Special Episode with Matt Mullenweg
In this special episode, Michelle had a great conversation with Matt Mullenweg about community: where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re heading. They talked about open source, growing WordPress through the next generations, and how to engage more people in the community.
Mentioned in this episode:
Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Michelle: Welcome to WP Constellations, a podcast exploration of the WordPress universe brought to you by StellarWP.
Welcome to the next episode of WP Constellations, your StellarWP exploration of the WordPress universe. And I think today it’s fair to say if there is a sun that is the part of that’s the WordPress universe part of the origin story, it is the person I’m interviewing today, which is Matt Mullenweg. Matt, welcome to the show.
[00:00:36] Matt: Great to be here. And as I mentioned before we started, this is an unusual interview for me because I have been quarantining because a few days ago I was going to go to an event. I felt totally fine, but I got a positive COVID test. So I am currently quarantined Matt, although I did get a negative test this morning, which is great.
[00:01:00] Michelle: Four days later you’re no longer one of “the untouchables.”
[00:01:05] Matt: Hopefully I’m going to run another one this afternoon before I start to reintegrate into society.
[00:01:11] Michelle: Well, most of us have been there with COVID over the past few years, so I guess it’s inevitable that at some point…
[00:01:17] Matt: I thought we were done with this stuff.
[00:01:20] Michelle: Gosh, I wish, I really wish, especially with all the community events that we have coming up and how we’ve been wrapping things up, it’s been pretty exciting actually. Last year we had the first WordCamp Asia. WordCamp Europe was back for, I think the third year since the pandemic, and lots of local camps all over the world have been coming back, which is pretty exciting. So to see you at some of them, whether it was remotely.
[00:01:42] Matt: I’m very excited to go to WordCamp Asia in person this year. It’s one of the things I’m allowing myself to do during sabbatical. So I am on sabbatical right now. So I’m not going to prepare a talk or anything. I’m just going to do a Q&A and I’m also bringing some friends.
Tim Ferris is coming. I actually spoke to him last night. He’s going to prepare actually a really exciting talk for the WordPress community. So that should be fun. Ben Thompson from Stratechery is going to come.
We’re trying to make it just a fun thing. And I’ll just vacation in Taiwan for a bit before and after. So if you see me there, I’ll be more in a chill mode than like necessarily work work mode.
[00:02:26] Michelle: Like, I know chill mode is good. I’m speaking at WordCamp Asia as well. People scroll down and there we are, side by side on the speakers page because it’s alphabetic, and I fall alphabetically just beside you, which is pretty fun too.
[00:02:29] Matt: I’m honored to be beside you.
[00:02:30] Michelle: Likewise. Thank you. I, as you know, love our community and the things that we do. I am a huge proponent of so many things. And you once called me the busiest woman in WordPress. And I love that. It made me smile, caught me off guard, which was kind of fun. But I just love our community and giving back to our community. And so I wanted to talk about that today.
There’s so much that’s going on, there’s so much that shut down for a little while during the pandemic. And now that we are post lockdown, I don’t know if we’ll ever be past Covid. I think it’ll always be part of our future, but I thought we could jump into some of those things. But before we talk about what’s happening in WordPress in the future, I want you to look back over the last 20, almost 21 years now since WordPress was launched, and tell me, what are some of your favorite community initiatives that we’ve had over the years?
[00:03:38] Matt: Open source is really a radical act of generosity.
And so the times when I’m proudest of myself and also of the WordPress community is when we have been generous.
If I had to epitomize that, it’s the sort of Do Action type events where we as a community come together and then redo a website for a nonprofit or a good cause just feels like a win/win, right? Because we are taking on some good causes, right? We’re donating our time to put them on open source software and make them a better website, which then will further their cause. So that just feels like we can’t fix everything in the world and we have to pick our lane, right? We’re the CMS makers, right? We’re like the tinkerers on the widgets, making the Gutenbergs and the blocks and everything like that. But if we can make our tool really amazing, perhaps we can enable others to be sort of like a fulcrum for goodness in the rest of the world. And I love that. But when we put our time towards that now, because we’re open source, it can also be used as a fulcrum by bad people. Bad people can use WordPress too, but that’s not where we put our time, right? That’s not where the Do Action events are. So I really love that. And I feel like it’s a good embodiment of our values.
