After an exodus of employees at Automattic who disagreed with CEO Matt Mullenweg’s recently divisive legal battle with WP Engine, he’s upped the ante with another buyout offer—and a threat that employees speaking to the press should “exit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance.” 

Earlier this month, Mullenweg posed an “Alignment Offer” to all of his employees: Stand with him through a messy legal drama that’s still unfolding, or leave. 

“It became clear a good chunk of my Automattic colleagues disagreed with me and our actions,” he wrote on his personal blog on Oct. 3, referring to the ongoing dispute between himself and website hosting platform WP Engine, which Mullenweg called a “cancer to WordPress” and accusing WP Engine of “strip-mining the WordPress ecosystem. In the last month, he and WP Engine have volleyed cease and desist letters, and WP Engine is now suing Automattic, accusing Mullenweg of extortion and abuse of power.

In the “Alignment Offer,” Mullenweg offered Automattic employees six months of pay or $30,000, whichever was higher, with the stipulation that they would lose access to their work logins that same evening and would not be eligible for rehire.

One hundred and fifty-nine people took the offer and left. “However now, I feel much lighter,” Mullenweg wrote in his blog. 

But many stayed at Automattic even though they didn't agree with Mullenweg’s actions, telling 404 Media they remained due to financial strain or the challenging job market. Several employees who remained at the company describe a culture of paranoia and fear for those still there. 

“Overall, the environment is now full of people who unequivocally support Matt's actions, and people who couldn't leave because of financial reasons (and those are mostly silent),” one Automattic employee told me. 

The current and former Automattic employees I spoke to for this article did so under the condition of anonymity, out of concerns about retaliation from Mullenweg. 

“I'm certain that Matt hasn't eliminated all dissenters, because I'm still there, but I expect that within the next six to twelve months, everyone who didn't leave but wasn't ‘aligned’ will have found a new job and left on their own terms,” another current employee told me. “My personal morale has never been lower at this job, and I know that I'm not alone.”

Mullenweg himself, in internal screenshots viewed by 404 Media, acknowledged that his first “Alignment Offer” did not make everyone who disagreed with him leave the company. 

On Wednesday Mullenweg posted another ultimatum in Automattic’s Slack: a new offer that would include nine months of compensation (up from the previous offer of six months). Mullenweg wrote: 

“New alignment offer: I guess some people were sad they missed the last window. Some have been leaking to the press and ex-employees. That's water under the bridge. Maybe the last offer needed to be higher. People have said they want a new window, so this is my attempt. Here's a new one: You have until 00:00 UTC Oct 17 (-4 hours) to DM me the words, ‘I resign and would like to take the 9-month buy-out offer’ You don't have to say any reason, or anything else. I will reply ‘Thank you.’ Automattic will accept your resignation, you can keep you [sic] office stuff and work laptop; you will lose access to Automattic and Wong (no slack, user accounts, etc). HR will be in touch to wrap up details in the coming days, including your 9 months of compensation, they have a lot on their plates right now. You have my word this deal will be honored. We will try to keep this quiet, so it won't be used against us, but I still wanted to give Automatticians another window.”

“We have technical means to identify the leaker as well, that I obviously can't disclose,” he continued. “So this is their opportunity to exit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance and probably a big legal case for violating confidentiality agreement.” 

Mullenweg and Automattic did not respond to requests for comment. 

This is the latest in what has been a tense few months at Automattic. 

“Regarding escalations, to me, the most upsetting thing has been the way he's treating current and former employees and WP community members,” one former employee who recently left the company after several years told me. “He clearly has no clue what people care about or how the community has contributed to the success of WordPress. It very clearly shows how out of touch he is with everyday reality. One, sharing pictures of him being on safari while all this shit is going down, as if people would think that was cool. Only rich tech bros would think that.” (Mullenweg posted photos from a trip on his personal blog and social media posts last week.) 

‘The Community Is In Chaos:’ WordPress.org Now Requires You Denounce Affiliation With WP Engine To Log In

WordPress.org users are forced to confirm they are not “affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise” before registering a new account or logging in.

404 MediaSamantha Cole

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.  

“We were unaware that Matt redirected sign-up emails until current Automattic employees contacted our support team,” a spokesperson for Blind told me, adding that they’d “never seen a CEO or executive try to limit their employees from signing up for Blind by redirecting emails.”

