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Guest: Whitney Phillips, Co-Author of »The Shadow Gospel: How Anti-Liberal Demonology Possessed US Religion, Media, and Politics«

Mentioned book: Adrian Daub »Cancel Culture Transfer« (German) / »The Cancel Culture Panic« (English)

Other references:

• Breitband episode about evangelical influence on social media (German)
• Kompressor about OnlyFans’ influence on pop culture (German)
• Hays Code
  • A a set of industry guidelines for the self-censorship of content that was applied to most motion pictures released by major studios in the United States from 1934 to 1968.
• Megachurches
• Prefrontal cortex development

(The transcript has been generated using the Whisper Large v3 Turbo model in Macwhisper and might contain errors.)

Hagen
Hello and welcome to a very rare occasion, a new episode of this podcast. And it's only the second episode and I'm already trying something new because the conversation you're going to hear wasn't actually meant to be released when we recorded it. because it was actually meant for the show Breitband, where I usually work at. So I'm talking to Whitney Phillips, who's a professor of information politics and ethics at the School of Journalism and Communication from the University of Oregon and author or co-author of books like This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, where she looks at 4chan and online trolling or the reason for our current talk the shadow gospel where she looks at the influence that evangelicals have on us media and have had for decades. The reason I wanted to talk about evangelicals which might sound like a weird topic for the things I usually cover, which is internet culture, internet politics, and of course from a German angle a lot of the time.

But the reason I wanted to talk about evangelicals go back to a different thing I did for the show Compressor, where I talked about OnlyFans and how OnlyFans became a part of modern pop culture. And when I reported on that, I, of course, looked at the discourse surrounding OnlyFans. And there's, of course, a lot of backlash because it's pornography. And there's always a lot of backlash around pornography. But what I found interesting is... that I found many left-wing feminist influencers who talked about the actual problems that pornography has. There's taking advantage of women, of less privileged people, how slimy the porn industry can be. But these same influencers or activists said things that were against porn, but... followed different ways of arguing. There were a lot of puritanical arguments there, like, it's just not a good thing to do because you don't do it, which isn't the same as talking about the patriarchy, about misogyny online. And I thought, these sound weirdly religious to me. And that led me to the thing I did for Breitband, where I looked at how evangelicals get their talking points into discussions like this. And Whitney is one of the experts I talk to.

And because it wasn't meant to be released as a whole interview, I need to give you some context about it. because some terms won't be thoroughly explained because the way it works is that I take small snippets and quotes and play them inside the show. So I didn't need to define things I already knew about At another point, I'm mentioning Adrian Daub, who is a professor for comparative linguistics at the University of Stanford. And we're talking about his book, Cancel Culture Transfer, which is the German name, or Cancel Culture Panic, which is the name for the English translation. So that is the context there. I will, of course, try to link as many things as I can in the podcast description. But I don't want to bother you any longer with the introduction. So let's talk with the actual conversation where I asked Whitney Phillips how the evangelicals got started in being interested in media and why they tried to shape it and influence it in the ways they did. Yeah. 

Whitney
It wasn't just that they wanted to save their own souls, convert souls. They wanted to convert society. And so there was this recognition that the way that you do that is to harness the media. At that time in the United States, the biggest, the burgeoning media apparatus was radio. For reasons that are kind of complicated and get into the weeds, they were essentially in this war for radio supremacy in the US, and ultimately they won. Evangelicals were able to kind of position evangelicalism as the American Christianity. So, not one of many Christianities, because there are lots of Christianities in the United States. But they were able to situate themselves as the Christianity because they won that media fight.

In every iteration of media, including the advent of cable television, all of the stuff that happened subsequent to that. In the US, evangelicals have always been the best at harnessing that. And they've been really good at harnessing, even VHS tapes. We think of that now as being an antiquated technology. But when it first emerged, that was cutting edge. And evangelicals used that to promote and spread these very hellfire, satanic, panicky kinds of direct-to-consumer videos that really help to prop up dispensationalism, this apocalyptic approach to the world. And they were the best at it.

They were always the best at it because, in their minds, they had to be because they didn't see a place for themselves within mainstream media. Seeing that evangelical churches, just christian churches generally, have been very good at positioning themselves on social media, that's actually more of a continuation of a long-standing trend. The question is just: Would non-christian people have encountered it before? And I think that's really the shift. That if you were an evangelical person or christian person, you would have been well aware of the media landscape that was your denomination of your faith. People outside of that had no idea that any of this stuff was happening. And so, in the United States, evangelicalism was able to amass a great deal of sort of visibility, or at least a great deal of, they were able to promote their messages with great intensity outside of the awareness of the mainstream. So, it's really more about who's paying attention to what the evangelicals are doing rather than suddenly evangelicals have become really good at harnessing media. They're so skilled at it and just have been for decades and decades. 

I think the interesting thing might be really because we come in contact with them even before we get into porn, like even with traditional movies, it's like now there's a whole discourse about Do we need nudity at all? Even kissing, are sex scenes necessary and not because of some feminist way, the way that the relationship is portrayed or that that is problematic. But Is this a necessary part of storytelling at all? And that feels so puritanical, religious. very contrary to the way things had developed before, where it seemed to be more and more progressive and more and more things were allowed and more taboos were broken or left behind. 

In the US, a lot of the driver of the code, so we had what was known as the Hays Code that Restricted, you know, could a married couple even be shown in the same bed? In the United States, the answer was no, because that was like, that was not acceptable. And it was Catholic groups were a big part of this as well. But religious groups were, at that period of time, they were really pushing to get sex out of Hollywood. And so. It's interesting that there would be a returning back to that. But there's definitely for it. But yeah, you would think that's something that's relegated to the past. And certainly the young people wouldn't be on board with that. But when you look kind of broadly at where The religious rite has been. We're kind of just going full circle to where they started. But it just is interesting that that historical arc doesn't seem like where we should have ended up, but here we are. 

A few moments ago, you said you were curious about how it is outside of the US. And while, of course, we have evangelicals over here, they don't have nearly the influence. Like we don't have this whole T V preacher thing. And because of the way it's financed and structured over here, we don't have these people buying private jets with church money and we don't have mega churches. It that's just not a thing. Like here mainly the Protestant and Catholic church are present. And There are smaller offshoots, and yeah, there are some radicals there, but it's not that mainstream. But the interesting thing is it was always that US media, of course, was very successful, so it influenced us as well with movies, with T V shows. But I think it's becoming more apparent as well because the platforms we communicate on haven't been US based before. Like we owned the broadcasters. Sure, we showed US movies, but we also showed French movies, we showed German movies. And Now everything is funneled through the US mainly, which also means through their moderation standards toward their acceptability of nudity or or whatever is. And that feels like the designs of the platforms are influenced by the U. S. religious perception or standards to some way. 

That's well, that's interesting. So Facebook and Twitter, the sort of big two to and Instagram, of course, to come out of the US. It was definitely when they were developed, they definitely were pulling from ideology, ideology really fundamental to a U. S. context. And around speech, what that meant was a kind of Information wants to be free. You don't want to restrict speech in any kind of way. Sort of the First Amendment, not on steroids, because the First Amendment is already kind of on steroids in the United States compared to other sort of speech contexts around the world. But that there really was this feeling that you are doing a disservice to the network if you don't Make information as frictionless as possible.

And that runs parallel to then, it's not just that information wants to be free, you want to be able to monetize people's information. So it should be free and it should get you money. And that is, I would say, within the context of Silicon Valley and that ethos, the sort of libertarian kind of ethos that doesn't really have grounding in religious tradition in the U. S. And what has happened, especially since Trump won. That all of the moderation that had been happening sort of haphazardly on those platforms, that's been pulled away. So speeches. There weren't really reliable guardrails beforehand, but now there really aren't reliable guardrails. So that is not exactly sort of challenging what you were saying, but I don't, the religious stuff comes after. Like, the religious stuff is not really baked into the cake.

I think that what has happened is that. The pervasive ideology around speech and around sort of freedom in the United States, that's what baked the cake. It's just that the people This is such a weird metaphor. The people who live on top of the cake have become religified through other kinds of influences that are very often disconnected from churches in any meaningful way. And so you've got this. It's not a religious basis, but it starts things start to look religious in many pockets online because this kind of quasi-religiosity has been sprinkled on top of it. So it's actually really, really weird. That it's an after effect, it's not a cause. That's how I would characterize it. It's just kind of knowing the kind of background of where some of these platforms are coming from, how they're based in. The sort of guiding ideologies of the United States in the last couple of decades. 

