The tech YouTube sphere is currently buzzing about DHH’s Linux distribution, Omarchy — a portmanteau of “omakase” (the Japanese term for letting the chef decide) and “anarchy”. The irony of combining authoritarian trust-in-the-expert with anti-hierarchical principles seems lost on most enthusiasts. Everyone’s sharing tutorials, praising his opinionated approach to desktop setup, and celebrating his contributions to open source. But while the tech community amplifies his work, few seem aware of — or willing to discuss — the workplace controversy that saw a third of his company quit over his “no politics at work” policy. This makes DHH’s public statements a perfect case study: here’s someone who openly acknowledges that “structural racism is a big problem in America” and calls Israel’s occupation “apartheid”, yet banned his own employees from discussing these very issues at work. How does that contradiction work? And what does it tell us about the limits of belief without practice?
First: Credit Where Credit Is Due
From DHH’s blog post “Mosaics of positions”, he states clearly that “Israel’s occupation of Palestine is an apartheid regime” and that “Structural racism is a big problem in America” — all while his political vision conveniently stops at issues familiar to the Western liberal consciousness, missing the rest of the world’s struggles against imperialism and structural oppression.
I applaud these views. These are important, principled positions that challenge mainstream narratives and show genuine engagement with issues of injustice and oppression. DHH is willing to call Israeli policy what it is — apartheid — which many people, especially in tech leadership, avoid. He acknowledges that structural racism exists, not just individual prejudice.
DHH’s Defense: Finding Common Cause
In his blog post “Let it all out”, DHH defends Basecamp’s controversial “no politics at work” policy. He argues that workplace political discussions had become “acrimonious” and were pitting employees against each other. His stated goal was noble enough: to find “common cause in the work” rather than “repeatedly seek out all the hard edges where we differ”. He positions the policy as protecting workplace harmony and allowing people of different ideological persuasions to collaborate productively.
On the surface, this sounds reasonable. Who wants constant conflict at work? Who doesn’t want a functional team focused on shared goals?
But let’s be clear about what actually happened. The controversy began when Basecamp employees created a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) committee and began discussing problematic customer names that had been mocked in an internal “Best Names Ever” list maintained for over a decade. When employees raised concerns about this practice and broader workplace culture issues, management responded not by addressing the concerns, but by announcing sweeping policy changes that banned:
- Societal and political discussions on company accounts
- Committees, councils, and advocacy groups (including the DEI committee)
- Paternalistic benefits (wellness allowances, fitness benefits, etc.)
The message was clear: employees raising concerns about discrimination and workplace culture weren’t met with dialogue or reform — they were met with prohibition. A third of the company quit in response, including the heads of design, marketing, customer support, and multiple senior engineers. This wasn’t about “finding common ground” — it was about silencing dissent when that dissent pointed at structural problems within the company itself.
The “acrimonious discussions” DHH references weren’t abstract political debates. They were employees — many of them from marginalized backgrounds — trying to address how the company’s own culture had normalized mocking “funny” (read: ethnic, foreign-sounding) customer names. When the structure of the workplace itself became the subject of critique, management shut it down entirely.
The Critical Problem: Where Can These Views Be Expressed?
Here’s the contradiction: If people can’t express their views in everyday contexts like the workplace, how do “normal” people ever get exposed to them?
Most people don’t read political theory in their spare time, attend activism meetings nor do they seek out challenging perspectives on Israel/Palestine or structural racism. They learn through everyday conversations with colleagues, friends, and community members. The workplace is where people spend 40+ hours a week — it’s one of the primary sites where ideas circulate and perspectives shift.
If DHH believes Israel runs an apartheid regime and structural racism is a big problem, but simultaneously bans discussions of these topics at work, then:
- His employees who might benefit from hearing these perspectives never do
- The status quo goes unchallenged in the actual space where people live their lives
- Radical ideas remain siloed in “appropriate venues” that most people never access
You can’t both believe in challenging oppressive systems AND ban the primary venue where most people might actually be challenged to think differently.
DHH’s “Let it all out”
Now let’s look at the specific contradictions in his workplace policy:
Quote 1: Shutting Down Discussion
“This was the second such discussion in a few months that had to be closed out following an acrimonious devolution that pitted employees against each other, and stressed these complicated power dynamics between managers and reports, all on a company-wide stage that invariably pulled everyone into the spectacle.”
