Users inevitably begin to feel hemmed in and controlled by the closed platforms, and yearn for open pastures. Then they go build something better. Something open. People’s natural desire for freedom starts to get more and more of the best and brightest in the world working on open, distributed, decentralized systems.
The seeds of this change are already everywhere, he said. Tesla has open-sourced its patents in an effort to speed up innovation in electric vehicles, because as Elon Musk said, the company’s goal is not just to sell cars but to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport
. There’s also the whole decentralized, Web3, blockchain community, which excites Mullenweg every time it comes up. There’s an inevitable gravitational pull towards open source affecting literally every field: finance, health, politics
, he said. All the things that currently happen in closed ways, what if they were open? What if they were transparent? What if you could copy and paste it? Do your own version? Remix it?
At this point, few companies have more influence over the way the internet works than Automattic. And few people not named Zuckerberg have more influence than Mullenweg. Beyond the whole “43% of the internet” thing, there’s the fact that both WordPress and Automattic basically belong to him. When Automattic sells shares to new investors, all the voting power goes back to Mullenweg. When he wants to push Automattic or WordPress in a new direction, he tries to do it as gently and collaboratively as possible, but one way or another he usually gets his way. Mullenweg generally tends to downplay this authority, noting that users can always fork WordPress and do their own thing, but there’s no question that where Mullenweg goes, the community — and the internet — follows.
Even as the tech industry swirls around him, with regulatory fights and social media backlashes and the seemingly hourly shift in priorities, Mullenweg remains steadily on course. We aspire to create the layer that every other application on the web can run on
, he said. Hopefully one day, 85% or 90% of all websites have WordPress as their base layer.
Right now, the web operates largely on top of closed platforms owned by companies like Amazon and Facebook. But to truly be a platform
, Mullenweg said, it has to be open. Otherwise it’s more like a trap.
David PierceThis article strikes an awkward tone between asserting how much influence Automattic and its CEO Matt Mullenweg have over the web and stressing how open WordPress is and how Matt strives to promote open platforms. It’s a bit of a logical fallacy – how can one man or company have so much influence over an open, distributed system? The more distributed the system, the less influence any individual party should have – and an obvious falsehood given the rather tangible power of closed platforms on the web. Despite the reporter’s framing, Matt also betrays centralizing tendencies when he talks about acquiring various internet services and even a web browser. And I can’t take anyone seriously who gets excited about web3 (nor anyone preaching open platforms, yet ostensibly using the most closed-off platform of all, Apple)…
The whole open and decentralized philosophy seems somewhat of a relic of the early Internet, when most participants were much more technical and excited about tinkering with their new toy. As things progressed though, the vast majority of Internet users now barely understand this kind of stuff, are scarcely interested in it, or simply have better things to do with their lives than wrestle some open-source software into shape. I used to tinker with my blog layouts and CSS years ago, but I simply got tired of dealing with compatibility issues and ever-changing standards. I would rather use that time reading, writing, or just relaxing.
Even nerds do not want to run their own servers at this point. Even organizations building software full time do not want to run their own servers at this point. If there’s one thing I hope we’ve learned about the world, it’s that people do not want to run their own servers. The companies that emerged offering to do that for you instead were successful, and the companies that iterated on new functionality based on what is possible with those networks were even more successful.
Moxie Marlinspike
The idea that most people would choose to run their own servers to participate in this idealized open network is simply delusional. The systems are too complex, and the current web so riddled with security threats and privacy complications that any one person would be rapidly overwhelmed. Even companies with entire trained IT departments are switching away from maintaining their servers to relying on cloud providers. Repeating this obsolete notion in the name of people’s natural desire for freedom
increasingly sounds like the rabid yells of antivaxxers and Bitcoin fanatics to ‘do your own research!’ – an ideological stance rooted in fear and hate of government and authority, rather than in any practical consideration.
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