But I think it's also interesting to think what makes them so successful because what you just said, like they are often even removed from the churches themselves, like how it happens. And that's also something I noticed while I got here, was like this thing on OnlyFans I did and the purity culture thing. And I think that's very interesting because if you're on TikTok or on other social media, you see many people arguing for it who definitely don't have a religious connection. And there are many parts to criticize about pornography, and there's a discussion to be had about power, about exploitation. But much of this discourse, even from these activists, sounds very like purity culture and not because of actual problems, but more about ethics and personal morals. what makes them s so efficient at communicating that they even can infiltrate other cultures, other spaces that are removed from religion itself? 

When you are disconnected from actual religious theology, from specific religious tenets, and from the sort of pesky task of having to read the Bible, It makes the religion or the religious ideas more mobilizable because you get kind of stuck if you are committed to a particular religious tradition. There's only so many things you can say, there's only so many things you can do. You are confined by. The strictures of the religious practice and tradition. So you can't do as much with it if that's what you're doing. It's a lot easier to utilize religion towards, especially cultural ends. If you don't have those strictures, if you're not connected to churches, one thing that really characterizes evangelicalism in the United States when it was establishing itself. Was that it was primarily pushed forward by what are known as parachurch organizations.

So they're not really connected to the church exactly. They talk a lot about Jesus, but it's not really theological. It's more about the packaging, it's more about kind of bringing people into the fold, but it's not really grounded on anything. And that means it can be harnessed towards. Lots of things. And so when I hear about purity culture, you even see some of that discourse in the fact that a lot of people, like Maha, a lot of people who are in the kind of wellness space. The discourse is also around purity, or purity of food, purity of farming. You have all these people who otherwise would be kind of Republicans or conservatives adopting the language of basically like left-wing hippies, with a very particular exception, which is that they hate left-wing hippies. They hate the left, and what they're actually advocating for is a purity from what are seen as liberal impurities.

And in the US, liberal is a very complicated word that, you know, it has a long history. And we try to unpack those histories in my latest book. But it's just this idea that the left, sort of broadly conceived, connected to liberals, broadly conceived, connected to the Democratic Party, broadly conceived. That there's some impurity that they bring into culture, that they bring into agribusiness, that they bring into science and all these other sorts of institutions. And so, purity culture in this really broad sense is about pushing out those elements. And so, when you think about the accusation that Hollywood is this liberal bastion. Part of, I mean, I would need to do interviews and would need to do sort of more direct kind of research.

But what I suspect is that the thing that is regarded as impure. is the vestiges of liberalism and the idea of this, you know, all things go, like liberals/slash the left, slash the Democrats. Have this reputation as being permissive about certainly gender representation and sort of sexual mores, and that shows up in all kinds of ways in trans conversations, right? And So they're regarded as being, and this is, it's not necessarily referring to any specific group of people, but like the idea of a liberal. Is that you can change your pronouns, you can do this or that, like there's no rules. And so that's regarded as being an impurity or like some kind of deviance or something, a deviance from. Traditional America, real America.

That's also why you see people like the trad wives phenomenon, where you've got these liberalizing influences, they're indoctrinating kids, they're indoctrinating women. Cast off their traditional biological roles. And so, Tradwife is about rejecting the impurity of liberalism and returning to a purity of an imagined conservatism. So That's my suspicion is that a lot of discourses around purity are about identifying those cultural elements said to be causing the impurity and then saying we're rejecting that and we're going back. We want to go back to the 1950s. You know, before the libs took hold, or whatever. Like, how does that line up with what you were seeing or what you have encountered? 

I think it's pretty much that, and I think it's also Yes, look at the world right now. I mean, my job is to I get paid and I have the time as part of my job to read the news, to think about the news. And even I'm like now with the Iran thing happening, that's horrible. That one I can't deal with. I I'm done. My plate is full. I have to compartmentalize. And that one I can't touch. And if that even happens to me who's like has the space and the time. There's so much happening. And I feel like it's also a return to easy answers that's happening. 

Yeah, well, right. I mean, and the idea, and this is hardly a new concept, that modernity has brought all kinds of social problems and we have to go back to a simpler time. People have always said that, right? I mean, not realizing that every simpler time was so much more complicated than gets represented. But so, yeah, I think. I think that there can be a deeply held conviction that like libs are responsible for cultural rot. That has been an ongoing and kind of growing Perspective among many people who aren't even necessarily conservative or Republican, but just it's become this position that a lot of people end up Taking. So I think that that's a powerful influence.

But then, yeah, you want to go back to a time that was simpler. You know, you want to go back to a time when Your behavior was more prescribed, that you knew what men versus women were supposed to be doing, where it wasn't so confusing. I mean, it could. Just be a backlash to how stressed out and overwhelmed people are. And then, without kind of having that understanding of history, that You know, things in the 1950s wasn't halcyon. It wasn't easy. Maybe some people's lives were a little easier, but by and large, that was not a great time.

To be a woman, to be a person of color, to be most people, you know, plus the fact that it just becomes then a trend online, people are really influenced by trends. So if the trend is to kind of move in this more Purity culture direction, it kind of has a recipe. There are a lot of things that would bring a lot of people to that. And how can you tell just by observing who's Committed in an ideological way to pushing out liberal influence. How many people just kind of like the aesthetic of the meme? And how many people are just overwhelmed and want some kind of answer that feels easy and graspable? That if we just. Get rid of porn, or we just get rid of sex, then maybe I will feel less anxious. So it's probably all of those things combined, and you can't really tease out which is which. But it speaks to the very weird moment that all of us find ourselves in. 

I just had a thought, like it really just occurred to me, so I haven't thought it out, but I'm interested in your opinion on it because what I just thought of was also people want to go back to a clear good and evil and away from the gray area. It is political, it's a tough topic, but if you look at everything in the discourse about Israel, where it's like both sides are the other ones are evil. And like, that doesn't mean that yours is Also, right. Two sides can be wrong. Two sides can do bad things. And everybody is so like, no, I have to be on the right side. And like. It isn't always that easy. And I feel like this is also a thing that falls into this whole easy answer thing. There needs to be a good person, there needs to be a bad person. And people are way more complicated than that. 

Then the world is more complicated than that, and history is more complicated than that. Politics is more, everything is more complicated than that. One thing I would say I mean, I focus on politics in my class, I focus on media, but in order to focus on those two things, especially in a U. S. context in the last couple of years. I also focus on the impact of overwhelm and stress on communication and on cognition. And one of the things that is really well established. In research, not just related to how people behave online, but what our brains do when we get stressed out. That essentially, so if you think of your brain, the frontal part of your brain, this is the prefrontal cortex, I'm pointing to my forehead. That's where all of our high-level decision-making takes place. That's where we're able to attune to other people's feelings and experiences. That's where we take perspective. That's where we weigh real threats against imagined threats. That's where we're able to self-soothe all of the things. That we would want people to be able to do, to interact with each other in society. That happens up here.

It's the most recently evolved part of our brain. It's a very sophisticated apparatus. You compare that with the, and I'm pointing to my brainstem on the back of my head, that's where your limbic system is. That's basically the lizard brain that is responsible for fight, flee, freeze. And what happens when We get overwhelmed because we're actually under physical threat or because we're inundated with information, because we're confused, because we're scared. Essentially, all of our processing moves from our prefrontal cortex down to our limbic brain. That now suddenly we're operating from this other part of our evolutionary kind of existence. And so it means that a lot of the sort of careful Reflection that we would normally be able to do, we don't have access to in the same kind of way.

And so when I am brokering difficult conversations in my classroom with students about politics, I want us to understand how our brains work because students need to be able to recognize when they're moving from a prefrontal front brain place to a downstairs brain place. Because once you go into a downstairs brain place, you're basically only capable of thinking in black and white. Survival, not survival, good, evil. That's what we have to keep ourselves safe. If millions and millions of people around the world, for all kinds of reasons, in all kinds of different conversations, if they find themselves in this Different sort of cognitive mode, discourse becomes impossible because that is not where gray area lives. And it doesn't mean that people aren't capable. It doesn't mean that they wouldn't be interested in having those conversations. It means that That skill set is maybe not accessible to us in the way that it would be under different conditions.