Mullenweg didn’t block emails from the @teamblind.com domain, Blind said. According to Slack messages viewed by 404 Media, instead, he redirected those emails to himself.

“We are disappointed when we hear employers or executives try to limit access to Blind. Some of the most commonly discussed topics on Blind are protected speech in the U.S.—pay, job terminations, critiques of workplace conditions—which we believe workers should be free to access and discuss. Blind's mission is to bring transparency to the workplace, as we believe it can inspire meaningful change,” the spokesperson for Blind said. “Employers' attempts to block Blind are misguided and often have the opposite intended effect. Generally, we have seen more employees register and use Blind when their company tries to restrict access.” 

“The escalation since then just confirmed I made the right choice."

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),” they said. “Clearly, Blind is designed to allow employee discussion free from employer interference, and he was trying to prevent that in the most obvious way possible.” 

Instead of Blind, employees have been posting on Anonymattic, an anonymous message board set up on WordPress’s own systems that allows all employees to post using one login. 

“A common theme for posts on Anonymattic is ‘Any time I try to get work done, some new drama comes up and I get distracted.’ I know that's true for me,” an employee told me. 

“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. 

Anonymattic was “conveniently closed down around Covid with the excuse of avoiding toxic discussions,” an employee told me. “I say conveniently because people would post their opinions and complaints to leadership that were sometimes uncomfortable. That’s when the Blind migration happened.” They said they believe Mullenweg’s interference with Blind emails was “an attempt to stop employees from joining Blind in some kind of intimidating fashion (are they collecting who is joining Blind? With what intentions?)” Anonymattic was reopened around that time, they said.

“At the end, even if anonymous, Automattic can delete posts there and not in Blind,” they said.

Last week, in response to someone criticizing his decision to add a checkbox to the WordPress.org login that forced users to denounce affiliation with WP Engine, Mullenweg posted in the WordPress contributor community Slack, “Wait until you see what we have in store for Thursday! And Friday. And Saturday. And Sunday. And Monday.” Several people posted vomiting and face-palm emojis in response to that message.

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." 

As I write this, a violent, unprecedented storm rips across the Florida—Hurricane Milton, a monstrous, life-annihilating catastrophe. A storm that officials are warning comes “once in a century,” and that you don’t survive if you’re in its path. 

A storm with storm surges expected up to 15 feet, and a storm that Florida is knowingly leaving thousands of incarcerated individuals to face. 

“Helene was a wake-up call, this is literally catastrophic and I can say without any dramatization whatsoever: If you choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you are going to die,” Tampa Mayor Jane Castor warned. 

Yet, incarcerated people have been issued no order to evacuate at all. They have been given no choice. They have been sentenced to what is effectively a death sentence.

Just weeks ago, during Hurricane Helene, prisoners in North Carolina were left locked in their cells, ankle-deep in water and feces, without power, clean water, or adequate food. “We thought we were going to die there,” one man recalled.​ He described the moment he “realized his single-occupancy cell in the state prison had begun to flood. Then he realized that his toilet no longer flushed,” documents The Intercept. 

“For the next five days, more than 550 men incarcerated at Mountain View suffered in cells without lights or running water, according to conversations with the family members of four men serving sentences at the facility, as well as one currently incarcerated man. Until they were transferred to different facilities, the prisoners lost all contact with the outside world.”

As nearby residents sought refuge from the storm, the men were stuck in prison — by definition, without the freedom to leave — in close quarters with their own excrement for nearly a week from September 27 until October 2.

Loved ones of men incarcerated at Mountain View claimed food rations were scarce, amounting to four crackers for breakfast, a cup of juice or milk, and two pieces of bread with peanut butter for lunch and dinner. Potable drinking water did not arrive for several days.”

It was only once their mental and physical health deteriorated beyond the brink that authorities made the too-late decision to evacuate. 

Florida now echoes this same refusal to act. During Hurricane Milton, incarcerated individuals in Sarasota, Hernando, Pasco, Charlotte, Lee, and Manatee County jails will remain trapped, unmoved, unprotected, in their cells—some in Zone A evacuation areas, the very zones that officials have explicitly marked as dangerous enough to be “coffins” for those who remain behind​.

These people, the ones the state deems less than human, are experiencing nothing less than torture. They are not sentenced to die, but their fate is an impending burial within prison walls, forgotten, drowned, and abandoned. 