[00:05:17] Michelle: I agree with that 100%. And I love that our events when we do get together in person, allow those kinds of connections to be made, to see those things kind of come forward, too. So sometimes it’s two people meeting serendipitously over lunch or coffee or something at a WordCamp that starts to spark ideas, that pushes things forward to be able to have those kinds of things, whether it’s a hackathon pointed event, the NextGen events that are coming up, things like that. So it’s a pretty awesome community.
[00:05:49] Matt: And something very key to that as well that I didn’t mention is that when we build these sites for people, we’re giving it to them so that they can manage it themselves.
Right? And so it’s teaching someone how to fish, not just giving them a fish. And I think that’s one of the beautiful things about the WordPress community. It’s not like we’re like a secret guild of people who know how to use WordPress, and we don’t want anyone else to. Part of what we’re doing when we’re building WordPress sites is we’re teaching people how to use WordPress so that they can do it themselves. So we’re giving them agency, we’re giving them liberty, we’re educating. And that’s the beautiful thing about knowledge. Like, I can share knowledge and you can have it. I didn’t lose anything. But then everyone gets better. It’s kind of like when you think about technological advances to the ages. At some point, people didn’t know how to plow fields and till soil, and that was a new technique, that was a new technology, but that technique spread. And it didn’t mean that the person on this farm has any less corn or something like that than the person on this one.
It raises the floor for everyone. And I believe that is kind of the root of human progress. And why I feel like open source is this sort of secular religion that can really, we can all contribute to and really help everything get better in a way that feels, for me, very fulfilling. I came across this word eudaimonia, which is a greek word for sort of like your higher purpose, being connected to something bigger. And I’m going to explore that more. You might hear me use that word more. It was sent to me by Blake at Equalify, I believe.
I think that might be, we might need a word like that to describe what we’re doing.
[00:07:39] Michelle: I like that. It’s kind of like the idea of kaizen – ever better and continuing to grow for the higher purpose. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
[00:07:48] Matt: I don’t know what the meaning of life is, but that feels pretty darn good and something that I feel like I can continue doing for the rest of my life. And it’s very generative.
It’s not like I’m ever going to complete that. I’m never going to be done teaching people how to build things and building the tools for them to do so. So that also feels very fulfilling to have something that I at least personally picked that I can work on the rest of my life.
[00:08:14] Michelle: I like that. I like that a lot, actually. And for some of us, the rest of our lives is a lot sooner than others of us as being somebody who’s a little bit older in the community. And I think about it a lot. I think about what the next ten years or next 15 years might look for me before I kind of age out and retire from WordPress or from work and what that might actually look like. It’s like, do you ever retire from WordPress or do you just continue to be part of it and hopefully shepherd people up into the community as well? Which is another thing I want to talk about is getting the next generations into WordPress. I think one of the things that we do, at least one of the initiatives that’s been handed to me here at StellarWP, is not just to sell our products, because we’re not just about selling our products, we’re about educating people about WordPress so that WordPress stays relevant for all of us and we continue to bring more people and younger people into it.
What do you think companies like mine and other companies, whether they’re bigger or smaller, can and should be doing to continue to grow WordPress, not just in our own little bubble.
[00:09:20] Matt: Well, you already answered your question, which is like future generations, right?
I think it’s totally fine that there’s seasons of contributions, and how I have contributed to WordPress changes all the time. And even right now, I was on a trac ticket yesterday. I haven’t been on a trac ticket in a while. That felt kind of good, but I contributed something to that.
And then maybe someday, maybe my mind is people and I’m unable to code or set strategy or something like that, but perhaps I can still tell people how fun it is to blog or something that sort of sparked that interest. So these are all forms of contribution.
And what’s beautiful about it is it’s contributing. Yes, you’re contributing to WordPress, but really what you’re doing is contributing to that person’s life. You’re giving them something that you believe will make their life better.
So the fact that it benefits WordPress is kind of like a side thing, really. What we’re doing is benefiting the people. And because of this beauty, this amazing intellectual property hack of open source, then WordPress also gets better and the people get better and it’s this nice virtuous loop. So I think you already answered your own question. Sorry.
