Every time I think the internet is going to calm down and I can maybe figure out some kind of plan for what I’m going to do once I’ve gotten enough sleep for complex thought and proper long-term planning, a new bit of bullshit breaks. To be completely honest, I figured that the guy running Automattic, that owns WordPress .com and Tumblr, and who also runs the WordPress Foundation (which owns and maintains the trademarks on WordPress and does some oversight on the open-source WordPress project), was at least some kind of asshole give the way that WordPress and Tumblr are doing their damnedest to sell user data to shitty plagiarism machines, but I really underestimated how much of an asshole he is. Turns out he’s allegedly trying to extort another company that he recently called out, threatening that he’d go “scorched earth” if they didn’t give in to his demands for changes to their business model or some kind of financial support. Reading some of these exchanges is absolutely wild and I’m really not sure how to feel about all of this, considering my plan to leave WordPress .com was to set up the open-source WordPress .org software on a different host. I’d even begun to do a bit of research about what hosts I could turn to, when the time came to make the change, and have bookmarked the research some of my friends on Cohost did for their own purposes. Now, I’m not as certain.

It feels like maybe breaking from WordPress entirely is the safer bet, considering I don’t much care to be held hostage by the infuriating whims of an out-of-touch rich asshole. That’s why I left Twitter, after all. Sure, Matt Mullenweg isn’t as bad (or as rich) as Elon Musk yet, but maybe we just haven’t learned enough about Mullenweg to know how bad he’s always been. It took a while for news of Musk to reach the general public and while I was off the Musk train a long time before most people were (him calling that diver who rescued those kids stuck in a cave a “pedo” was when the scales fell from my eyes), I was still pretty heavily taken-in by the image he created for public consumption for a long time. Who is to say that Mullenweg isn’t any different? Maybe he’s just better at keeping his shit under wraps and only now, as he’s losing his humanity to the millions he’s accumulated, is the true shittiness of his personality shining forth in an easily discernable and public way. Maybe he’s always been an asshole and it only never came up until now because, for whatever reason, the things he wanted more or less aligned with what the people who made him rich wanted. Honestly, at this point, if he vanished from the public eye and never spoke or led a company again, it would be barely sufficient for me. I’m just so tired of people like him skating by for years only to eventually fuck it all up because they got greedy, started to feel entitled, or mistakenly believed that they can do no wrong.

What really makes me nervous about this news (Mullenweg’s alleged blackmailing scheme) is that I absolutely can’t trust him or the companies he runs. I mean, I couldn’t before, since trying to set everyone up with an opt-out “we’ll sell your data and give you absolutely nothing for it” setting so they can make money off the theft of creative works already happening is one of the scummiest things you can do on an internet platform that isn’t some kind of heinous crime, but I didn’t know that the guy who runs the WordPress .com company is also the one heading up the foundation that controls the WordPress .org. Who has, coincidentally, in recent days, gone on record as saying that he, specifically, is the one who controls it. I’d hate to get booted off my website just because the asshole whose behavior I’m accurately portraying decided to take umbrage with my words that are, once again, an entirely accurate depiction of his behavior and, where they are not, are clearly my opinion. All of which is to say that I’m envisioning quite a few potential futures in which I might want to part entirely from the WordPress ecosystem and just deal with starting a new home somewhere else entirely. It’d be a lot of work and I’d lose most of my following, but it’s not like most of my blog’s followers actually read my posts or anything. I get a total views equal to two or three percent of my blog’s WordPress specific follower count and maybe one or two a week come from WordPress links and WordPress readers. The rest arrive seemingly at random or from links I’m sharing on various social media platforms. Now that Cohost is gone, Facebook is the source of most of my link-clicks (I’ve got one person who has been reading every single post when it shows up at nine in the morning on my Facebook page and I just want to give them a shoutout, whoever they are, for making my day and giving me an endless mystery to ponder since I have no way of knowing who it is unless they like the post on Facebook), beating out WordPress pretty handily.

Anyway, rich people suck and are ruining everything. Pretty much literally everything, too, since all the people I can think of who are having a negative impact on the word are rich and only have the impact that they do because they’re rich or famous or famously rich. Trump. Rowling. Most politicians in pretty much every country. Oil company executives. Lobbyists for the for-profit medical system in the US and those leading said system itself. I could write at least a few paragraphs made up entirely of easily recognizable names if I wanted to be that specific, but I’m already exhausting myself just thinking about how easily any of those people could ACCIDENTALLY do something good for the world and how actively they’re all avoiding having a positive impact on the life of anyone but themselves. Honestly, I’ve been thinking of my post about grief from 2022, when the Queen of England died and I first read the comic Vattu. There’s a line in there, “it’s a tragedy for an emperor even to exist,” which feels like it applies pretty well to most multi-millionaires and every single billionaire, though I’d advocate for a slight change to the idea. For billionaires, I’d argue that it’s a crime for them to even exist, given that they all only have that much money because of some form of horrendous exploitation or another. So, yeah. Eat the rich. It’s not like they’re doing any good in the world that wouldn’t be done better by redistributing their ill-gotten wealth.