Julie Reimer, whose son is trapped in a Florida jail, spoke out, painfully stating to The Intercept, “When my son was sentenced, he was not given a death sentence”​. Yet, for the imprisoned in Milton’s path, that is exactly what has happened.

Far-right, fascist Governor Ron DeSantis is preparing for “the largest search and rescue operation in Florida history,” trucks running 24 hours a day to clear debris left by Hurricane Helene—and debris that could now become deadly projectiles as Hurricane Milton hits. 

While those preparations have been prioritized for those fortunate enough to be outside the bars, there is no similar urgency for the incarcerated, who are left like expendable commodities. 

As noted last year in a Scalawag piece titled, Florida’s Jails Put Incarcerated People’s Lives at Risk During Hurricane Season, hurricane after hurricane, we see the same pattern—refusal to evacuate, refusal to value the lives of Black, Brown, poor, and incarcerated people. These individuals aren’t statistics or mere bodies—they are sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, and community members. They deserve safety, dignity, and the ability to survive this “storm of the century.”

This is climate change at its most explicit—and at its most unjust. Hurricane Milton is more than a natural disaster; it is a climate disaster fueled by the deliberate policies and actions of those in power. 

This is the clearest, most explicit example of how climate change disproporationately impacts the most vulnerable among us. And if or when there are deaths resulting from this, the blood will be on the hands of the officials, the prison officials, and the politicians who sanctioned this.

This is why we need abolition. We cannot wait until after the storm, when the bodies have been counted, when the headlines are written, and the officials make their empty statements of “unfortunate losses.” 

We must abolish the cages, the concentration camps, and the mechanisms of state violence that deem any life disposable. What kind of country are we, if we let this happen? Surely, we are not a civilized one. We are watching state-sanctioned torture. We are watching state-sanctioned mass death. And the only response to this barbarity is to fight for the freedom and dignity of every human being. 

The post Hurricane Milton: Climate Catastrophe & the Sanction of Mass Death for Florida Prisoners appeared first on The Kansas City Defender.

WordPress.org users are now required to agree that they are not affiliated with website hosting platform WP Engine before logging in. It’s the latest shot fired by WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg in his crusade against the website hosting platform.

The checkbox on the login page for WordPress.org asks users to confirm, “I am not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise.” Users who don’t check that box can’t log in or register a new account. As of Tuesday, that checkbox didn’t exist. 

Since last month, Mullenweg has been publicly accusing WP Engine of misusing the WordPress brand and not contributing enough to the open-source community. WP Engine sent him a cease and desist, and he and his company, Automattic, sent one back. He’s banned WP Engine from using WordPress’ resources, and as of today, some contributors are reporting being kicked out of the community Slack they use for WordPress open-source projects. 

Among WordPress community contributors, who keep the open-source project running, this checkbox added to the organization’s site is an inflection point in a legal battle that they’ve been mostly isolated from until today. 

“Right now the WordPress community is in chaos. People don’t know where they stand legally, they are being banned from participating for speaking up, and Matt is promising more ‘surprises’ all week,” one WordPress open-source community member who has contributed to the project for almost 10 years told me. They requested to speak anonymously because they fear retribution from Mullenweg. “The saddest part is that while WordPress is a tool we use in our work, for many of us it is much more than a software. It is a true global community, made up of long-time friends and coworkers who share a love for the open-source project and its ideals. We are all having that very abruptly ripped away from us.” 

In a Slack channel for WordPress community contributors, Mullenweg said on Wednesday that the checkbox is part of a ban on WP Engine from using WordPress.org’s resources.

Mullenweg explained the ban in a blog post published on the WordPress.org site in September, saying it’s because of their legal claims and litigation against WordPress.org.” 

“WP Engine is free to offer their hacked up, bastardized simulacra of WordPress’s GPL code to their customers, and they can experience WordPress as WP Engine envisions it, with them getting all of the profits and providing all of the services,” Mullenweg wrote in the blog. “If you want to experience WordPress, use any other host in the world besides WP Engine.” 

WP Engine is an independent company and platform that hosts sites built on WordPress. WordPress.org is an open-source project, while WordPress.com is the commercial entity owned by Automattic, and which funds development of, and contributes to, the WordPress codebase. Last month, Mullenweg—who also co-founded Automattic—wrote a post on the organization’s blog, calling WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress” and accusing WP Engine of “strip-mining the WordPress ecosystem, giving our users a crappier experience so they can make more money” because the platform disables revision history tracking.

