The Unworthy, Ungrateful Manchildren of Tech

A couple of years ago, WordPress founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg went onstage at the annual WordCamp event and declared war against WP Engine, a big company whose entire business is built around WordPress, saying they needed to pay hefty royalties because they hadn’t shared enough free labor or cash back to the WP open source project that Matt has controlled for 20+ years.

Actually, he’d been trying to extort royalties (to the tune of 30-40% of net revenue, iirc) behind the scenes in texts and phone calls to WP Engine’s CEO and execs. Onstage at WordCamp, Matt went on a diatribe about private equity — especially Silver Lake, a PE firm that’s one of WP Engine’s biggest shareholders — and how it hollows out communities and threatened to wreck everything WordPress has ever stood for.

That Matt is ostensibly CEO of a for-profit business with multiple product lines competing with WP Engine was apparently lost on Matt himself, but very much on everyone else’s minds. What was presented as a righteous stand for freedom, community, and open source seemed to line up a little too well with Matt and Automattic’s commercial interests — it was at least poor optics, and at worst a false flag to try to get the community to back Matt in extorting cash and free labor from a competitor.

In any event, it did not work. Matt sued WP Engine; they sued him right back.

Matt’s claim that WPE had infringed on WordPress trademarks didn’t hold much water, because the trademarks had been made available for WPE’s exact use case for years.

WP Engine claims Matt and his company had been talking massive, massive shit about WPE, its investors, and its executives in public, directly and materially damaging their business. Matt had also directed the ostensibly nonprofit WordPress.org plugin service to take over a popular plugin owned by WPE, under the guise of “security,” which is technically permitted under the GPL but — like the rants about private equity while trying to extort a partner/competitor — just a really, really bad look.

These lawsuits are ongoing, and while the courtroom battle has (thank god) been out of the public eye for the past year or so, WPE’s case would seem to have some merits.

WP Engine is not a hero in this story, though I don’t think they’re a villain per se. It’s complicated. My company, Bits&Letters, is enrolled in WPE’s agency partner program, and we have some client sites hosted there, but I don’t have any financial stake in this fight other than wanting to take care of my clients.

Anyway, Matt Mullenweg (likely on advice from his lawyers) has been more or less quiet on this subject… until today:

WordPress at 23 is simultaneously both the strongest and most precarious it’s ever been. … Silver Lake, in its immense 100B+ power, summoned a shoggoth in Quinn Emanuel that has been paperclip-maximizing legal torture that is not just going after Automattic and WordPress.org and me personally, but this Golem Jagannath is now trying to dissolve the WordPress Foundation itself, a non-profit with no employees or payroll that supports WordCamps and Open Source education around the world.

If you know anyone at Silver Lake, Quinn Emanuel, or WP Engine in that order, please beg, plead with them to stop the violence. End this internecine warfare that is threatening to destroy one of the last stalwarts of the Open Web.

This was posted to the official wordpress.org blog, not his personal one, in his role as chairman of the WordPress project, which is, wink wink, unrelated to his role as CEO of Automattic which offers WordPress hosting and related services in return for money.

If you’re a forty-something adult who uses terms/phrases like “shoggoth”, “paperclip-maximizing legal torture,” “Golem Jagannath,” and “internecine warfare” to describe anything, let alone the other party in ongoing litigation, in a public blog post under your organization’s logo, you deserve to be not just fired but sued by your shareholders.

But that’s not even the worst thing in this post:

It’s not fun and games anymore, not just business. This is having a real impact on people’s lives.

It took every ounce of will in my body, and I am grateful to thousands of hours of meditation, to not explode in rage when asked about pineapple on pizza and debating the meaning of Jean Baudrillard and “bastardized simalcra” [sic] when miles away, my closest friend is in a hospital bed waiting for a heart transplant.

I have colleagues LITERALLY DYING I can’t be with because Silver Lake / Quinn Emanuel / WP Engine shoggoth is trying to make it seem like I am hiding or destroying evidence because we rotate logs on wordpress.org or I have disappearing chats on Signal with romantic partners.

