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Matt Mullenweg and the Wordpress debacle - we told you so, you fucking fools!

Author: Iris Meredith

Date published: 2024-09-30

Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, owner of WordPress and Tumblr, has been having a pretty bad time in the media of late, entirely of his own doing. I'll not rehash the whole sordid tale here (if you're interested, there's a good summary here), but in short, Matt attempted to extort a company called WP Engine, repeatedly threatening them in private messages, retroactively filing to register trademarks that they didn't previously own, and when these avenues failed, publicly blasts WP Engine during his keynote address at WordCamp US (which WP Engine was sponsoring) and in several other venues. He's since gone off the rails entirely, stalking and harassing WP Engine employees on social media and just generally being a toxic little shit: this escalated recently to Wordpress.org, at Matt's behest, banning WP Engine sites from accessing the WordPress plugin repository, introducing massive amounts of security vulnerabilities into millions of sites. Generally charming behaviour, and it's almost certainly going to go to court and do some serious damage to both Matt and WordPress.

What's a little startling, however, is the fact that a lot people are quite surprised by Matt's conduct: for those of us in the know, this was no surprise. And so, us trans people find ourselves having to repeat the immortal words of Robert Conquest (who probably would not have liked trans people in the slightest, but the wording is too good to miss). With only minor alterations, therefore:

WE TOLD YOU SO, YOU FUCKING FOOLS!

The predstrogen incident

Let me explain. Tumblr has a longstanding issue with transphobic, queerphobic and generally problematic moderation. This first rose to prominence in the wake of Tumblr's porn ban in 2015, when trans women found clothed and completely non-sexual photos of themselves being reported for "sexual content", all while actual, literal child sex abuse material was staying up on the site unflagged. Moreover, targeted harassment and hate speech was ubiquitous on the site, and persistent complaints about this were repeatedly ignored by Tumblr staff, citing Tumblr and Automattic's relatively libertarian stance on free expression (a stance which, while reasonable if fairly applied, seems to only apply to hate speech by right-wing accounts).

Matters came to a head when Tumblr blogger Predstrogen was permanently banned from the site for "making threats of violence towards Tumblr staff". This was, to be clear, basically bullshit: the exact quote cited was that she hoped that Mullenweg would die a forever painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere." This is obviously not a serious death threat, and given that threats of violence against trans people regularly stay up on Tumblr, banning someone permanently for writing that seems more than a little hypocritical and the mark of a fragile ego. It later transpired that what Predstrogen wrote was prompted by the persistent transphobic harassment they received on Tumblr which Tumblr moderation completely ignored, as well as her account getting suspended for posting clothed photos of herself post gender-affirming surgery. Obviously this stunk to high heaven, and led to an outcry on Tumblr.

When pressed, Matt Mullenweg claimed that the clothed photos had nothing to do with the issue (despite them being directly responsible for an account suspension), and that the hammer quote was in fact a serious death threat. Moreover, he took time out of a five-month sabbatical to post this, and attempted to demonstrate his pro-trans credentials in what Tumblr users interpreted (not without reason) as a very performative "if I do this will you stop bothering me?" kind of thing. Naturally this didn't go down well, and Mullenweg, being constitutionally incapable of fucking dropping the thing, made an ass of himself in the comments of the post, some of which you can find documented here. Moreover, he started direct messaging dozens of trans women on the site who'd commented on his earlier post to dispute what they'd stated: this is weirdly obsessive and unhealthy behaviour for anyone and is downright fucked up for a CEO.

Finally, to top this off, he followed Predstrogen onto Twitter and began a campaign of harassment against her, including sharing personal details of her other blogs, which isn't publicly available information.

We saw all of this goes down. We saw Matt Mullenweg become so consumed by vindictiveness and his over-inflated sense of his own power that he felt that he could do more or less what he liked and that people who challenged him deserved all the opprobium that he could throw at him. We saw his constitutional inability to understand that he was in the wrong or apologise, and we saw him obsessively stalk and harass people with much less power than him whom he felt had wronged him. This was all very well-documented.

And now everyone's surprised that he's gone completely off the rails with regards to WP Engine? We fucking told you he was a problem.