[00:10:42] Michelle: There’s different ways to do it, but there’s different ways to involve the next generation. And I think we can continue to build good products, but shepherding people in is sometimes the more challenging piece of it and showing our relevance, not necessarily from WordPress the project, but those of us who are using it to make sure that the next generation, like I built my daughter a WordPress website this year for her DJ business, so now she’s a WordPresser. She doesn’t log in, she doesn’t want to log in, but her site’s on WordPress and so that helps her. And I think she’s not the next generation anymore, she’s a grown up. But there are so many other people that we’re bringing in who are teenagers and things like that too.
[00:11:25] Matt: How old is your daughter?
[00:11:27] Michelle: She’ll be 32 next month.
[00:11:29] Matt: Wow, that’s beautiful.
[00:11:31] Michelle: Yeah, thanks.
[00:11:33] Matt: We’ll make a WordPress user out of her at some point.
[00:11:35] Michelle: Exactly.
[00:11:37] Matt: We need to make the mobile apps better, by the way. I think that would really convince people, because how cool would it be? Like she has a DJ business. How many people are visiting her website? Where are they from? Does she have a contact form?
There’s so many ways to interact with it. And I think also one of the best ways is leading by example. So make your own website. Super cool.
I’ve been working on mine. I’ve been blogging a lot more. One of the best things about a sabbatical is it’s freed up…You know, Automattic, it’s quite a job.
[00:12:12] Michelle: Yeah.
[00:12:13] Matt: The day I left, we were 1934 souls, you know, people. And so leading that team is an incredible privilege and an incredible responsibility that weighed so heavily on me, on my shoulders, the lives of those 1934 people and their families. And so being able to take that off my shoulders, hand it to Tony Schneider for a few months has freed up so much mental energy for me and a lot’s been going into writing. I actually have this really long multi-thousand word essay I’ve been working on the past few days.
I’m just kind of blogging a lot and it’s really fun and lovely. It’s also brought up a discussion about planet and what we should do there. So I like these because they’re forcing functions. So it kind of encourages us to maybe pay attention to some parts of our community that have fallen fallow, like the jobs sites, the planets, the forums I think are way worse than they used to be, how they function. So there’s a lot of things we can go back and work on and really kind of get them back to that community flywheel, part of the, WordPress had always had a wiki and everything had a button to edit this page. You could just click edit. We have a lot of documentation now that doesn’t have a very simple edit button on it and we can define what that looks like. Maybe edits go into a moderation queue. That would be pretty cool. That would be kind of a new paradigm on the web. I haven’t seen wiki plus moderation.
Yeah, I would be really interested to see that.
You’ll see me around. I’m on sabbatical, but I’m also like, just for me that means working on things I love. And so I will be around the meta channels and trac tickets and all those things. So I’ll go to this WordCamp and do a Q and A. So I’m going to do a Q and A, not a talk. That’s kind of like my thing because talks, I really spend a lot of time preparing, like the State of the Word, hundreds of hours from many people go into something like that.
So this is a Q and A though for me is easy. I’ll just go and answer questions kind of like this. I’m on sabbatical, but I was like, yeah, I’ll talk to Michelle. This is easy.
[00:14:35] Michelle: Make it fun, I hope, anyway, I love…
[00:14:39] Matt: It’s just a conversation. And conversations are what we need more of in the world.
[00:14:43] Michelle: I agree. It’s how we get to know each other better and share really good information.
Like Five for the Future. I love the concept of Five for the Future. I love people working towards everything that happens with WordPress and I was several years into working with WordPress and even being part of WordCamps and things like that before I realized that to contribute, core was only part of contribution that so much more goes into. And within the last two years we have the Photo Directory now, which is so amazing, and the mentoring programs and all the things that are happening. So it isn’t just contributing to core that makes you a WordPress contributor and contributing for Five for the Future. Because as somebody who’s not a coder, it was really exciting to me to know that there are other ways that I could contribute in a positive way.
[00:15:38] Matt: How can you take creative work and put it into the commons. That’s fundamentally what contributing to open source is. And sometimes that’s creative commons, sometimes that’s code, sometimes it’s documentation, sometimes it’s organizing an event. But this is fundamentally what you’re doing is taking something and putting it out there for the people.
[00:15:56] Michelle: Absolutely. One of the things that I have seen spring up over the last year, too.