Then the team is dysfunctional in the first place. If discussions about racism and workplace culture “pit employees against each other”, that reveals the problem isn’t the discussion — it’s that there are serious underlying issues being ignored. Discomfort doesn’t equal dysfunction. Sometimes teams need to be uncomfortable to address real problems.
In It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work, DHH writes:
“Most of the time, if you’re uncomfortable with something, it’s because it isn’t right. Discomfort is the human response to a questionable or bad situation… If you get into the habit of suppressing all discomfort, you’re going to lose yourself, your manners, and your morals.” (p. 25)
DHH literally wrote that discomfort signals something isn’t right and that suppressing discomfort leads to losing your morals. Yet when employees expressed discomfort about workplace culture and racism, he shut down the conversation as “acrimonious” rather than recognizing it as a signal that something needed to be addressed. By his own framework, the employees’ discomfort was telling him the truth — but he chose to suppress it anyway.
This is the classic leadership hypocrisy: writing books about principles you refuse to practice when they become inconvenient. It’s easy to write about listening to discomfort when you’re the one feeling it. It’s much harder to listen when your employees are uncomfortable and their discomfort implicates you and the power structures you benefit from. DHH’s book preaches one thing — trust your discomfort, don’t suppress it, recognize humans are humans at work — but when employees actually practiced those principles by raising concerns about workplace culture, he did exactly what he warned against. The rules, it seems, only apply when the discomfort flows upward, not when it challenges those at the top. The advice in his book doesn’t seem to be meant to apply to power itself. It was meant to help individuals navigate workplaces, not challenge the people running them. How convenient…
Quote 2: On Keeping Politics Out
“I’ve read some opinions on all of this that charge that facilitating these kinds of discussions, however acrimonious or uncomfortable or unresolved, is actually good, because a lot of life right now is acrimonious, uncomfortable, and unresolved, so work should reflect that. I can’t get behind those arguments.”
It’s real life. Get used to it! Everything is political. You can’t compartmentalize human beings. The idea that people can just “leave politics at the door” ignores that workplace decisions about hiring, promotions, pay equity, and whose voices matter are inherently political.
Not challenging the status quo is political. DHH’s position isn’t neutral — it’s a choice to protect existing power dynamics. When you say “no politics”, you’re really saying “no challenging how things currently work”.
The irony: DHH holds views about Israeli apartheid and structural racism that are challenges to the status quo. But by banning these discussions at work, he ensures the status quo remains unchallenged in the place where it matters most — where people actually exercise power over each other daily.
Quote 3: On Company Focus
“My belief is that the key to working with other people of different ideological persuasions is to find common cause in the work, in the relations with customers, in the good we can do in the industry. Not to repeatedly seek out all the hard edges where we differ.”
Neoliberal crap talk! This assumes work exists in a vacuum separate from society. But work is a site of political struggle — it’s literally a product of capitalism. You can’t separate “the work” from questions about who benefits, who has power, and who gets exploited. Pretending you can is just protecting those who benefit from the current arrangement.
If DHH believes structural racism is a big problem in America, how can Basecamp address it in their hiring, promotion, and workplace culture if they can’t discuss it? “Finding common cause in the work” means nothing if the work itself reproduces the structural problems DHH claims to oppose.
Quote 4: On Alternative Venues
“Those explorations are better left to the smaller groups, to discussions outside of the company-wide stage, and between willing participants.”
They are just a few of many. Work is one of them. We spend 40+ hours a week at work — it’s where we spend most of our lives. If racism, discrimination, and power imbalances exist in the workplace, then the workplace is exactly where they need to be discussed. Pushing these conversations elsewhere is just saying “don’t make me uncomfortable where I have to see it”.
This is especially problematic given DHH’s own views: If he thinks Israeli apartheid and structural racism are real problems, does he only discuss them with “willing participants” outside work? Then how does anyone’s mind ever change? How do people who’ve never thought about these issues get exposed to them? The answer is: they don’t. And that’s exactly how structural problems remain, well, structural.
Quote 5: The “Pyramid of Hate” Dismissal
“I was dismayed to see the argument advanced in text and graphics on [Employee 1’s] post that this list should be considered part of a regime that eventually could lead to genocide. That’s just not an appropriate or proportionate comparison to draw.”
The pyramid of hate is an educational framework showing how normalized biases can escalate. DHH dismissing it as “disproportionate” misses the point: the workplace is where normalization happens. If you can’t discuss how small acts of bias connect to larger systems of oppression, you can’t challenge them.