This is the sort of thing any adult should know, but to start with: when you are in litigation with any other party, anything you say in or out of court is part of the case, and you do not get to decide whether that’s fair or not. The smart thing to say about the other party, whether you are suing or being sued, is nothing. Saying nothing is always an option, and usually the best one.

Second — and while I’m thankful to have never been involved directly in corporate litigation, I’ve had to sit through so many Big Tech legal orientation meetings and feel like I know what I’m talking about — there is a whole industry of products and services around document retention precisely because corporations cannot be caught destroying paper related to an open case even if the destruction is routine.

A lot of companies invest in data/doc retention just in case there is a discovery request, because it’s a lot cheaper to comply with these requests than to go back and forth over why data was destroyed and why it probably wasn’t material to the case. It’s better to just keep and show the data.

Is it nice that WPE’s attorneys at Quinn Emmanuel are trying to make something out of log rotation or private Signal chats? No! Is it fair? Yes, not least because Matt isn’t just a private citizen — he’s a CEO, a community leader, and the one who started this fight. He can’t throw bombs in public at a hundred-million-dollar competitor and then whine about someone asking for his Signal chats in discovery.

What’s more, it’s sad that Matt has sick and dying friends (or colleagues? both?) who he’s not able to spend more time with. A private, normal citizen can go on social or their blog and complain about this sort of thing. A normal someone who can’t spend more time with loved ones because of litigation would be advised to stay quiet, but ehhh, it’s probably fine.

A CEO and community leader who started this legal fight has no reason to mention this in public other than to manipulate public opinion for his benefit. But, because people don’t vote on who wins court cases, the only practical effect it can have is to harm WP Engine, Silver Lake, and Quinn Emmanuel’s public images — which strengthens their lawsuit against him.

But I titled this post “The Unworthy, Ungrateful Manchildren of Tech” — as opposed to “Matt Mullenweg: Still A Jerk” — because, somehow, our industry’s Overton window for acceptable CEO behavior has slid all the way past the gutter and into the upper layers of Hell, yet there never seem to be any consequences for any of it anymore.

The cult of the founder (not to mention founder-friendly governance structures) have grown so powerful that CEOs — especially white dudes — are like mini-kings who fear only death and (theoretically) taxes. Matt Mullenweg should lose his positions and some of his wealth for posts like this… but he likely won’t. He’ll probably lose his shirt, or some of his shirts, if/when WP Engine wins or settles their lawsuit against him. But people like Matt always have more shirts and zero shame.

What’s maybe most worrying is that people see all of this happening in public and it shapes their view of what power looks like. Gone is any sense that, like for Spider-Man, great power comes with great responsibility. We still have Lord Acton’s power corrupts, etc, but absolute corruption looks like a blast from the outside. Call your legal opponents shoggoths in front of your nerd audience? Sign me up!

I have no idea what the takeaway from this is. I don’t think it’s “boycott WordPress”; one irony of this mess is that, while Matt Mullenweg’s self-image is regrettably tied up in the WP project, he’s done such a poor job of building solid businesses around it that a boycott wouldn’t hurt him nearly as much as it would hurt you (or your clients, if you have ’em).

One thing definitely worth underlining in thick, black Sharpie: the legal battle between Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine (et al) has nothing at all to do with the Open Web. WordPress is not the open web. It’s part of it, sure, and (to Matt’s credit) WP being not just open source but governed by the GPL. Because WP has been well maintained by a (relatively) sane, committed group of contributors for 20+ years ensures a degree of access to great web tools that is worth celebrating. There are ambitious web sites that wouldn’t have happened if not for WordPress.

This is why it makes me so angry to see a post like this, where not only is the Open Web a pawn in this game of Chess for Dummies, but apparently also real-life friends and colleagues of Matt’s who deserve a better friend than this.

WordPress will survive this lawsuit; the Open Web definitely will. I worry about the tech industry, though, if we’re gonna keep propping up some of the worst dudes on earth and allow them to live without responsibility or blowback.