Mullenweg also criticized WP Engine for not contributing enough to the WordPress open source project, and its use of “WP” in its branding. “Their branding, marketing, advertising, and entire promise to customers is that they’re giving you WordPress, but they’re not. And they’re profiting off of the confusion,” he wrote. “WP Engine needs a trademark license to continue their business.” He also devoted most of a WordCamp conference talk to his qualms with WP Engine and its investor Silver Lake.

WP Engine sent Automattic and Mullenweg a cease and desist letter demanding that he “stop making and retract false, harmful and disparaging statements against WP Engine,” the platform posted in September. 

The letter claimed that Mullenweg “threatened that if WP Engine did not agree to pay Automattic—his for-profit entity—a very large sum of money before his September 20th keynote address at the WordCamp US Convention, he was going to embark on a self-described ‘scorched earth nuclear approach’ toward WP Engine within the WordPress community and beyond.”

Automattic lobbed its own cease and desist back. “Your unauthorized use of our Client’s trademarks infringes on their rights and dilutes their famous and well-known marks. Negative reviews and comments regarding WP Engine and its offerings are imputed to our Client, thereby tarnishing our Client’s brands, harming their reputation, and damaging the goodwill our Client has established in its marks,” the letter states. “Your unauthorized use of our Client’s intellectual property has enabled WP Engine to compete with our Client unfairly, and has led to unjust enrichment and undue profits.” 

The WordPress Foundation’s Trademark Policy page was also changed in late September to specifically name WP Engine. “The abbreviation ‘WP’ is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people,” it now says. “For example, many people think WP Engine is ‘WordPress Engine’ and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.”

WP Engine filed a lawsuit against Automattic and Mullenweg earlier this month, accusing them of extortion and abuse of power, Techcrunch reported.

Last week, Mullenweg announced that he’d given Automattic employees a buyout package, and 159 employees, or roughly 8.4 percent of staff, took the offer. “I feel much lighter,” he wrote.

According to screenshots posted by WordPress project contributors, there’s a heated debate happening in the WordPress community Slack at the moment—between contributors and Mullenweg himself—about the checkbox.

One contributor wrote that they have a day job as an agency developer, which involves working on sites that might be hosted by WP Engine. “That's as far as my association goes. However, ‘financially or otherwise’ is quite vague and therefore confusing,” they wrote. “For example, people form relationships at events, are former employees, collaborate on a project, contribute to a plugin, or have some other connection that could be considered impactful to whether that checkbox is checked. What's the base level of interaction/association that would mean not checking that box?” 

Mullenweg replied: “It’s up to you whether to check the box or not. I can’t answer that for you.” 

At least two WordPress open-source project contributors—Javier Casares and Andrew Hutchings—posted on X that they’ve been kicked out of the WordPress community Slack after questioning Mullenweg’s actions.

“A few of us asked Matt questions on Slack about the new checkbox on the .org login,” Hutchings posted. “I guess we shouldn't have done that.”

“In today's case, somebody changed the login and disconnected everybody, so, without explanation on the check, if you need to contribute to WordPress and access the website, you need to activate it,” Casares told me in an email. “In my case, this morning, I had to publish a post about a Hosting Team meeting this afternoon.” He had to check the box, he said, because without it he couldn’t access the platform to post it, but the vagueness of the statement concerned him.

He said the people banned this morning included contributors who have been contributing to the WordPress project for more than 10 years, or people related to other source-code projects.

“Why? Only Matt knows why he is doing everything he is doing. I really don't know,” Casares said. 

“Matt’s war against WP Engine has been polarizing and upsetting for everyone in WordPress, but most of the WP community has been relatively insulated from any real effects. Putting a loyalty test in the form of a checkmark on the WordPress.org login page has brought the conflict directly to every community member and contributor. Matt is not just forcing everyone to take sides, he is actively telling people to consult attorneys to determine whether or not they should check the box,” the anonymous contributor I spoke to told me. “It is also more than just whether or not you agree to a legally dubious statement to log in. A growing number of active, dedicated community members, many who have no connection with WP Engine, have had their WordPress.org accounts completely disabled with no notice or explanation as to why. No one knows who will be banned next or for what... Whatever Matt’s end goal is, his ‘tactics,’ especially this legally and ethically ambiguous checkbox, are causing a lot of confusion and mental anguish to people around the world.”