So if you think about Crushing anxiety, crushing catastrophe, just nothing but information and scary information from every direction. Why are we surprised? Number one, that conversations online often are not very good. And number two, that a lot of people for a lot of different issues in a lot of different directions. Are in a mode where who's good and who's bad is an easier place to go. When you think about it from that perspective, you can, and I think you should, have some compassion for why. People are often in this binary kind of place. It's because that is where their brains are, and their brains are there because things are so stressful and things are so scary. The reality of most situations is so much more complicated than this person is the devil and this person is 100% good. And so the conditions of our lives, the network conditions of our lives, really prevent us from being in a great place comfortably. 

That's also pretty interesting because I had this a couple of times now over the last month or year where conversations that would have ended in a fight online, but I didn't have them online. I had them in a bar talking to the person. And the result was we are still of different opinions and still have different conclusions. But it turned out like how much closer we actually were together, we agreed way more on the problem space. We didn't agree on the solutions and what would be the right way to solve everything. I wouldn't say everything is fixed now, but it was way easier to find points where we could agree with each other. 

And part of that is one of the ways that we kind of Self-soothe, or one of the ways that we down-regulate our nervous system is by attuning to another person. So that means that when you're, I mean, it doesn't always Work this way because sometimes people get really reactive around each other. Obviously, that's why violence happens. But if you're in a situation where you're able to actually connect with another person and see them, you know, engage with them. Pay attention to their reactions, expend some curiosity, then what that kind of does is it helps your brain stay in this frontal place.

Which doesn't mean you can't ultimately think that the person is terribly misguided and that you will never agree with them, you may never like them, but there's more opportunity in person. To find a way to kind of keep things a little bit simmered down, and our ability to be in a gray area space and to consider the different. causes and and the the various consequences that might happen. Certain situations are more conducive to that. And the Internet is not conducive to that in any way. You know, so if you have, especially if we're thinking about younger people, this is not just true of younger people, too, of course, but younger people spend an enormous amount of their time online or.

Kind of filtered through a device. They might be interacting in person, but they're also interacting in a sort of device space. And so those are spaces that are just more geared towards keeping your limbic brain activated. So, the conversations we need to be able to have that are hard and require everybody to kind of check their priors and Consider other perspectives and maybe allow for the possibility that you might be wrong, or at least that you might not know everything. That is not what the internet sets us up to be able to do. And our discourse is reflective of that. 

What I just thought of was this whole …, because I know the actual number is disputed because of when the study cutoff was and everything. But this whole thing about your prefrontal cortex only being developed in your twenties, late twenties, thirties, whenever. But at the same time, that's actually different from what happened before, where Yes, young people dominated pop culture, but they were always edited through television appearances, whatever. And now we see the unedited thoughts and discussions being dominated by people whose prefrontal cortex isn't developed yet, and now you say now you're saying like that is actually an important part to be making decisions, that that might even be the problem there. 

As an instructor, so I started teaching college in 2007. And my experience with college students then in the United States, you know, by and large, They had fun, and that was a carefree time in their lives. And, you know, they would get stressed out about certain things and breakups, and they worried about grades. So, it wasn't that college was this perfect experience. Some students, you know, had other kinds of financial challenges and other challenges. So, it wasn't 100% just Playing all the time. But as time has gone on, and I have continued teaching the same age of student, but the world has changed. The students that I teach now in 2025, and I talk to them about this: the level of stress, the level of anxiety, the level of just worry about the world. Yes, that has to do with the fact that the world is very complicated, but it's also that they never get a break from information. We can talk about the sort of, I don't do developmental psychology, so I'm less kind of.

I'm not really in the position to speak to that as an expert, but as someone who studies communication and who also just by virtue of being in rooms with them. I study undergraduates. I teach them. You know, I have to try to figure out what works for them. What worked for my students in 2007 is not necessarily going to work for them now. They're not necessarily in the same headspace. And so you can see in that kind of longitudinal way how conversation becomes increasingly difficult, and people figuring out where they belong in the world becomes increasingly difficult. Because there's no rest ever. People don't get to rest.

And when you are engaging online, often, especially, so I'm speaking to my college students in a US context. You know, when they're engaging online, they're all often doing it because they're trying to hustle, they're trying to find internships, they're trying to build a brand, they're doing things in this very They're positioning themselves in the marketplace. They're thinking of themselves in that way. There's no kind of consequence-free action. You're always performing. That requires a lot of. 

I think pretty important that like these things don't work anymore. I mean, this is going off topic now, but I see the same like when people talk about the discourse around AI in schools and like you would have cheated too if you had in your early twenties, you didn't know the value of learning yourself. trying to explain that to people that their brains also didn't work like they do do now. 

Well, and the other thing too is that my experience as an instructor Students have never been busier. And so you have these tools that allow them to multitask, sometimes in classes. They're going to take it. And that just contributes to or emphasizes the fact that we're talking about bandwidth issues. So anytime. I'm asked to talk about big cultural trends or challenges or weird things that are happening. It's important, I think, to look at the thing itself, the challenge itself. What is it that's actually being discussed? But it's really critical, I think, to also consider this holistic picture: that it isn't just that people are behaving in X, Y, or Z problematic way or strange way.

It's always against the backdrop of what the media environment is like, what the regulatory environment is like, and how we as human beings Interact with all of those things in better ways, sometimes, but often in worse ways. And so then the next question, usually, after considering, so here's this problematic thing, what do we do about it? What we do about it is complicated by the fact that what is contributing is all of it, all of it at once. So you can't take away the mental health conversation in all of this. Any more that you can take away the regulatory framework. How you would deal with a mental health crisis is different than how you would deal with a regulation crisis, especially if you're talking across the globe. So Everything, even talking about our problems, let alone how it is that people engage with those problems, everything is so much bigger and more complicated, I think, than we appreciate. And our brains are a really big part of that conversation that go sort of underappreciated, I think. 

Talking about brains is a good hang up to get back to evangelicals, I think. How do they manage to instill things in the minds of people that are exactly The opposite of what they propose to believe in, because let's take my migration. Jesus was clearly for migration if you believe what's in the Bible. He wanted to help the poor, like there was a prostitute with them. He was clearly something that now would be called a liberal in the US, and a very progressive one at that. So how can people read that and don't notice? 

Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, in the U. S. , this is pretty well reported that pastors around the country for years now have been dealing with the fact that a lot of their parishioners Will approach them after a sermon and say, like, why are you using these liberal talking points? And he's like, I was talking about Jesus. I was talking, I like, literally quoting from the Bible. I mean, and you saw some of this tension play out in the U. S. a couple of months ago with Doge, you know, going after Lutheran ministries and other. Christian organizations that were doing Jesus stuff in that they were, you know, servicing immigrants and helping people who, you know, who had migrated to this country.

They were totally doing Christian stuff. And yet they get attacked by these other kinds of Christians who say, I mean, even J. D. Vance, who is very publicly Catholic. Basically, saying you're doing Christianity wrong, or you're of the devil, basically. You're doing this liberal stuff, you're leftist, you're Marxist. When in reality, they're doing the stuff of Christianity. So that is a phenomenon that has been happening for quite some time in the United States. And on the surface, it seems really bizarre, because you're like, yeah, didn't you know that Jesus was totally cool with migrants? The way that we talk about it, my co-author and I, is we have this concept called demonologic. we have developed this idea of demonology, of describing the kind of underlying belief system in this Christianity that's not exactly Christian or it's not totally tethered to Christianity. Demonology is pointing vaguely to this sense of leftist or liberal threat. And it's not really referring to anyone in particular. And it's really nebulous and it's constantly shapeshifting. But it's very effective emotionally because you can point to whoever you designate as evil and like situate them in this cosmic drama frame. Emotionally satisfying.

It creates a kind of clarity, even if it is confusing for everybody else. And so, demonology is this guiding framework that drives a lot of behavior that looks Christian, that looks religious. But it's not actually focused on God or Jesus. It's focused on the liberal devil. So that's the framework that we're engaging with. But demonologic are those places where you see MAGA, for example, Making statements that seem really hypocritical, making statements that are really antithetical to what Jesus would say, for example. They proclaim themselves to be Christians. And then they do stuff that's really anti-Christian. And it looks like the words that we have typically to describe it, it's hypocrisy. Or there's it just is incoherent. That's the way that people try to respond. Those words kind of fail, though, to capture what actually is happening in terms of the belief structure that The reason that Lutheran ministries are doing something bad, it's because they can't be Christian because they're doing liberal stuff.

