Leaving politics at the office door

A software company’s announcement that it would curb political conversations at work sparked an employee exodus, said Katherine Bindley in The Wall Street Journal. Roughly a third of Basecamp’s 60 employees accepted a buyout offered by CEO Jason Fried after he said that “societal and political discussions” had become a distraction and would no longer be welcome at work. The announcement was similar to one made last fall by the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, which “declared its culture ‘apolitical.’” With Basecamp, however, “the fallout came fast.” The episode is likely to intensify “the simmering debate at tech companies over how to define what is political” and how employees can engage with such issues. Despite the backlash from workers, David Heinemeier Hansson, Basecamp’s co-founder, said he had received “an avalanche of supporting emails from executives.” fields,” such as political science. Now geographers are raising the alarm about the potential for “fake, AI-generated satellite imagery” that could be used for propaganda—for instance, erasing prison camps or generating images of fake wildfires. There is a long tradition of mapmaking deception; cartographers even used to insert fake settlements or “paper towns” into their maps to expose knockoffs. Manipulated satellite imagery is particularly worrisome, however, because the resolutions are poor to begin with, and satellite images have gained broad public credibility.