase employees, many of whom had fueled the very hostile workplace environment Brian was attempting to correct, who alleged racial discrimination. Famously, Brian scooped the Times with his own post on their hit piece, ushering in one of the great first examples of “going direct,” a strategy popularized by Balaji Srinivasan, the OG champion in tech’s war against the press that covered it, who was of course fully embroiled in the Popper saga. But the Times didn't — perhaps, at that point, couldn't — stop there.

Following publication of their hit, I've been told by sources close to the matter that Popper went to Brian's board, and demanded to know what they'd be doing in response to his bullshit allegations. Internally, the sense was Popper wanted Brian fired. Was his motivation ideological, or was it retaliation for blowing the scoop? There's no way to prove it either way, of course, and it's certainly possible Popper was just attempting to garner some shocked reaction he could use in another loser story. But on net the motive doesn't really matter. The end result was fear.

With few exceptions — the usual few, including Paul Graham as well as Balaji — tech was mostly silent. The reason was simple cowardice. The New York Times made clear the cost of speaking up would be your name, alongside the word “racist,” in the country’s most important news outlet. Today, such a thing would be a nightmare. But in 2020 it felt like a death sentence.

Six months later, Ruby on Rails creator and Basecamp founder David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH, we call the man) followed Brian’s lead. He reoriented his company with a mission focus, and paid his more endemically outraged employees to leave. Reaction was equally deranged, and Basecamp’s new policy was framed as a total disaster, with David’s failure guaranteed. And for a time, he told me, it really was dark in social purgatory.

I sat down with the Rails legend this week, and asked him about the industry’s changing culture, as well as the events that precipitated his decision to break from consensus.

“We spent about two weeks in hell,” David explained. “I probably received 2,000 emails at the time, and some 30,000 tweets. We trended on Twitter for, I think, 24 hours right around the time the Verge article came out.”

What drove DHH to release a statement he knew would risk his company’s life? Why did he — a media darling and anti-Big Tech Scandinavian leftist — take such a stark position? It was a slow drum of countless things, he told me, and then something unimaginable: when determining whether they would work with a client, one of his employees tried to figure out a potential client’s politics.

“When I saw that we had an inquiry into a customer,” he explained, “where [an employee] on their own accord just started going through their social media profiles… I just went oh, okay, no, I’m not going to run that kind of company.”

David’s worldview was defined by suspicion of power, and this was total Stasi shit. A veil was lifted, and the crazy things he’d previously tolerated became impossible to ignore.

At one point, his employees demanded he and his cofounder change the name of their book, “It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work.” The word “crazy,” they said, was ableist. The opinion itself was nothing especially terrible. Language changes, David reasoned. So he “did the work,” researched the issue, and decided no, thank you for the feedback, but we will not be changing the title of our — not your — book. Strangely, the conversation didn’t end. “You aren’t listening,” he was told again, and again, and again.

“It’s like the only argument for why someone wouldn’t accept the terms would be they weren’t listening,” he explained. “It wasn’t enough to give employees the opportunity to voice their concerns. If those concerns weren’t transformed into the exact actions those employees were looking to achieve, that was problematic.”

He continued:

“If you empower literally every employee in your business to believe every suggestion they put forward, every analysis they put forward, has to be implemented as stated, or the business is fucked? You don't have a fucking business. You have a goddamn commune or something that's going to argue about, I don’t know, whatever the color of the fence should be until the end of the day. Is orange actually now a racist color? And now we've got to fucking paint the fence again.”

Workplace activism is poison, and when a body is poisoned, David explained, its reaction is violent, horrific, seemingly unbearable. But, in a way, that reaction is good. The pain means you’re still alive, and importantly signals you’re still poisoned — expel that poison, or die. He had made the right decision.

And the pendulum continued to swing.

By the time Meta joined the mission-first party in 2022, tech’s broader culture had shifted to the point that most people did not even realize Zuckerberg made the decision. David credits that broader cultural change to two things. First, Elon Musk took Twitter private, and shattered the censorship apparatus. Then, tech crash-landed from a 14-year bull run. With mass layoffs now a norm, the balance of power between employees and leadership shifted. CEOs were back to the business of business, and tech’s long psychosis began to recede.

On the one-year anniversary of Coinbase’s mission-first policy, Brian Armstrong noted something interesting: “there is a huge mismatch,” he wrote on Twitter, “between people’s stated and revealed preferences right now, and we’re operating in an environment of virtue signaling and fear of speaking up.”

Almost nobody in tech wanted to live through a daily workplace hell of struggle sessions, and a couple years ago any CEO brave enough to simply lead with common sense would have been rewarded by his like-minded, if less powerful, employees. At the time of Brian, and then David’s decision, this was only difficult to see because one privileged, activist class had been anointed sacred, while the rest of us were silent — when not actively silenced. That silence was blinding, which is something we were warned about.

In Jessica Livingston’s great 2017 post, “The Sound of Silence,” she wondered what we could possibly know in a world increasingly hostile to new ideas, theories, and unpopular opinions. The industry is in danger, she warned. This is as great a place as any to mark the beginning of tech’s silent winter, and I think it’s safe to say that winter basically concluded on the morning of October 26, 2022, when Elon Musk walked a sink into the halls of Twitter, and took the place over. These days, it’s relatively safe to speak in public. Mission accomplished? Maybe for now, and to an extent, but the danger of authoritarian workplace activism remains a considerable danger to every healthy company.

I talk to founders every day. Even now, new hires constantly attempt to mainstream activism into their startup’s culture — in everything from demands for public statements on some contentious political issue (abortion was the last big one) to the insistence we must all adhere to objectively racist hiring practices in the name of ending racism. There is no reasoning with such people. Simply declare yourself a mission-oriented company like every other sane adult left in the industry, pay the crazy people to leave, and carry on succeeding. But in order to keep the fire off our founders, the rest of us have to “do the work.”

Defending a free and open tech culture, mediated among friends, in our writing, and online, beyond the halls of our workplace, is the only way to keep the psychotic workplace Stasi shit at bay. For those among us in positions of influence or power able to speak without harming their business or losing their job, I think the medicine is just to talk. I think the medicine is just to be honest, relentlessly. Because silence is the herald of disaster, and if it comes again we may never make it back.

-SOLANA