Back to Dictatorship

Today I’m trying hard not to self-plagiarize what I’ve said about company culture in the distant past, but if anything I was being too optimistic. A pair of recent Company Cultural Moments around (what else) crypto companies make me wonder if company culture is unsalvageable as framing device for human interaction at work.

A couple weeks back, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong was understandably annoyed by a quixotic employee petition to remove some of his company’s senior executives, and he aired his animus in the usual way—he took t’Twitter, as we say in the hills.

“Great suggestion,” says Armstrong when his employees bring him a private internal petition to fire his execs. Probably not how that would go down, I’m guessing? If the CEO has to publicly tell everyone what the company culture is, then that’s not “culture,” it’s just a workplace rule that the business is not successfully enforcing.

However, Armstrong will have to step aside for Kraken CEO Jesse Powell, who manages to mint the perfect nonfungible token of condescension and hubris:

I’d humbly submit that perhaps the dictatorship never really stopped. Powell was reacting the New York Times story on his studied policies about why he should be allowed to say the N-word, for example. The (reportedly edited) public Kraken culture explainer does not technically mention whether or not employees may say the N-word if they’re just being friendly, but it does make it sound like you definitely couldn’t object if someone called you … well, anything? I won’t bother picking over this long treatise in detail, but consider these bullet points:

Sounds like an absolute utopia for assholes. But let’s say you agree. Is this company culture? Or is this a list of the CEO’s pet peeves about the wider world that he gets to afflict upon his thousands of employees because he is the boss?

Kraken’s culture document is half warmed-over libertarian trolling and half crypto business dogma. Fortunately these are mutually reinforcing when it comes to ideological conformity—producing employees more likely to “conform to basic rules of honest debate,” whatever those may be. Controlling the nature of the workplace “debate” is the oldest trick in the book of narrowing the range of outcomes to pre-determined alternatives acceptable to management. Fortunately, there’s always time to drop the facade and “return” to dictatorship if the debate gets too sticky.

I want an honest debate about doing crimes at work. Are people gonna get all offended if I’m doing crimes?

Hmmm. When you say you don’t support illegal activities, does that mean I can’t do crimes, or I can’t ask for help doing crimes?

You can argue this is a backlash to equally overreaching top-down progressive DEI principles making people feel uncomfortable with office politics they don’t agree with. The difference is those policies are ideally employee-focused—they are designed to protect employees from longstanding problems and prejudices embedded in institutions and the history of the cultures we live in outside of work. DEI workplace concepts arose to mirror the growing cultural awareness of these problems, and they are meant to be universally applicable regardless of business or industry.

That’s not to say that high-minded DEI discourse gets a pass as company culture either, if it’s not serious, sincere, provably actionable, and—most critically—an emergent property from how people authentically and positively behave at work, rather than a rule that must be policed. Regardless, CEOs and companies are more than free to concoct and impose whatever eccentric behavioral rules they want on their employees, thanks to our pal capitalism. But that’s not culture. That’s a costume.