Some things came from the Community Summit around WordCamp us last year, and that was a phenomenal event to be able to really, the idea generation and ways to move things forward, but also the idea of NextGen events and where everything isn’t just WordCamp this region or WordCamp that country. And I loved some of the things that are happening. As a matter of fact, this week, Kerala, India is doing a photos week, and they’re doing an entire week of photo submissions. We’ll have almost 1000 photos by the end of an entire week that are being moderated in quickly because we have a team of about 30 moderators trying to.
[00:16:20] Matt: Wow, it’s amazing.
[00:16:25] Michelle: And the end of the week, people will, there’s a competition, so people will win prizes for contributing the most photos and the most beautiful photos and all those kinds of things. So it’s fun to see that. Earlier this year in Kolkata, they had career fest, like a career event online, too. So the idea that there’s all of these NextGen events that are happening that are really more specific to people’s interests than just to go to a city and learn whatever people are talking about there. So I don’t know where that idea came from and how it’s been generated, but I’m kind of excited about it. I wonder what your thoughts are as well.
[00:17:21] Matt: So what you said really makes me think about also how sometimes we might fall too much on the human volunteer side of things.
And we need to, when designing these systems, incorporate also what can be positive feedback loops of contribution of interaction. So that’s very abstract. So let me give you some real world examples. Part of the reason why Google is the best searching engine in the world isn’t just that they index all the pages and look at all the links, right? Anyone can do that. Bing can do that. Others can do that. Part of the reason why Google is the best search engine is because they also look, when people search, they look at what they click on and they use that as a feedback loop, right? So when you click on something, do you stay there, or do you immediately come back to the search results and then click on something else, which is like a really strong indicator that you didn’t find what you were looking for. So the last thing that you click on was probably the answer. So maybe that was fifth on the results with their normal ranking. But then for short term they can move it up. So to expand this example to photos, for example, I like that we have this volunteer team that’s moderating everything.
But I also wonder how we could make it more wiki like, more like sort of open that doesn’t require moderators and volunteers. So for example, is there a way that anyone could suggest tags or edit captions on any photo on the photo directory?
Why not, you know?
And let people tag however they like. And then every time with the APIs that show photos for a search, right? Because ultimately, why do these photos exist? Because people look for something, they get some photos. Okay, when the photos show up in a search, we should track and maybe have publicly available as part of the API how many times this photo was shown for what search and whether someone selected it or not, right? Because the team can have a quality rating. They can say this is good or bad, but it doesn’t truly answer for this search. Does this match? Right. We can have some generic things. This makes a good photo. But people might also be searching for bad photos. Maybe they’re searching for something that looks like a 90s GIF.
And so if our Photo Directory only allows things that look beautiful, like this background photo I have right here, we’re not actually solving the user problem of they’re typing something in a box and they want a free available answer to what they’re doing.
So with Openverse, with other things, I think a lot about how we can incorporate that data and also make it transparent and public. So Google hides all this. This is their secret sauce. We don’t need to, right? It’s not our business model. It’s actually a cost for us to run these things. So it’s not a lot of cost, which is kind of beautiful, right? With Moore’s Law, every 18 months these things get effectively cheaper to run, provide for the whole Internet. I don’t know if you saw, a little digression, but Signal, which is this open source secure messaging app, just published their finances.
It’s kind of beautiful. I don’t know exactly their monthly active users, but it is a world scale, large messaging app that is secure and running that network and all the developers was on the order of like $15 million per year.
That’s not bad actually, right? In trillions of dollars to provide secure open source messaging for humanity.
The scaling, I think let’s pretend they’re at 100 million right now, if they went to a billion monthly active users, I don’t think it goes from 50 to 500. I think it goes from like 50 to maybe 80.
And out of those billion people, can you crowdfund that or something like that? That’s actually pretty neat. So, yes, there’s real cost to these things, but I think they are costs that we’re providing, a utility that they can be borne by the people. And then we don’t have to have these advertising or other models where we essentially have to sell people’s data or attention or essentially desire. Right. Because what is advertising? But I’m trying to create a desire in you that you didn’t have. Your life was fine. Now I’m going to make you want something that you didn’t know you wanted. That’s what advertising is at the end of the day, which is in a buddhist sense. I do not want to create more desires than others. Right. I’m trying to eliminate desires in myself as well. I don’t want to have to desire anything.
Okay. That was a lot of discretions. What’s your next question? I apologize. “Sabbatical Matt.”
