Content Fighting Systems

Back in February, amid a separate controversy largely focused on Tumblr, trans users, and AI scraping, I posed this question about WordPress provider Automattic and CEO Matt Mullenweg’s leadership: “Do we have to worry about the future of WordPress?”

I think it’s safe to say that the answer to that question is yes. So much has happened in the past five days that it’s hard to wrap one’s head around it all, but the long story short of it is this: Mullenweg, and by extension Automattic, is upset with one of the biggest vendors in the space, WP Engine.

Now, to be clear, I initially heard about Mullenweg’s criticisms of WP Engine at the recent WordCamp event in Portland, Oregon, and found myself nodding along to some degree. My initial comments were more supportive of Matt’s POV because I don’t like WP Engine very much. The fact is, WP Engine is one of those very large providers that is so dominant in its subsector that they do things like squeeze their customers. And I don’t like it when providers squeeze.

I’ve seen it. It’s not a fun place to be.

But for various reasons, including stringent IT requirements, a service like WP Engine has long looked very attractive to IT teams and agencies that just need a good content experience. It’s stable, and it does everything it needs to do.

I made this image last night because of how the drama was picking up. Oh, how little I knew.

The battle between Automattic and WP Engine—each with its own dramatic cease and desist letters—has gone from dust up to nuclear option in such a short amount of time that it makes you wonder how long Mullenweg has been harboring this wound to his pride.

But as more details have come out over the past few days, I’ve gradually flipped to the other side of this debate. And I think the reason is simple: Mullenweg has turned a basic conflict over trademarks into an existential conflict over the future of one of the most important tools in the history of the internet. Yes, WordPress.

This is a content management system that supports 40% of the internet, from tiny nonprofits to large corporations. I launched my first site, ShortFormBlog, on it more than 15 years ago, and maintained an editorial site on the platform for more than a decade. Many people rely on it for their businesses, whether those businesses are editorial in nature, technical management, plugin or theme development, or hosting. It is an important community, and no one person should be at the center of that community.

But increasingly, Mullenweg has centered himself in the conversation around WordPress in ways that are increasingly troubling. People use WordPress because it’s a stable tool with a big community. This week, he has repeatedly taken steps to shrink the community and destabilize the tool. Just this evening he blocked WP Engine from WordPress.org, effectively preventing every customer of WP Engine from doing critical plugin and theme updates in an automated fashion. Meanwhile, his company’s subsidiary Pressable is offering to buy out your contract from WP Engine.

If he thinks the legal battle between WP Engine and Automattic is high stakes, he should get ready for the class-action lawsuit he might have opened himself up to.

The thing is, on some aspects of the conflict, he’s right. WP Engine should do more to support the WordPress ecosystem, and WPE has a questionable track record of customer support in many cases. But shaking down a company with thousands of prominent customers is not the way to solve this problem. In fact, it does more to hurt his community and his company in one fell swoop.

I don’t know the best way to explain this, so let me try this: Building content on the internet is insanely democratizing, and gives us access to a broader voice and easy ways to make money. But it is susceptible to middlemen that can threaten your experience at a drop of a hat. In the right context, open source allows us to build out our own plots of land without having to worry about the man in the middle. WordPress, no matter its strengths or weaknesses, spent years as the example of a tool that objectively made the internet better for many—big, small, and in-between.

Until this week, when Matt blew it up. Now, we’re in this position where, even if Matt drops everything tomorrow and admits he was wrong, we no longer have the stable ground we once had. We’re now going to question every single decision Automattic makes around WordPress. And that means that people who relied on this tool to publish—many of whom I know and am good friends with—no longer feel safe there.

In his attempt to get one over on a competitor he felt wasn’t giving its fair share, he threatened the whole thing. In just five days, he tarnished 21 years of internet changing work.

WordPress is not going away tomorrow. Matt, along with Automattic, still has lots of money to spend on this legal battle. And transitioning from a WordPress site to something else is not dead-easy.

But no longer will people look at WordPress as something that makes the internet better. Those days are over. We will remember the unnecessary trauma of this week instead, when a trusted source ruined a good thing because he wasn’t getting his cut.

It’s fucking sad.