How Basecamp Blew Up
&quot;But Fried and his co-founder, David Heinemeier Hansson, had been taken aback by an employee post which argued that mocking customer names laid the foundation for racially-motivated violence, and closed the thread.&quot;<p>Children understand that calling people names isn&#x27;t the same as violence.<p>At some point can we all admit that the most narcissistic, dramatic people are overly-indulged by this garbage?<p>I&#x27;m at a startup now, but left a company in February that got torched by this toxic BS.  My favorite moment was sitting there, and having a coworker (US born, but of Arab descent) who grew up in an extremely wealthy neighborhood with immense privilege, lecturing a blind white male employee about how much privilege he had, and then going on to talk about how white people were uniquely tainted by the slave trade that some of their ancestors engaged in.  Naturally, he didn&#x27;t seem to realize that the African slave trade was invented by his Arab ancestors.  Nor did he see the irony in the fact that holding a person responsible for horrible action of people who look like them is the same way of thinking that leads bigots to blame all Arabs for the actions of the 9&#x2F;11 hijackers.<p>Seeing good companies get torn to shreds by this campus idiocy reminds me of how insulated academia is from the real world.  The absurd, essay-driven philosophy masquerading as social science makes it impossible for groups of humans to achieve anything productive.  Nobody ever noticed this before, because in the pseudo social science world they inhabit, productivity isn&#x27;t a thing.