[00:22:27] Michelle: Sabbatical Matt. I love it. It’s great. I love these kinds of conversations as opposed to scripted and that kind of thing. But I do have some notes because I want to make sure I cover a few things. One of those is I created a project, a service last year called WPSpeakers.com, where people from all over, anybody can join the database. Anybody can search the database to find WordPress speakers for their events, whether it’s a podcast or a WordCamp or meetup, et cetera.
And then I have other ideas for things that I want to build. Right. I’ve registered some domains, I’m not going to lie.
But I was at WordCamp last year at WordCamp US, and I came under criticism from somebody who said, you shouldn’t be creating these outside of wp.org. You should give these ideas, especially if you’re not looking to make money and all of that, that these should exist within WordPress.org.
Since I published that, we also have now the WP World that Marcus Burnett has. We have GatherPress that’s coming, have, you know, other jobs, boards and things like that. So I’m wondering what your thoughts are on people like me who see a need, find a gap and fill it.
[00:23:39] Matt: I would kind of do a “yes, and.”
I mean, the beautiful thing about WordPress is it’s open. So, yes, you can do that. We have some restrictions around the trademark. Right. Like, you have to call it WP, not WordPress. But you know what? Do it. And I think that you had to do it on your own domain probably means that our methods of allowing someone to spin something like that up on WordPress.org maybe has a high barrier. That’s probably a nice way to put it. Honestly, I don’t think these things happen unless I ask for them to be totally honest right now. So if it’s not something I asked for or you proposed to me, it doesn’t really happen on WordPress.org right now. I would love for these things too. And now when we do something on WordPress.org, we’re committing to maintain it for life. So that’s part of why we have this deliberation.
But I don’t think there’s anything wrong. And we have done this in the past where something starts out in the community and then we kind of like acquire it or incorporate it into WordPress.org.
Not the borg, the worg. Right. W.org worg.
[00:24:52] Michelle: I got it.
[00:24:53] Matt: Actually.
[00:24:53] Michelle: I like that we’re the worg. We just got to the nerdiest part of Matt in that right there.
[00:25:01] Matt: Well, I’ve been wondering if I should switch WordPress.org to use w.org because we have w.org, which is kind of cool.
There’s not very many one letter domains in the world and we have one of them. So I wonder if we should switch it to that.
But branding is very something, I ruminate.
Yeah, that could become part of the worg in the future also. It’s fine to have things that are satellites, but they can be their own brands. So for example, WP Tavern is kind of a Worg project.
In that it has, it’s not commercial, it’s sponsored by Audrey Capital, which is myself. WordPress.org is all paid for by that. But it’s nice to be its own site because it’s like a newspaper, it’s like a publication. And actually, I don’t know if you saw, but did I post this?
Maybe I didn’t click publish. But we’ve actually narrowed it down to seven potential writers.
[00:26:09] Michelle: Oh good.
[00:26:10] Matt: Two week trial where if they want to, can sort of bill at the standard trial rate. At Automattic the trial rate is $25 per hour. So they’ll be able to just start blogging and managing the community on site. They’ll all get access and then at the end that we’ll pick two people to go full time.
[00:26:27] Michelle: Oh, that’s fantastic. I was wondering about that actually just the other day, thinking I haven’t seen anything on the Tavern since December.
[00:26:34] Matt: I must not have published yesterday.
It’s funny, although I’ve been on sabbatical, my days have been very full. Like, there’s just so much backlog I think I’ve logged. I responded to an email from 2018 a few days ago.
I’ve got a lot of catch up to do, and so that’s part of what I’m doing.
[00:26:56] Michelle: Well, I imagine people reach out to you an awful lot, so your inbox must be very full most of the time.
[00:27:02] Matt: Yes and no, actually. So people reach out to me in some ways way less than you would expect.
And actually the people closest to me reach out to me the least. I just had this as I was going on, sabbatical. I met with all the top people at Automattic, and you can imagine this is a very elite group. It’s folks I’ve been working with, often for many years, sometimes like 15-20 years.
We know each other really well, and one of the things I said to everyone was, I was like, guess how often of this group, how many times I’ve been called in the past three months?
And the guesses were always like, pretty low.
But the actual answer was zero. Literally no one.
