I have a lot to say about how rotten social media is/is becoming/always has been. But an essential part of how bad things have become is the cult of personality around the people who sit atop the engines of our permanently online social interaction, no matter how relatively “humble” they are on the Dennis Ritchie-to-Elon Musk spectrum:
Dennis Ritchie is what I consider to be on the “enlightened technologist” end of the spectrum–actually talented, unknown to the masses, did not launch a start-up and sell out, made great things possible with his work. He is, however, not a product of the Post-Microsoft Tech World.
Dennis Ritchie created the C programming language and is as a result directly responsible for both much of the software revolution and much of the non-memory-safe code that makes the digital world insecure*. Net +, with notes. Full disclosure: a personal hero, and he wrote a great book.
* as Ken Goldsholl pointed out, the memory un-safe-ness was probably not foreseeable at the time, and honestly I cannot hold anything against Ritchie because he was in it for all the right reasons.
Elon Musk is a nerd who had emerald mine money from his apartheid-fan dad and evaded the draft by coming to America…he got involved with PayPal and has been trying to name everything with an X ever since because he’s a fucking neofascist pirate.
Elon is on the other end of the spectrum. As far as I can tell, he can code but in a very unenlightened way–but his main talent is that he has money and rich friends and is part of the Paypaligarchy. He has put money and his weirdness into a lot of things, but he has not made anything of consequence himself–he has just imposed his weird aesthetic and pot-smoke-haze Ayn Randian philosophy on everything he touches and is all about extracting as much value as possible from everything he touches (except Twitter, which he has fucked up beyond all recognition).
And then there’s Matt Mullenweg, who owns the platform I blog on.
Where does he fall on the Dennis to Elon spectrum?
Welp.
WordPress has been part of my online life for almost 20 years. It’s hard to believe. I’ve done Moveable Type and all sorts of other platforms over the years (including a very interesting development project on Community Server .Net that nearly robbed me of my sanity). But most of the words I’ve ever published electronically, including everything at Ars Technica and my current gig, were processed through WordPress.
Matt was a PHP developer at CNET, and he did WordPress on the side. Then he became an open-source hero, and then a hosting hero to everyone who had used Google Domains. But he’s also something of a tech bro asshole. And his recent purge of employees at Automattic is just the latest symptom of a very confrontational, not very open-source kumbaya personality and business approach that has scorched a lot of fucking earth.
But WordPress is still open-source, and I am paying for hosting and patching, not for Matt’s personality. So… somewhere between Dennis and Elon. Am I going to move off a WordPress-hosted blog and take my words to a self-powered domain somewhere? Probably not anytime soon–just like I’m not going to stop using a Mac or an iPhone even though Tim Cook is a jackass.
The Packet Rat 