So, what they're attacking in their minds, it's not the Christianity. They're attacking the liberalism. So, you see that in other areas too, where it seems Trump will do something or MAGA will do something that seems really hypocritical. They'll hold one group of people to a different standard. You know, that, for example, MAGA is really protective of free speech. And the reason that Trump is going after Harvard University is because they infringed on the speech of Jewish students or otherwise there's not it conservatives are being censored on campus, and that's why you have to attack Harvard. At the same time, they can take really power, really strong steps against. Students who are supporting Palestine, right? And so they're very comfortable taking speech rights away from people who are using speech that they don't approve of. 

They are banning books, which has never been a sign of being on the right side of history. 

But well, there's that, but there's also they ban books, and it might look like that goes against free speech, but it does not. Because what they are banning are liberal ideas. And liberal ideas don't count as real American ideas. They're fundamentally problematic. So you can simultaneously ban books. Kick out students for writing pro-Palestine op-eds, you know, fire liberal professors. You can do all of those things and still maintain that you're protecting free speech because the right people's speech is being protected. That is not fully explainable by hypocrisy. That can only be explained by this other mechanism that explains what it is that's actually being targeted. And that's why. A concept like demonologic, I think, is useful when trying to contend with these really weird moments that otherwise are not very easily explained by our existing frameworks. 

Yes, I mean, since we last talked, we actually got a new government in Germany, with our new chancellor being part of the Christian Democratic Union. One of the first things that happened is that one of the high ranking government members from that party told the churches to stay out of politics, and they're going against church sanctuary. Which is weird. I I'm not very concise messaging. I I'd call it that. 

Yeah, I mean, so in so how strange is that in terms of the historical context in Germany? Like, is that a really out of the blue kind of, or seems like an of the blue sort of thing? 

Not really. It's actually a very neoliberal financially motivated party. The Chancellor worked at Blackrock before he became Chancellor. So and the party has always been very much conservative. And yeah, they also believe in God, but it was also very much about the financial system, capitalism. And it's not really surprising, but it's like it's still obviously weird. Like you are called the Christian Democratic Union, you can't chastise the church. That that that's not how 

That's well, we just live in a world right now where things don't seem to make a lot of sense and our existing frameworks don't fully account for the weirdness. I think that it's a call. To really rethink those frameworks and to figure out how we can better describe the weirdness. It's really hard to figure out what to do about weird stuff. And I'm speaking very broadly here. It's hard to figure out what to do about weird things, especially if we determine that they're harmful things. How do you do something about that if you can't even describe it with language? And that's the problem that, especially in the United States, trying, we think about politics here in terms of right versus left. It's different in other parts of the world, of course. But we have this two-party system. And it has, it cleaves onto the left and the right. And then that allows us to talk about polarization and the culture wars and all of these things that seem to be really stable. Even the designation between religious and secular, the binary seems to be true. But then you actually dive in and you look at it. The binary doesn't make any sense. The binary doesn't line up with what is actually happening. And yet, people often still use those same frameworks to try to talk about what's going on. And it just means that we're talking over, above, under, around the issues rather than contending fully with what is actually so weird in this moment. 

I think do you know Adrian Daub? Like he's actually a German professor, but he teaches comparative literature at Stanford and is It's very interesting because, of course, he sees the US discourse, has a very US perspective. But he also writes books and how it is in Germany. And one of his, I think it is his latest book, is like called Cancel Culture Transparent. because this whole culture was cancelled culture discourse and now woke, whatever the newest terms are, it's always at the same. It's like political correctness, it's always at the same. We brought that over to Germany and directly copied it We don't have a two-party system. It's way more splintered. And he wrote about how this doesn't make any sense. How you c it doesn't make sense in the US, and it makes even less sense in Germany, but it doesn't need to. 

I mean, that's where a lot of this stuff gets very interesting. I'm fascinated by how some of these discourses and some of these binaries move around the globe. The figure of the liberal devil or the leftist devil, that it has its own, it has origins in the United States for these very particular historical and media-related reasons, and should not end up in other parts of the world. And yet, it has. To my knowledge, there's not been comparative analyses of how it is that we sort of ended up here. But I think that needs to happen to best understand the kinds of dynamics that you're describing in the story and that. You know, just don't they sort of defy easy explanation. I think that explanation is in global comparative analysis of. How religion and politics and polarization have failed us, like the distinctions between religious versus not religious. Left versus right, whatever. Those things have failed us in explaining, and we need a better way of explaining it in our respective countries and then also globally as part of a broader conversation about transglobal communication. 

I think a lot of stuff needs to happen because if you look at the election period before the election even happened, like the new Chancellor, he took very much stuff out of the Trump playbook, even though he isn't a Trump. He is like this very like I said, he's from Black Rock. He's like this serious older businessman, elder statesman, like what he portrays himself like, which is very much not like Trump, who's like loud and brash and But at the same time, he did the same thing of no, I'm just gonna say things that are obviously not things I can accomplish. He promised the exact opposite the things of the things he knew he needed to do after the election, and it worked for him. So and Trump did the same. Like he knew he was lying and it works. Now we have that system here, even though he's a very different character, the same methods work 

Well, it's helpful, I think, to think about some of these dynamics in terms of Informational Darwinism. That's a framing that I'm using in a chapter I'm working on now, where our information ecosystem sort of selects for the fittest. Information and the fittest rhetorical modes. And people, human beings, were very good at doing things that have proven to be successful. Our networks also incentivize and make it more likely that those are the things that are rewarded. So it's this combination where the network is rewarding certain kinds of actions. Human beings are also choosing certain kinds of actions. And then what you end up with is really similar kinds of people in positions of power because they're able to harness and In some cases, weaponize information in similar ways because that's what works. 

I get why evangelicals in principle, like some things I get, like, yeah, you can jet around in a private jet and have a rock concert at your mega church. That's awesome, I get it. Who doesn't want to be celebrated like that? Fine. But what is the goal behind influencing everyday discourse like that? Because It's not like they really care about Christianity or they really care about the messaging. It's about getting the power, but the preachers they already have the power. They are not as far as I can tell, they aren't into politics. They don't go for the Presidency. They don't go for a career in the Republican Party or something like that. What is the plan? Why do what they do? 

Yeah, I mean, that's hard. Some people are just cynics, right? Some people have just figured out how do you commoditize, make money off of the information ecosystem. So a certain percentage of Preachers, a certain percentage of MAGA personalities, they don't believe it. They see an opportunity and they're opportunistic and they're smart enough to understand how the network works. In those cases, the motives are going to be much more straightforward. It's money, it's power, it's influence, it's whatever. And that's sort of less interesting to me because that just is people wanting to. Amass things for themselves and to enhance themselves in one way or the other.

Where it gets really interesting is where people are true believers, where there's a kind of There is a religiosity in the effort to convert society, but it isn't a religion that centers on cultivating love for God and Jesus. That kind of faith takes time, that takes engaging with the scripture, you know, that requires energy and effort. And it's slow and it's not flashy. It's certainly the attention economy doesn't care about that kind of faith. That's boring to the attention economy. Instead, it's a religiosity that is centered on hatred of the liberal devil. And when you look at the emergence, the power of the religious right in the United States. Ultimately, Satan is fast and God is slow. That's the difference. Satan is expedient. So if you're able to designate A certain group of people or behavior or things that are not quote unquote real America as the devil, that is the fastest shorthand to get people mobilized. And if you genuinely believe That liberalism, as this broad, vague concept, poses an existential threat. You want to try to convert. Therefore, you want to be in the comms field. You want to engage in You want to share the message. You want to share your faith. It's just not the kind of faith that people assume it is because it's about fighting the liberal devil, and basically that's it. And so when you think about politics, In that kind of way, you know, a lot of what you see out of MAGA, it isn't really policy that they're advocating for. It's fighting the liberal devil. 

the fascist principle of you have to have the Jews, whoever. It it it doesn't matter. Your system works because you're against something. You aren't for anything. You need to be against something to mobilize and concentrate power for yourself. 

Yeah, and if you're able to affix some degree of religiosity onto that, all the better, because religion inspires people. In a way that, for example, science does not, right? Like religion touches on people's identity, it goes down to their marrow, it's belief, it's 

You don't want your kids to go to hell. 