And I think I could stretch it out to maybe even twelve months. No one’s ever called me, but it’s my job to literally be responsive to these people. These are like my top lieutenants, these are the top people I exist to serve as CEO.
So I was like, hey, just call me. And actually it was nice because those last couple of weeks that started happening, so they did start just like calling me out of the blue. And the way I do CEOing is I try to actually keep my schedule a lot more open from pre-scheduled commitments so that I’m able to be responsive to anything people need, because I want to unblock people as fast as possible. So actually, those last few weeks at Automattic were some of the best of my entire career, and it made me really kind of like, it was very bittersweet to know, pass the baton, hand the crown. It was both sad because I was having so much fun, but also I was very proud and I knew Tony would have like a fantastic time, so I was passing him something that was in a really good shape.
[00:28:58] Michelle: That’s awesome. Are you worried that everything will be changed by the time you get back?
[00:29:03] Matt: No, I’m hopeful everything will be changed.
[00:29:06] Michelle: I love it.
[00:29:07] Matt: Motion. I posted about this big Automattic reorg and the cards. So just for those who don’t know. You can now ask any Automattician, “what’s your card?” And they will answer one of three ways: They are trying to be the host, which is basically like WordPress.com. So they’re trying to be a host. So that means they’re very competitive with the GoDaddy’s and Sitegrounds and Bluehosts of the world, or they have a Help the Host card. So that’s Jetpack, that’s WooCommerce, that’s all the people working on core and WordPress. So the things they do benefit every single host in the world, right?
So they can partner with all these hosts, they can ally with them, those hosts can talk to them without worrying of it being used competitively.
And the third card is just neutral, which could mean one of two things. It either means they’re in a support function like HR or finance or something, or they’re in a part of Automattic, which just isn’t part of the WordPress ecosystem like Texts or Tumblr right now. Although Tumblr hopefully will. Tumblr will get to be the host card in the future, right? Because it will be essentially a WordPress hosting thing as well, alongside WordPress.com in the future.
[00:30:22] Michelle: That’s pretty cool. I do a lot of work in DEIB within WordPress and within tech in general, working with different groups of underrepresented people. Started with UnderrepresentedInTech.com in 2020, whenever it was, with Allie Nimmons, and she’s recently stepped away. So I’m going to be bringing somebody new in to co-host with me, and I’m excited to announce that in the next couple of weeks.
[00:30:49] Matt: Congratulations.
[00:30:50] Michelle: Thank you. It’s very exciting. I’ll tell you off screen so that it won’t be recorded this week, but it’s very exciting.
There are so many pockets of, I don’t know if pockets is the right word, but under smaller subsets of the WordPress community that have similar needs. So like, for example, Blackpress.
Last year I gave a talk at WordCamp Phoenix, and I talked about BlackPress, and I talked about how a community within a community like that could really bolster one another because we all have the experience of WordPress, but then subsets of people have other experiences that others of us don’t. As a result of that, LGBTQPress.com became a thing and we spun up a place for people in WordPress who are part of the queer community.
And there are probably others that I’m not even aware of, but I have been talking with Anne McCarthy and I know that the Queermattic folks have sponsored, they want to sponsor people from the queer community through the mentoring program, which I think is phenomenal. I had a meeting yesterday where I was a fly on the wall because I’m just there to support as an ally. The BlackPress community had a really amazing meetup yesterday where they talked about things, ways to move things forward.
I just kind of want to hear what you think about these different groups that are kind of allies for one another and kind of growing up and how that’s all working within the greater community.
[00:32:17] Matt: Yeah. And this is obviously a hot topic in society because there are some versions of this work that have actually ended up being exclusionary. Right.
[00:32:30] Michelle: Yes.
[00:32:32] Matt: So this is something I both think is ultimately beautiful and I struggle with. Because essentially what we’re talking about is tribes or identities that separate us.
And so part of me really identifies with Martin Luther King being, I want my children judged on the content of their character, not the color of their skin.
So I think of WordPress as a fundamentally humanist philosophy and organization, meaning that I see you and I see Michelle.
I am not seeing however you might want to be labeled or however my mind might label you, purple haired woman.
