Ian Betteridge

Regarding our Cease and Desist letter to Automattic | WP Fusion:

The events of the past month have made me realize a few things: I don’t trust Matt. Matt doesn’t appear to be taking advice from legal counsel. Always defend your trademarks.

With those points in mind we sent a cease and desist letter to Automattic and WordPress.com on October 12th, asking for WP Fusion Lite to be removed from WordPress.com due to the potential for confusion regarding the affiliation of the WP Fusion brand.

It is absolutely hilarious that in its letter, Automattic dispute what is a very clear trademark violation, given its history of weaponising trademarks.

Samantha Cole at 404 Media – Employees Describe an Environment of Paranoia and Fear Inside Automattic Over WordPress Chaos:

In July, before the latest WP Engine blowup, an Automattic employee wrote in Slack that they received a direct message from Mullenweg sending them an identification code for Blind, an anonymous workplace discussion platform, which was required to complete registration on the site. Blind requires employees to use their official workplace emails to sign up, as a way to authenticate that users actually work for the companies they are discussing. Mullenweg said on Slack that emails sent from Blind’s platform to employees’ email addresses were being forwarded to him. If employees wanted to log in or sign up for Blind, they’d need to ask Mullenweg for the two-factor identification code. The implication was that Automattic—and Mullenweg—could see who was trying to sign up for Blind, which is often a place where people anonymously vent or share criticism about their workplace.

I cannot understand how any manager, any leader, can get themselves into a position where they believe they should redirect employee email to themselves in order to monitor who is signing up for a site of any kind. What’s almost worse is that to anyone with half an idea about human beings, it should be obvious this would do more harm than good:

One Automattic employee told me that Mullenweg’s interception of Blind emails was the thing that made them start looking for a new job. “For Matt to do that, without prior announcement, was equivalent to spying on his employees. And for him to think it’s ok to tell people to message him for their verification code is ridiculous—I’ve never questioned an employer’s judgment as much as I did in that moment (although it has happened many times since),”

What Mullenweg – like all insecure leaders – appears to be craving isn’t an effective team, but a monoculture of people who believe in him, personally, and his vision.

“There is a vocal group of sycophants who are cheering on Matt’s actions via Anonymattic,” they said, “drawing favorable comparisons to how Elon Musk and Donald Trump operate. Their morale seems high, but I can’t relate.” Screenshots viewed by 404 Media show some staff having changed their Slack usernames to include “[STAYING]” to signal their support of Mullenweg and intention to remain at the company.

Companies that have this level of leader cult fanaticism inevitably fail. And what this monoculture entails is a situation where “the emperor’s new clothes” becomes a leadership manual, not a warning:

A recently-departed employee told me that the WP Engine legal drama wasn’t their final straw. “But in hindsight, it should have been,” they said. “The escalation since then just confirmed I made the right choice. At the time, I thought Matt might have a point about the trademarks (something I know little about), but he did say at the time he was going to treat this like a war and continue escalating it, because the truth was on his side. I guess we’re now seeing what that really meant."