Yeah, well, I mean, and what's interesting is that, so evangelicals, part of what the big shift, one of the things that distinguishes evangelicals from fundamentalists, certainly in the 1950s. Or one of the things that allowed them to veer off and do their own thing. For fundamentalists, hell was a faraway place. Like hell was a place where Satan lived, and you had to keep yourself pure and clean and insulated. You don't, you know, you don't watch movies. You don't go dancing. You don't drink alcohol. You don't do those things. And that way, Satan's minions can't steal you away and bring you to hell, which is a faraway place. It's like a, it's, it's a place, and that's where Satan is. Evangelicals shifted how Satan was understood such that Satan wasn't just free range on earth. Earth was hell. Earth was hell. And the way that you would fight against that is to fight against what were regarded as liberal influences that could not be escaped.

It wasn't enough to just not go dancing or not drink alcohol or not go to the movies. Every single thing in society was already suffused with these liberal influences, which meant the devil was everywhere. Think about how powerful that is. As a motivating factor, like in terms of directional reasoning. And so then people who really have internalized that, there is nothing that is more compelling to act. That is going to compel someone to try to do something about these influences. So, if you can take that need to always be fighting, but then connect it to a powerful religious drive. That is, I mean, that is a profound thing to be able to do. And that was what evangelicals were able to do in the United States. 

I instantly had to think of this one clip that went viral, I think, multiple times, of one of these evangelical priests be like I see the devil in your eyes. And he said it with an intensity, like even I was like, What the f I get that he gets people to believe him. Like, I don't think he believes it, but I get how people believe this guy. I also like your term free range for the devil because I had to for the last two minutes, I was like the devil running around like a chicken. 

It's well, I, so Billy Graham, he's one of the was one of the most prominent evangelicals in the United States. He was sort of the guy that people would imagine in their heads when they thought about like a Christian in the United States. And when he would go around and he would give these like huge rallies, Trump actually attended several of those when he was a kid. And he would talk about sort of the threat of Satan. He was basically like, Satan is everywhere I go. So even Billy Graham. Emphasize that he was not protected from Satan just being able to like scuttle about and go every place and go into the things that you liked. Including education.

So, like, this also, all of these conversations dovetail into what's happening in the education space in the United States and just the idea of like liberal indoctrination. People may be using that word, that term, liberal indoctrination. They may not be explicitly talking about Satan. They may not think about Satan in that outright way. It's making the same argument, though. And that's where the religious influence gets really interesting and difficult to track. Where people using seemingly secular language to talk about the liberal threat, they're actually tapping into that same feeling of. Cosmic drama as people who are using the term Satan literally and explicitly. But it's the same argument with the same emotional intensity. And for a lot of people, they want to be on the right side of that line. 

I think you said a thing that them not thinking of it as Satan, because that reminds me of a clip I saw recently of a TikToker saying That he can spot YouTubers who were raced moment. And then he explained how he does it, which I didn't know because we don't really have moments here. That's not a thing we encounter. And I think it was pretty interesting. to see him explain the patterns that made him recognize it. Which leads me to the question, some of this purity discourse is part of general feminist discourse now, which doesn't follow the same logic based on studies and science. How do I spot the patterns of evangelical thoughts, evangelical doctrine, when there isn't the religious aspect being talked about? 

Yeah, it's a really good question. And that's something that we've been working on, my coauthor and I, over the last several months. And we've identified a couple of markers. That we think really characterize this as a rhetoric and as a belief system. And it's important to be able to recognize it. So you sort of know what you're dealing with. One of them is very powerful amalgamation. And so. Let me put it this way: it's a powerful disconnection from specific individuals and specific policies.

So, when you're looking at in the United States discourses around trans stuff, one of the really striking things that you notice is that in fights, in quote-unquote culture war fights around trans issues. People are almost never talking about actual trans people. Instead, they're talking about things like gender ideology or indoctrination in schools or these various things where you're like, who are you talking about? And then, so that's one marker where it's not actually talking about the people it says it's talking about. It's a really strange linguistic thing, but you can be having a discussion about something, and it's not actually about that. They're not talking about that at all. Individual people are harmed by it because they're then not allowed to live their lives in the ways that make sense to them or that they should have a right to do. So people, individual people get hurt, but discursively, nobody is talking about individuals.

It's just like broadly. You don't want boys playing girls' sports, right? But it isn't really localized, it's not talking about a specific thing. So that's one marker where you've got this. Disconnection from specificity. The other marker is it's this lumping together of a whole host of traits. So when people talk about liberals or even, let's stay on the trans issue. The trans issue is actually touching up against a million different other sorts of liberal things, not only attitudes towards gender. You know, but it also in the US, it rolls into discourses around critical race theory or it maps onto other kinds of things that are regarded as being liberal. And so there's a part of speech. In English, it's Schenectady. I have no idea what that equivalent would be in German, but it basically is: it's a part standing in for the whole. So if someone were to refer to a car as wheels, It's that, or you refer to a crown and you're actually talking about the monarchy. So it's using a specific thing to describe the totality of the thing. 

Trans people are just a symbol for all that's wrong with 

Yes, you mentioned one trans thing and you basically light up the entire framework of everything that has ever been described as liberal. So now suddenly the enemy is like the biggest enemy you could imagine when you actually were supposedly talking about one kind of thing. So that Schenectady, again, I don't know what that translation would be, but. It's doing this weird thing where one or one annoying leftist on Twitter represents every leftist that ever existed, right? So it's that. It's like the individual thing or a specific thing becomes everything. So that's one of the markers, or the second marker. The third marker is what I described around demonologic, where there's different standards. Given to liberals that are given to other groups of people. So if a liberal does it, it's inherently bad. And if the same exact thing is done by a quote unquote real American, then it's fine. So, Trump can commit all the crimes that he wants.

And like everybody shrugs, it's okay. But you do you have a liberal, someone designated as a liberal, do the same thing, and blamo, you know, that's like the biggest scandal that ever existed. So It's all those three things. They typically operate together, but those are the markers for us that allows us to differentiate. Well, what makes demonology different than Just not liking someone or thinking someone is terrible. There's some very weird logical things that you can look for once you know you're dealing with that. Then you can kind of say, oh God, I'm kind of dealing with religion right now. It's like religion, not in a traditional way, and it's not about God, and it's not about Jesus, and it's not about the Bible. But it's about the devil. And once you understand that you're dealing with some kind of religious experience, it just might even be easier to manage your expectations. You are never going to argue someone out of their religious belief. And so that is not where, that's not where you put your energy. Like, where else do you put your energy? So, figuring out what the, you know, what the rhetorical markers were was, again, something we worked really hard on. But in all of these cases, those are the things that you see. 

One line that goes right through every single aspect, even the trans issue, is a misogyny, because They never talk about trans men. Never. They it's always it's just trans women who are a problem. And with porn, it's like women deciding to do something, having power over their own sexuality. And it's always women. And I get that misogyny has always or for a long time been part of culture. It's woven into every aspect, and not just that's one and we also do others, but no, threat wise, everything is focused on women. 

Yeah, it's interesting. And in this book that we're, the follow-up book that we're working on, we're really focusing on demonological masculinity as being a big driver of this. And it gets Tethered to also trolling rhetoric. So basically, the way that you prove that you're a man is that you fight the libs constantly. But what that does, in a sort of ironic way, is it makes Demonological masculinity really fundamentally dependent on liberals. Like, you can't exist as a man if there isn't a liberal, and that ends up. 

That's why they're so mad about Bluesky. All their talking points are based on owning the lips, and now the lips aren't there, and that's that's bad. 

Right. I mean, so identity is predicated on enemies, the particular kind of enemy, and without that enemy, you don't really exist. And so, what that does, the kind of masculinist displays that you see, it would be easy to Call it toxic masculinity, but I think that the problem and the interesting conversation is not around the ways that it's toxic, it's around the ways that it's not grounded in masculinity. That it's grounded in something else. It's grounded in fighting liberals, and that's all. And so the discussion of, well, this is so, this is all just sort of masculine stuff, like, yeah, that's how it's expressing itself. But what is it actually grounded in? And if that answer is nothing, then what the hell kind of masculinity is it? And those are the kinds of questions I think we really, again, need to challenge. It looks like masculinity. But it might be doing something that we haven't really contended with. And that is what I advocate we start doing. 

That seems smart because so much of the discourse around Android hate and these people is like Wait, now it's manly to not talk to women and not be interested in women. What? The ha the I thought the whole point was to fuck the women, and and but now even that is It doesn't make any sense, but yeah. 

