Rise of the neutral company

"Politics is the exercise of collective power against human opposition."

This new idea of corporate neutrality—as lately invented by perhaps the two most different high-profile companies in Silicon Valley, Coinbase and Basecamp—is, for once, new. It means something. It might even mean more than it knows it means.

I had been toying with this idea myself for a few years—and even kind of practiced it. But I couldn’t get past the…