Woke at work Why tech firms are trying to run away from politics—and failing

W HEN AT WORK, steer clear of politics. This rule, generally accepted around the world, does not apply in techland. Employees bring their “whole self to work”, including their political beliefs. Internal online forums are full of heated debates about social issues, ranging from sexual harassment to police brutality. Some firms have started to push back. Facebook, Google and Shopify discourage political debates on their internal message boards. Basecamp, a small but culturally influential maker of web software, recently caused a stir when it declared itself a politics-free zone, as Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange, had a few months earlier.

Last week even Apple, otherwise famously focused on its products, got caught up in the debate. It fired a well-known new staff member, Antonio García Martínez, after employees circulated a petition highlighting the supposedly misogynistic tone of a book he penned in 2016 mocking life in Silicon Valley. And last week Alphabet, Google’s parent, had to deal with another internal petition circulating among employees, this one calling on the firm’s leadership to make a statement “recognising the violence in Palestine and Israel”.

Digital technology has always had a political bent, starting with firms such as Apple, which have their roots in the 1960s counterculture. Technological shifts have tended to be framed in political terms, as was the case with open-source software, which initially had an anti-capitalist impetus. More recently, to attract top employees, tech firms have felt obliged to offer plenty of perks, such as free food, but also “work that aligns with personal values”, says Jennifer Kim, a noted startup adviser. Such expectations also explain why bosses of big tech firms pipe up on issues ranging from immigration to misinformation.

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