We're dealing with a different logical paradigm than what we've dealt with before. And the way that we've kind of been conceptualizing this masculinity issue is Rather than thinking of it as being an expression of dominance or power, you know, the way that we look at it is that it's actually. It's a masculinity of being cucked by your own obsessions with liberals. 

Yes, yes, yep, no, no, ye yes, ye ye yes. 

You know, and when you find it, like. 

You have to use these terms. Like there is no other terms left. But yeah, you need the enemy. And also if the guys don't talk to women, they don't get women, which means they are lonely. They need to listen to Andrew Tate more. 

We live in a very strange world, but it mostly, I mean, all of that is just to say we have to start talking about these issues in different kinds of ways, and we have to stop taking for granted that Things that look Christian actually are in the ways we understand it, or that things that look like masculinity is actually about masculinity in the way we understand it. That we lose our way when we try to use frameworks that are just not. Accurately describing what is happening on the ground. So we need new frameworks. That's the bottom line. 

I feel we're going to have to talk again when the new book comes out. 

I will be very, very happy to do that. And also, you know, all of this stuff I'm really interested in talking about all the time. So, you know, anytime, I'm around. 

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Wordpress co-founder Matt Mullenweg has been under fire recently. And while the drama is messy, petty and also kind of entertaining, it also highlights how we, as a society, need to find a way to take better care of our digital infrastructure. Tools that our society depends on are more and more of a digital nature. And yet they are treated differently than roads or the water mains.

I talked to tante to think of new ideas and how we could build a future where software that benefits democracy can be governed in a way that guarantees the level of maintenance, care and user involvement that it deserves.

Book recommendation: Deb Chachra: »How Infrastructure Works - Inside the Systems That Shape Our World«

(The transcript has been generated using Macwhisper and might contain errors.)

Hagen: Hi and welcome to my new podcast. Like I said in the announcement this will not be a regular occurrence and only happen if there's a topic I feel the desire to talk about to gather new ideas for things that I feel like are under explained or concepts where I want to learn more about them. So that's also why it's a podcast and not just a blog post even though this podcast is meant as an extension of my blog because sometimes my own ideas just aren't enough so I decided to just talk to people who I think can help me to figure out new ways to think about problems I'm seeing and for the first episode I chose to talk about this whole WordPress situation but not really.

If you don't know what I'm talking about we will explain it in the episode it's just a symptom of a bigger problem we have where digital infrastructure isn't maintained the same way public infrastructure is usually maintained in the meat space but i think that could be a problem and i don't want to sound dramatic but i actually think it could be a problem for democracy itself so i feel the urgent need to figure out new ways how we could govern the internet or govern big, important online infrastructure in a way that makes it impossible or at least very unlikely that something like this whole WordPress thing happens in the future. And for that, I decided to talk to tante, who you may know as someone who has a lot of thoughts about exactly these things. But if you don't know him, let him introduce himself. Both of our blogs are on WordPress and how long has your WordPress instance been running?

tante: I used to say a jackasss with a Twitter account, but I no longer use that fascist service. so I'm just a jackass now, I guess. No, I am an independent writer and do a lot of writing and thinking about open source as well as other techno-social topics, so to speak. I checked that a few days, no, weeks ago by now. I think it started 2012.

Hagen: So, it's been running for a decade now, or over a decade now, and I have the feeling, like over the last decade, WordPress has become the default platform if you want to host a website or run a blog on the internet, if you want to self-host at least.

tante: yeah and if you're not a nerd like i mean some some very tech oriented people they have all kinds of different types of technologies that they want to use and like and and they have their advantages but especially if you're not super tech savvy and you just want a thing that does the thing you want a box that you can type into and it's supposed to generate a website for you without much digging around wordpress is definitely the go-to because it runs on every cheap space that you can rent like pay like two bucks a month and you have a web server that can run wordpress decently. Yeah. Yeah, it is all the like the naked WordPress installation is passable, but it's okay. But there are so many themes that you can get for free. There are so many plugins for everything you might want to do. And also, most of them are free or have a free version that will apply to most people. This infrastructure that you just hook into by just choosing WordPress. All this code and functionality and visual that are available to you at the click of a button.

I mean, you also don't need to understand anything. You just click add plugin, you search for a thing, and then it gives you plugins. You click one, it does the thing, you're done. The reason for WordPress is not that it's such a great tool and the editor is so nice or the code is so great or efficient or whatever. No. A, it runs on every cheap VPS, and it has this huge ecosystem that everyone can just use.

Hagen: I think that's a huge thing actually because I'm one of those nerds who liked dicking around. So I switched CMSs like other people change their underwear and I never blocked. And then I decided, no, I should actually start writing again, properly writing. And then I installed WordPress because it just works. It really just does. It runs. You don't have to do anything about it. It updates itself.

And I think that's something I've been currently running into because things happened and I did the radical move to switch away from WordPress. And I think you're still thinking about it. WordPress is run by something that's pretty common in the open source space, like this whole benevolent dictator for life role. In this case, it's Matt Mullenweg. And he turned out to be not so benevolent. I think that's a nice way of putting it.

tante: I'd say emotionally unstable.

But the interesting thing is not that WordPress is run by one guy who's in charge. I think the interesting thing is that for the longest time, people, either due to laziness or because it was convenient, ignored that because it wasn't framed as such. Like there are, the Linux kernel is run by Linus Torvalds. What Linus says is the kernel. Everyone knows that. It's not hidden. And some other projects work this way as well. They have like the guy in charge. It's always a guy. Like I've never seen a project like that run by a woman in this shape or form.

Hagen: I mean, the current example would be Mastodon, which is also one guy.
tante: Like they exist.

tante: It's run by a dude, yeah. And there's many, many projects, but WordPress presented itself differently. There's the WordPress Foundation, and there's also many open source projects that run like that, where there's a legal entity, often a foundation, or in the U.S. these public benefit structures that you can set up, or in Germany, an eingetragener Verein, like these instances that allow you to not pay taxes, and that allow you to build like democratic structures or whatever structures, government structures to manage this project that don't depend on one person's will. And WordPress kind of presented itself as such. Like there was the WordPress foundation. It still is. Like there is the WordPress foundation that owns WordPress.org, we thought, where you download all the plugins, all the themes, the source code.

And it says the foundation kind of manages the development of the open source project. So it's in their hands. And Matt Mullenwick, the founder of WordPress or one of the founders of WordPress, also has a company that's called Automatic that runs WordPress.com where you can pay money to host your WordPress for you.

Hagen: Which seems like a reasonable setup in the first place. Like you need money to develop something like WordPress and not everyone wants to run their own servers. So just buy it from them and they can run it for you and you can just write. Sounds like a reasonable idea in the first place.

tante: Totally. I mean, the interesting thing is that there's this reasonable setup. I can host my stuff myself, or I can just pay Matt Mullenweg's company and have this good feeling of not only do I get my shit hosted and professionally run, but I'm also kind of investing in the open source project because automatic also funds a lot of people who work on the open source project it sounded like a win-win and i think everybody felt like that like that was the setup and nobody really looked closely at what was going on i mean it wasn't hidden but no one because that was the gut feeling and everything worked until like a few few weeks ago by now where people realized that this setup is is more like it looks good but that's not the facts ...

Hagen: Exactly, it's not the facts because it turned out like Matt Mullenweg now claims he personally owns the WordPress.org domain, so he claims that isn't part of the foundation. There are some disputing facts in what has been registered at which point, and it turns out that the whole board of the foundation is under his control so they aren't independent from each other they don't vote like wordpress the foundation is exactly the same as automatic it's it is matt malnweck at this point and he decided to start some beef with some other people in the community and that went so far that he took over some plugins like just removed the owners from them and said they are mine now we are in control now which has sometimes huge security implications for customers because huge huge businesses run on wordpress who depend on the thing being consistent and transparent and not just arbitrary they really depend on things being predictable

tante: Yeah, I think it is relevant a bit to go into the details, not like the full turn by turn of everything, how things went down, but like, okay, he has beef with his other hosting company, WP Engine, who also offers you pay them and they host your WordPress, like so many other companies. Like there's a bunch of them, but WP Engine is very big. he complained that they don't invest enough into the open source project, which I think is probably fair. I think they could invest more given the money they make, but whatever. That's one conversation. It's beef between two corporations who gives a shit, whatever. But what he then took is when you said he took over plugins. Yes, those were plugins that WP Engine, the company that he said doesn't invest enough in the open source project, developed as open source projects. Like people WP Engine employed develop these very core WordPress plugins that many, many installations use as open source tools on the WordPress.org repository, like in the way that you're supposed to do things.