Honestly, all these things, yes, they exist. Let’s not deny that these labels exist. And evolutionarily, our minds work that way. And we are tribal, so we do kind of have an affinity for folks who might share some identity characteristics. And if we can use that to invite contributors, I think that’s great. But I think it should always be towards the goal that how we treat each other, how we work together, is sort of that human first, where we’re not leading, like, awesome. Michelle, you are a woman contributor. No, you’re a contributor.
I don’t want to ever put an adjective in front of this. There’s this great Morgan Freeman interview, which actually kind of shook me when I first saw it, because Morgan Freeman’s someone I look up to a lot. He’s one of my favorite actors.
And he was actually railing against Black History Month, which I was very surprised at because I’ve never in my life thought that was something that shouldn’t exist.
And his argument was interesting. He was like, hey, he was talking to someone. The interviewer was white and Jewish. He’s like, is there a Jewish history month? Is there a white history month? No, you just call it history.
And that was kind of his point. It wasn’t to take anything away from black heritage or anything like that, but he was like, our history is history, and so we should talk about it twelve months out of the year.
That was his argument. I’m not making that argument, by the way. I don’t think it’s my place to. But when I saw that, I was like, whoa, okay, here’s someone who, with this identity card, I would say it’s a Black American who is very politically active, a very good moral thinker, who is making a case for this thing that I thought was just kind of standard.
I just grew up with it. It was like my whole life. That’s what we do.
Why he thought it doesn’t actually represent how he wanted to be seen as a person or how he wanted his identity’s history to be seen as part of history and part of the canon of western civilization.
And I say all these things like, gosh, I hope I didn’t say anything wrong and offend anyone, but these are the things I’m thinking about and how I sort of ruminate and struggle with some of these issues as well.
[00:35:48] Michelle: So, for the record, you’re not anti-advocacy.
[00:35:52] Matt: What I do always return to and what always feels true at the end of the day is the humanist part. We’re humans. I want to see people as their primary identity being their name, however they choose to identify and then their behaviors and everything else, the labels, the categories, let’s wear them lightly. And how beautiful is it that they could change? How someone chooses to identify might change over time. And that’s kind of cool, too.
A lot of people don’t know this, but actually when I started contributing to open source, I did so under a pseudonym. I was anonymous because I was like a 17-18 year old kid in Houston who had computer science training or no qualifications. And one of my big struggles at that time was people wouldn’t take me seriously.
I think I have a blog post about this, but I remember walking into a Best Buy to buy my first digital camera, and they wouldn’t pay attention to me. I had saved up. I’d scraped together money for months and months to buy my first digital camera. I was so proud that I went in there with the $300 or what, that I really worked hard and then they wouldn’t even serve me. And I just felt like really ignored.
And so online it was so cool. And that’s actually one thing I think should be maintained. Like, I’m totally fine with people contributing to WordPress without their real name or real identity attached.
Who cares what you look like or what your name is or where in the world you are or something like that? All that matters is your contributions and that I think is kind of the ultimate end of this. How can we make space? Obviously we do a lot of in person stuff, so it doesn’t work there. But at least in the online space, I think we need to maintain that it’s totally fine for someone to be completely anonymous and a full participant in the WordPress community. And that perhaps is the ultimate epitome of what being online allows us to be free or take on completely new avatars than what we happen to be born with.
[00:37:56] Michelle: Or gravitars, as it is.
[00:37:59] Matt: Gravitars, yes. Good reference.
[00:38:03] Michelle: That’s awesome. Well, what else is coming up that you are looking forward to before we wrap things up and I let you continue to recover in isolation, what other things would you like to share?
[00:38:17] Matt: Michelle, we covered quite a bit, so thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure and I look forward to doing this again someday.
[00:38:24] Michelle: Absolutely.
[00:38:25] Matt: For people to follow me. I’m blogging a lot on ma.tt and I’m @photomatt on like Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, everything. So yeah, I hope to connect with people there.
[00:38:36] Michelle: Absolutely. I’ll include all of those in the show notes, all the links. So if you want to follow Matt on all those places, you can, along with a transcript of today’s episode so that people can read it instead of listening to it, if that’s what they want to do. Matt, thank you so much for taking some time to spend with me today on your sabbatical. I hope that you have some good rest over the next three months in spite of continuing to kind of chime in and pay attention to what’s happening. And I look forward to seeing you in Taipei.
[00:39:02] Matt: See you then. Bye bye.
[00:39:04] Michelle: Bye.
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