Based on entries to his personal blog and social media posts, Mullenweg has been on safari in Africa this week. Mullenweg did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Like yesterday, I’m seeing brick; this time, however, it’s more of a distance away.

Tonight’s event is at 7 at the Unity Temple on the Plaza, hosted by Rainy Day Books (all the details are here). If you’re in Kansas City I hope I’ll see you there.

Tomorrow: Boulder! I’ll be at the First Congregational Church for an event sponsored by Boulder Bookstore. Please come visit me, it’ll be fun. Here are the details for that.

— JS

My latest in The Guardian

Announcements from major employers, including Amazon and Tabcorp, that workers will be required to return to the office five days a week have a familiar ring. There has been a steady flow of such directives. The Commonwealth Bank CEO, Matt Comyn, attracted a lot of attention with an announcement that workers would be required to attend the office for a minimum of 50% of the time, while the NSW public service was recently asked to return to the office at least three days a week.

But, like new year resolutions, these announcements are honoured more in the breach than the observance. The rate of remote work has barely changed since lockdowns ended three years ago. And many loudly trumpeted announcements have been quietly withdrawn. The CBA website has returned to a statement that attracts potential hires with the promise, “Our goal is to ensure the majority of our roles can be flexible so that our people can work where and how they choose.”

The minority of corporations that have managed to enforce full-time office attendance fall into two main categories. First, there are those, like Goldman Sachs, that are profitable enough to pay salaries that more than offset the cost and inconvenience of commuting to work, whether or not they gain extra productivity as a result. Second, there are companies like Grindr and Twitter (now X) that are looking for massive staff reductions and don’t care much whether the staff they lose are good or bad.

Typically, as in these two cases, such companies are engaged in the process Cory Doctorow has christened enshittification, changing the rules on their customers in an effort to squeeze as much as possible out of them before time runs out.

We might be tempted to dismiss these as isolated cases. But a recent KPMG survey found that 83% of CEOs expected a full return to the office within three years. Such a finding raises serious questions, not so much about remote work but about whether CEOs deserve the power they currently hold and the pay they currently receive.

Many of the factors contributing to corporate success or failure, such as interest and exchange rates, booms and recessions, and changes in consumer tastes are outside the control of CEOs. And the success or failure of technical innovations is, to a large extent, a matter of chance.

By contrast, the organisation of work within the corporation is something over which CEOs have a lot of control. The case of remote work shows that the CEO class as a whole failed to pick up an innovation yielding massive benefits before it was forced on them by the pandemic, and have continued to resist and resent it ever since.

The immediate impact of remote work has largely benefited employees, who save commuting time and are able to combine work and family more effectively. Some estimates suggest that the average Australian worker is willing to forgo up to 8% of their annual wage in exchange for the freedom to work remotely, and it may be much more valuable for those with high commuting costs, disabilities or unavoidable family commitments.

The logic of the labour market, in which CEOs presumably believe, implies that these benefits will be shared with employers. A worker enjoying a substantial benefit will not accept an offer from a rival company without such benefits, even at higher pay. In the end, pay and working conditions are, in the terminology of economics, fungible substitutes.

Studies on the productivity effects of WFH have had mixed results. But no one seriously suggests that any negative effects are sufficient to outweigh the benefits to workers. Rather, the claims made by CEOs largely rely on vibes – like the feelings associated with a busy office – or (what should be) irrelevant considerations such as the impact on CBD cafes. For a while it was suggested that remote work would create difficulties for new hires. But four years on, the opposite is true – many younger workers have never experienced the five-day-a-week office and may have difficulty adjusting to it.

The real concern driving CEO resistance is the fact remote work involves a previously unthinkable change in the way productive activity is structured and organised. If workers can do without the physical presence of managers, perhaps they don’t need managers at all, at least in the way they currently operate. The eagerness of CEOs and other senior managers to wish these changes away suggests that, at some level, they realise this.

As Gideon Haigh observed 20 years ago, the era of neoliberalism has been associated with the “cult of the CEO”. The office has been the shrine of that cult. In their plaintive call for a return there, CEOs are like declining deities who see their votaries deserting them.

The reality of home prices vs income is depressing.