So the thing that he complains they're not doing enough, when they do it, he takes it away from them. Which is a really weird move that goes beyond just okay. I'm taking over our name or whatever but like it shows how inconsistent and how unstable his behavior is and you

Hagen: Yeah, there were important plugins, security-relevant plugins that people depended on, And then it's more out of control where if you wanted to develop or contribute to WordPress as a volunteer, like working for free on WordPress, you had to say, no, I'm not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, shape or form, which many of the contributors couldn't do because most of them are developers for a living. They develop for WordPress for free, but they also work for clients who might be hosted on WP Engine. So it all felt a bit like the whole joke that happened at one point where the artist Anish Kapoor got exclusive rights to Vantablack, this one very, very black color. And he got the exclusive usage rights for art. and then Stuart Hicks, I think his name, created the Pink is Pink and said, everybody can use it, it's fine, unless you're Anish Kapoor or affiliated with Anish Kapoor, which was a joke because it's a ridiculous thing to say. That was never meant to be taken seriously. And Matt Malnweck just did it like he had a tantrum in kindergarten.

tante: And the interesting thing is that Matt Mullenweg didn't do that as the CEO of Automattic. He did that as the foundation. Like the platform that like webpress.org is supposed to be where the foundation does their thing. It's where the foundation's bylaws lie and where their rules are and all these things that are relevant for what the foundation wants to do. He changed it on the foundation website. He didn't change it on like you could as a business person, you could say, OK, we're here at Automatic. And if you also work with WP Engine, we don't want to want to do business with you. That's fine. Like you also host on WP Engine. You can't buy more hosting space on our website, whatever. That's not what he did. And I think there's distinction between automatic where you think, okay, you're a private business. Do whatever the fuck you want. And like the foundation that so many people on this planet like kind of trusted. It's like they use, I mean, many people use WordPress without knowing they use WordPress. They're just happy that they have a thing where they can type it to a website and it appears. But like people who make those decisions for them, like the agencies or developers who set those things up, like they trust in WordPress because they thought there's this entity that covers the project and it can't die, it can't go away. There's processes of how things work. There are rules that govern how things work. And now you see that this one guy who has a company can just put on a different hat. Now he's the foundation. And now he says, yeah, you're fucked now, by the way. That's what distinguishes it from, for example, Elon Musk, who also is an unstable white dude. But there you know, like, yeah, it's his company, whatever. Do your thing. Ruin Twitter.

Hagen: Yeah, we knew Twitter was fucked the moment he bought it.Like, it was clear from the beginning that this was going to happen the way it did.

tante: Everyone knew, okay, Twitter is a company. He bought the company. Now it's his toy, and he can break it if he wants to. But the difference in WordPress is that there was supposedly this thing that is bigger than the guy that WordPress could survive whatever Matt Mullenwick did. And now people realize, oh, he has his fingers basically everywhere. So if he wants to kill this thing, he can't.

Hagen: That led to a lot of, I think, understandable outcry. I was one of the people who participated in the outcry, and then I decided, you know, I can't support this behavior, and it's not good for independent web publishing for one platform to have this amount of power. And then I tried switching away from WordPress, and that is, on one side, it is pretty easy because WordPress is so big and powerful that every other CMS out there basically has an export tool. It is very easy to get your data out of WordPress and to get it into another CMS should you choose to leave. The problem is that over the last decade, two decades, the ecosystem of WordPress became so powerful and so influential that basically no other CMS seems to have survived that can compete on the feature set even a little bit. Like I tried a couple of things, like a couple of static site generators like Kirby, but now I switched to Ghost, which seems to be the other, not big, but bigger option. They are very focused on not doing traditional websites. They are very focused on blogging and newsletters with membership integrations and things like that.

tante: And they don't have comments, for example.

Hagen: No, they have comments for members. Like, if you are a member of the page, you get comments.

tante: Yeah, but if you want to host your own, you can't, Unless you have a third party that hosts it for you, and it's a whole different problem.

Hagen: Exactly. There are a lot of, like, you could implement Disqus comments. TalkYard is another option. You could self-host a TalkYard instance. I looked at it and decided, comments aren't that important, are they? That was basically my, because, yeah, no, I'm not going to do all of that. Write me an email. Don't write me an email. Just won't happen. Let's be honest. And this very podcast here will be hosted on Ghost because I decided to integrate it with my blog.

And it works as in it's possible to generate a podcast-compatible RSS feed. It's just not meant for this. Like, the MP3 length tag will be broken. No podcast client cares, but it technically is a broken feed. The audio will be pasted into the field that is usually reserved for the Facebook excerpt. It is very hacky, very broken. And for WordPress, there were many, many plugins. There were commercial plugins to host your podcast. There are projects like Podlove that allow you to host your podcast very, very easily. You don't have to touch any code at any point. It's just you install a plugin and it tells you what to do and then it's done. And even Ghost, the other option that is used by commercial entities that is used for professional publishing, like 404 Media, for example, publishes via Ghost. It just can't do that. And that's also a company who do their own hosting who have an income. like ghost is also a company like very similar structure with the commercial entity and the non-profit entity like wordpress and it just can't match it like and for me i just have a blog and and this podcast that's easy but i think you for instance have a multi-site wordpress installation is what you said is there any way for you to get out of wordpress at this point

tante: I mean, I could host like four versions, but if I were bigger and had like many active WordPress websites, I would at least have to like multiply the effort. Like I would have to say, okay, no, I'm hosting ghost or Drupal or whatever a few times. So I have to keep them all up to date and have all this code running extra that I need to need to take care of. It's harder, but I think that the multi-site thing isn't that much of a killer. But whenever I looked at alternatives, I realized, okay, it's a lot harder to run.

Like WordPress is, here's a bunch of PHP files, unzip the thing and drop it into your web server. And now it's done. It works. Like if you want to run Ghost, you have to run a Docker container. And if you run it without Docker, nothing works. It's broken.

Hagen: No, that's fine. I actually have to say I'm not running it through Docker because I hate Docker with all of my heart, I don't want to touch Docker.

tante: But , it's a technicality. Like I don't want to get too deep in the depth. but it's a lot more complex to run.

Hagen: And it's heavy on the system. I see the RAM demands. It's way worse than WordPress when it comes to efficiency. Like you need beefier hardware to run it.

tante: Yeah, I mean, hey, Ghost is, it's built for a different thing. I think it does that thing well. It's not a bad CMS at all. It works well, especially if you just want to run like a professional newsletter with for-pay stuff and whatever. I just pay Ghost to run it and it's fine. And I know I could export the thing and run it myself and things went badly but for many people that they chose wordpress exactly because they didn't have to do that because it was like okay i have this little i don't know you have a little football club or like just a bunch of friends who dick around with i don't know board games and you have a website and it's a thing blah blah you don't want to pay a lot of money and deal you just want a thing and drop it there and the web space is maybe even free because you don't need a lot of it, and you can do all the things you need to do. And that was a huge benefit for the very small variant. But you could also host WordPress as a very big and highly scalable thing. People probably know Ars Technica, which runs on WordPress. This is a website that gets more than a few hits every second. They had to think about how to run it, but they run it through WordPress, and it works well.

Hagen: Vox Media is moving all of their properties to WordPress. They're using WordPress.com, like the commercial instance, but Vox Media is completely switching to WordPress from their own CMS because they say it's not worth it to maintain your own CMS.

tante: It absolutely isn't like there's so many great cms options but like if you have a staff of professional developers and designers who can do your thing like your vox media whatever they have a tag team. You can pick from a whole bunch of CMS versions and CMS solutions that have different properties and there's great stuff from like the, okay, here's just building blocks to build your own thing to add. This is basically done. You just slap a theme on it. It's all there. I think WordPress had this very specific niche of for people who don't have like that staff. Browse through the free themes. Then you realize, okay, they're not fully there, but then you pay like a hundred bucks then you have a very well-looking theme that is greatly integrated it also just asks you okay here's your social media thingies enter them the ones you have and it gets the icons and it looks all very professional like what wordpress i think brought was every website you build with wordpress unless you start really messing around with it looks very professional or can look very professional with very very little work that was great for many people who don't know how to design a website. Like the navigation is probably still fucked because they have no idea how to set that up reasonably. But the website looks good. Like it was easy to get to a point where you could, you have this thing, it looks nice, and then you have new, I don't know, demands. You want to have a calendar on your website for events that your association hosts or whatever. And it's one plugin. You click it in, now you have a calendar view, and it does the thing. And it has more features than you probably need because it can also do ticketing and whatever. It had this large infrastructure that was so easy accessible. But that all rested on the trust in the foundation and the fact that everyone believed, okay, WordPress.org is where all the plugins live, and I could get it from there, and they're open source, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But that's really what Matt Malamook's actions shown to not to be true. At some point, he blocked people from WP Engine to access the website. Actually, his legal argument at some point to block people was, this is my website and I get to decide. Like, they can publish their shit wherever.

