I lived in the States for about a decade.

Sometimes it was partisan politics. Trump came up pretty often, for better or worse, during those years -- I had a milestone birthday the day Trump was elected, so I remember a haircut maybe a couple of days before where that was a natural springboard.

Sometimes it was cultural politics. #MeToo came up a lot; a surprising amount of young male barbers want to talk about how they pick up chicks, which I've always found a little weird because I'm old and I'm married and I am really surprised they judge I'd be receptive to that kind of thing. One talked to me about how he saw a sex worker. Maybe that's not something you'd code as political. I remember someone mentioning the Aziz Ansari kurfuffle. Again, it's all politics baby.

My work overlaps with politics, and anyone who asked me about my work typically volunteered some kind of politics in response. If I told you I ran a polling outfit, what do you think your followup questions might be?

But what I'm saying is that partisan politics isn't the same thing as politics, which is one of the fundamental dimensions of the Coinbase story, and so it's pretty relevant. A woman who cut my hair in Los Angeles was telling me about her travel experience. Non-political. I talked about my travel experience. I wasn't from the states either, so I talked about where I was from. Wait, my hairdress is from a country that was affected by the Trump travel ban, and her parents were no longer able to visit her here, and her status -- though documented -- was such that she couldn't easily get back to see them and get back in the country. She wasn't going on an unhinged partisan rant about Republicans, she was just talking about a basic para-political topic in a pretty unobjectionable way. And that kind of thing happens very often.

Presumably you got a haircut during COVID. Did you talk about COVID? Isn't COVID (para-)political? Do you live in a city? Did you get a haircut that summer? Were there boarded up businesses because of the protests/riots connected to George Floyd? Did you talk about that?

Did you talk about sports? Most of the barber shops I'm in display ESPN. The worst was a place where I got my haircut in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and jesus christ, the "Go Big Blue!" is insufferable. Is sports para-political? Yes, in two ways -- as we're seeing with the NBA and vaccines and as we saw in 2016 with the kneeling and anthem protests and as we saw with LeBron's bizarre China apologism, and as we saw with the WWE doing stuff in Saudi Arabia, and as we saw with Blizzard and Hong Kong, and as we're seeing with the NCAA student pay dispute (had this particular conversation three or four times, in Ann Arbor, in Los Angeles, in Ontario Canada...) it turns out that sports overlap with politics a lot.

But let's say you avoid all of that discussion, and you just discuss teams. What I'm trying to say is that the kind of torturous, almost religious, tribalism that people hate when it comes to talking politics casts a shadow over a lot of other stuff. I hate talking to sports people who are nuts about a particular team and perform all the chest-beating bullshit surrounding it. It's not partisan politics, but it's the same kind of "why are you getting on with this shit?" implied by it. That's what the word valence means and why I used it.

I got a haircut in Kilkenny, Ireland recently. Fun little town. It's got a castle. It's got Cartoon Saloon animation studio. Since I wasn't getting my beard shaved, I wore a mask, so did the woman cutting my hair. Once she figured out I wasn't from Kilkenny (believe me, with my accent, it's pretty easy to tell I'm not Irish) she asked what I was doing in town. Just some tourism. She asked about how I found the barber shop, I off-handedly said "Well, I'm just a walk-in" -- side note, Irish people don't use review websites so it's impossible to find anything here -- and mentioned I saw a few other barbers but they were unmasked with customers and I'd rather not take a gamble. It was a pretty short exchange. I wasn't trying to bring up politics. Her question wasn't political. But I think you could agree, it has a distinctly political tinge, and it invited further conversation that could be more or less political depending on comfort level.

I am agnostic about Coinbase's decision to ban politics. Seems reasonable enough, and seems reasonable enough for workers to leave or stay on that basis. I think the kind of advocacy model of you demand what you want and I demand what I want and we see how it shakes out is actually a very good way to structure society. But I think a lot of their position relies on an extremely crude and unsophisticated view of politics: what it means is "We don't want to hear about the woke SJW representation intersectionality critical race theory BLM bullshit". So you end up with a workplace that absolutely tolerates discussing politics, just not a certain kind of boat-rocking politics that makes people mad.

That leads to the analogy that barbers cutting your hair aren't political, when really what is meant is that they are political, but they tend to be a little more subtle about navigating it, and because the relationship is transactional, mostly there's no ongoing stress about having to continue to work with them.