Canaries in the coal mine

So, why's this important? Literally all of the personality traits that we're seeing on display in the context of the WordPress debacle were shown previously in Matt's conduct on Tumblr. From the initial inability to admit that anything that he or his company did could possibly be wrong, to his unbelievably fragile ego, his vindictive nature and his inability to understand his power over other people or let go of shit, it's all there in the Tumblr situation. It even extends to his impulsive willingness to follow people to places where you might not expect him to and continue harassing them there. All in all, the situation paints a deeply unflattering picture of Matt as a deeply privileged (and this is pure, uncut, white-man-with-billions-of-dollars privilege) man with an exceedingly fragile ego, very poor impulse control and a complete lack of awareness as to how he and his power affects other people. We've also seen him be willing to threaten, harass and intimidate, his absolute lack of self-awareness and his immense self-absorption rear its ugly head. But because it happened to trans people, who don't count, nobody took this as evidence of how Matt would treat everyone whom he doesn't have to kiss up to.

It's easy to ignore what happens to trans people on the internet (and for that matter, in real life too). After all, we are a small and fairly marginalised community, and one that gets maligned in the press an awful lot. Given what we've witnessed here, however, I think it's safe to say that people shouldn't, and not for any reason to do with trans people. Rather, the degree to which people are willing to be publicly, openly transphobic reveals an awful lot about their character (this applies to other bigotry too). It reveals how people treat other people with a lot less power than them, it shows how people behave when they aren't constrained by the threat of consequences and it really, thoroughly shows what it is that they actually care about. Importantly, this doesn't just apply to ideologically focused transphobia a la JK Rowling. I genuinely don't believe that Matt Mullenweg believes himself to be transphobic or holds any actual animus towards trans people, but it doesn't matter: he's treated the entire trans community as a group of people whose lives and well-being don't count and aren't important. Thus, while not having an ideological commitment to transphobia is probably morally preferable in the abstract, in terms of actual impact, this is worse. Being willing to casually fuck over the online presence of a whole bunch of trans people without even thinking about it or considering whether maybe he was overreacting or abusing his power says much more about his personality than merely thinking that trans people were weird or delusional would.

This is of particular importance when it comes to anyone who might be invested with a degree of power: hiring managers, promotion committees and investors take note. Even if you don't much care about bigotry (and I'd be disappointed in you if you didn't care, but this is the reality that we live in), the more power a bigoted person gets, the more people fall into the category of people whom I don't have to care about. And let me tell you, you really, really, really don't want to hire people who have that category in their heads. Because as they rise higher, first the customers will fall into that category, then their employees, and then eventually the business as a whole will become something beneath their notice. And that's the good outcome: it assumes that they gauge their level of power correctly. If they misjudge and snub someone who actually has real power, well, you end up with the current situation. Having this kind of personality in a position of power is a massive risk to any organisation, and you cannot afford to allow them to stay in power.

About the bigots

It's been my considered opinion for a while now that the persistent and single-minded focus that liberatory movements place on the victims of oppression has been a bit of a disaster for oppressed people and society at large. While I understand the impulse, focusing on the victim all too often allows perpetrators of bigotry to escape due attention.

We are talking here about a man who's demonstrated a repeated habit of harassment, responding vindictively to the slightest provocations, terrible impulse control, lack of self-awareness and a complete inability to apologise or reflect on his behaviour. Despite his billions of dollars in wealth, he can't or won't bring himself to behave with a basic level of decorum in public, even when it might destroy his company or cost him billions of dollars. In a very real sense, this is the story. This is the important thing, and as much as it sucks to be a victim of this kind of behaviour, our priority has to be getting people like Matt to shut up and stop acting like this. If we focus in too hard on the uniqueness of how we've suffered and what we have to deal with, this fucker and his actions vanish from view. And I hate to say this, but I don't know how bigotry is going to away if the perpetrators of bigotry and what they do disappears from sight every time. Just think about all the time wasted on arguing whether Predstrogen's post constituted a real death threat or not, and imagine how that might have been better put to use if those doing it had focused on Matt's behaviour instead.

We need to find ways to hold the perpetrators of bigotry accountable for the shit they do. Online cancellation isn't going to work: as much as Matt seems to be upset by things posted about him on the internet, cancellation usually simply seems to target marginalised people that look like they have a bit more power than the baseline. No, there have to be real-life, socially imposed consequences for shitty behaviour. Without dog-piling or harassing people, we have to hold the line and demonstrate that if you do not behave in a civil manner, you will be excluded from civil society. Matt and people like him need to feel real, material consequences for acting like this, and I can only hope that they do.

We deserve leaders that can, at the very least, behave with dignity in public. We don't currently have that. Hopefully we can have them in the future, and I think this is an excellent wake-up call to all of us as to why that's so important.

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