The ultimate irony: Again, DHH recognizes Israeli apartheid — a system that the pyramid of hate framework would argue didn’t appear overnight but developed through normalized discrimination. Yet he rejects using that same analytical framework to understand workplace dynamics.
Quote 6: The Core Contradiction
“Demanding that it also has to play out in our shared workspaces isn’t going to lead anywhere good, in my opinion.”
The workplace isn’t just a “shared workspace” — it’s a political and economic structure where power is exercised daily. Refusing to acknowledge that doesn’t make it apolitical; it just means those with power get to avoid being challenged. Work is, for fuck’s sake, a result of capitalism. You can’t pretend it’s neutral ground.
And here’s the fundamental problem: DHH holds anti-apartheid and anti-racist positions on apartheid and structural racism. But by banning political discussions at work, he ensures that:
- Employees who might hold different views never get challenged
- The “normal” people who don’t read political blogs never encounter these ideas
- Structural problems in the workplace can’t be addressed because discussing structure is “political”
- His own stated beliefs become irrelevant in the space where he has the most power to act on them
Beliefs Without Practice
You can’t meaningfully oppose structural racism while simultaneously banning discussions of structure and racism in the primary institution where you exercise power. You can’t call out Israeli apartheid while refusing to let employees discuss how systems of oppression function.
Without everyday contexts for these discussions, liberatory ideas remain the domain of people who already seek them out. The coworker who’s never thought about Palestine, the manager who doesn’t see their own biases, the team that reproduces discrimination without realizing it — none of them change if we only discuss these things in “appropriate venues” with “willing participants”.
DHH seems to want the social capital of holding “progressive views” without the social cost of radical action. He can write blog posts about apartheid and structural racism, collect praise from certain circles, feel good about his positions — all while ensuring those positions never threaten his authority, his company’s operations, or his comfort.
This is the neoliberal compromise in action: you can believe whatever you want, as long as it doesn’t interfere with business. Consciousness is permitted; organization is not. Analysis is fine; action is banned. The workplace becomes a microcosm of liberal democracy: you’re free to hold any opinion in private, but the actual structure of power remains untouchable. And just like in electoral politics, the people who benefit most from this arrangement are the ones who get to define what counts as “too political”.
A Note on Individuals vs. Systems
This critique isn’t about DHH being a “bad person”. I don’t care about his personal moral character, and I’m not interested in cancellation or condemnation. DHH is a symptom, not the disease.
The pattern he represents — radical analysis held privately, radical action banned institutionally — is endemic to how power operates under capitalism. It’s the same pattern we see in corporations that celebrate Pride Month while funding anti-LGBTQ politicians, universities that issue statements about racial justice while calling the cops on student protesters, and politicians who acknowledge climate change while approving new oil pipelines. It’s status fucking quo!
The problem isn’t that DHH is uniquely hypocritical. It’s that the structure of capitalist workplaces requires this hypocrisy. As a business owner, DHH’s primary obligation is to maintain profitability and managerial control. Allowing genuine discussion of structural oppression in the workplace threatens both — not because such discussions are inherently disruptive, but because they reveal how workplace hierarchies, pay disparities, and decision-making power are themselves structured by race, class, and other systems of oppression.
You can’t be a “good” boss under capitalism any more than you can be a “good” slaveowner — or a “good cop” for that matter. The role itself is the problem. This isn’t about individual moral character; it’s about structural position.
Just as “All Cops Are Bastards” doesn’t mean every individual police officer is personally cruel — it means the role of police is to enforce property relations and state power, regardless of individual intentions — the same applies to bosses under capitalism. The role of “employer” is to extract surplus value from workers and maintain hierarchical control. A boss who personally believes in equality but structurally enforces inequality is still enforcing inequality.
DHH’s “progressive” blog posts don’t contradict his authoritarian workplace policies — they complement them. The former provides moral cover for the latter. He gets to feel enlightened while maintaining the very structures that make enlightenment irrelevant.
This is why individual “awareness” or “allyship” from people in power is never enough. The structure doesn’t care about your beliefs. A boss who acknowledges structural racism but bans discussing it at work is functionally identical to a boss who denies structural racism exists. The outcome — workers unable to organize around shared oppression, structural problems left unaddressed — is the same.
The point isn’t to condemn DHH. The point is to recognize that as long as workplaces remain autocracies where owners have unilateral power to define what can and cannot be discussed, no amount of radical belief will translate into radical practice. The structure ensures that belief remains decorative while power remains untouched.