This is my website and I decide what goes. Like, as a person, it's mine. It's not the foundation. He never said, I do that as the director of the foundation. that wordpress.org is mine brackets matt malewick's website there are like a few hacks where people change like have user scripts whenever you go to wordpress.org it inserts a big matt's website on the top because that's what it is it's one dude who can just decide to change things and especially for if you just have a website that runs on wordpress that doesn't need to concern you too much you have your thing it works you probably don't even know what that this thing kind of affects you. But if you are like a professional, like you have an agency that builds websites for businesses and whoever, and now you no longer can trust the platform that you built your career on and built your business on, you cannot trust that the plugins and building blocks you need will be there or that you will still be able to access it. If you're a dick on Twitter to Matt Mullenwick, who still uses that, he might just block you. You don't know. Could be. It's reasonable. Like he, He blocked all kinds of people like the WordPress Foundation had like a Slack where all the people who built open source plugins could get access and they talked about it and like overarching projects were in there as well. Like, for example, the accessibility group for WordPress, like developers who try to make WordPress more accessible. They met there and organized there. And whenever, like in Slack, when these things, when these decisions became public, people asked Matt, like, what the fuck is going on? What does this box even mean? And whenever you criticize him, he just kick you out of the Slack. Like it's all just his toy. And I think this isn't just bad for like WordPress as a thing, which, yeah, trust in that infrastructure is really shaken by the people who know that this infrastructure is what holds estimates, say, 40% of the web together. But I think it's also it shows a larger problem with with open source projects that often forget that they are organizations and that need governance and that too often like to Rest on like a strong guy like the founder or whoever who gets to decide what's going on And yeah, if that person is nice, that's great. But when your king gets mad things get bad Oh that rhymed cool you

Hagen: And I think that's the reason why I wanted to have this talk in the first place because it raises a lot of questions of where to go from here. Because I think we laid out pretty well why WordPress isn't just a CMS. It's basically infrastructure at this point. Because the whole web ecosystem for indie publishing, if you don't want to pay your own developers, is just built around WordPress. This is the one you want to have if you don't want to tinker, if you just want something that works and can work in every direction that you want, from a portfolio to a blog to a podcast. doesn't matter wordpress can do it and we just don't have an alternative to go from here so what does have to happen for us to protect things like this infrastructure i mean you also mentioned linux and we are all like yeah linus torvalds just decides and to be fair most times it has gone well more or less linux works i mean there's a reason why basically every web server runs on it but it doesn't have to be this way it can be way more fucked up than it is like i know there are a lot of problems there as well but how do we protect essential infrastructure i mean just imagine something like this would happen with wikipedia which is also has been one guy jimmy wales's face now is a foundation and it seems to work more or less pretty well and every country is a bit different but think about these huge open source projects that we have like that large chunks of the internet and with us all moving to the internet like large chunks of human civilization run on and then it comes down to one dude how do we fix this

tante: Well, I mean, even for WordPress, people are trying to work on things. Like there was a fork a few years ago called ClassicPress. They didn't like the new editor that WordPress introduced, so they kind of stuck with the old one, but it never really gained any traction. But there's now a project called AspirePress. And what they're trying to do is not just fork the WordPress code, like the PHP for the WordPress software. They're trying to A, build governance infrastructure, like how can this project be run democratically and reliably, and B, to kind of replace WordPress.org. like build a plugin, themes, blah, blah, blah, infrastructure that is managed by a community where not one person has all the power, where there's like transparency. But it's a long time. It takes a long time to set that stuff up, not just because of the programming and the technical challenges, but also like, okay, what kind of organizational structure do you want? Which juristic region do you want to put it in? What's the right legal shape it should take? It takes a long time because these people also all have to work. Like they do that in their free time because they need to pay rent and all this eat and all those annoying things. But so there is movement to try to transform WordPress or whatever WordPress is now and take it away from Matt Mullenwick's hands. Because forking just code is easy, but that will not get anyone to change their behavior or give people an actual out.

Hagen: I think this is one of the important things, like just install a fork. Who cares? But a large chunk of the appeal of WordPress is the centralized infrastructure to some point, where all the plugins are at this one point. Like, it's easy to update because you can just point your update mechanisms at this one source of the true information to get the updates. You can just go through WordPress.org. So I think we need what you explained, that people are working on an alternative to WordPress.org, but I think it has to happen. There has to be this one central location where everyone agrees this is the source of our plugins and the source where we will do the development and it can't splinter away. That is the main problem that I see currently.

tante: Yeah, but I think that it's important to build these more robust structures for a bunch of reasons like a because mitmahal wik is a dick but also like what what program is called the bus factor like if your project is run by one guy and when that guy is run over by a bus the project is dead that's not smart especially if it's a core project that so many other people or other projects depend on so you want to spread like the the responsibility uh a bit but also you want to have checks and balances you want like the the reason we built a democratic systems the way we do is because we don't want to have one person who has all the power because power corrupts and that's just not a good situation to be in on the other hand like i think people were very comfortable with the setup even though i mean all the details were public people believed wordpress.org was owned by the foundation but in general people were happy with that setup because matt malwick did put a lot of money into the open source project like he paid for a lot of shit he paid for a lot of developers who work on the thing. He did a lot of outreach and advertising for WordPress. Like, it's not like he didn't do anything. He put a lot of his basically personal money behind the project.

Now, if you set up a different structure that goes away, you no longer have that. And will people who used to use WordPress for free, who didn't pay anything except for maybe like their neighbor's daughter who set up the WordPress for them a few bucks, will they start like subscribing to a foundation or donating to a foundation will that generate the kind of money you need to keep a project of that size going and that's that's really hard to say and i'm not sure if we as digital citizens if we want to call it that like or people who also live in the digital world if we do have the infrastructures to set those things up robustly like probably if it if if a a good alternative to wordpress.org forms they will get some buy-in and i think they will survive and they will maybe even thrive depending on what matt mullenwick does but how many of those foundations can we actively support given how people how donation structures work how much money people have to give like we have the same problem with firefox which is like the only free browser that is not actively run by an no longer true firefox also bought an advertising company and is now itself an advertising company but like if you don't want to run google's code that is optimized to what google wants if you want to have an alternative that's currently firefox it's basically the only other relevant rendering engine i mean there's whatever apple is doing but that's basically just trying to hold the web back so it doesn't work properly so they can sell more iPhones.

But Firefox is in the same position. There's a company that does weird shit, spends money in weird ways that gets a lot of outrage in the community, like what the fuck are you even doing? But do we really have any infrastructure that could take over? That could say, okay, we're going to fork Firefox and now continue to develop a browser that more aligns with what people want? I don't see that. And I think that that is the bigger question we have right now, saying, okay, we have all these critical infrastructures that we rely on, and browser is one thing, operating system is another thing, and then tools like publication tools, and all these different small tools that people kind of need and want, whatever, and who can carry that? Who can be like this scaffolding that holds that up? And currently, what we're hoping that people who do that out of of love because they like running the thing do that, but maybe they get, at some point they get their family and kids and their free time kind of melts away or they get older, which is a problem with a lot of the open source projects where a lot of the people working on it are, their hair is gray.

Hagen: and they have to compete with commercial offerings. Like, the rapid development that happens if you can pay people to work on it will outpace it. And at some point, the software that is updated and updated and updated because people are paid to work on it will be, by definition, so much better than the free alternative that people only can work on in their free time that you basically don't have a choice to not use the commercial offering anymore. because it's so far ahead.

tante: the choice, but you pay for it. I run Linux on all my machines and yes, sometimes tools don't work. That's the price I have to pay. And that's annoying. But I think that it's very easy to ask for foundations and form the project as an entity. And many projects do that. Even Mastodon that we mentioned earlier, they have this gig, GmbH, this public benefit company in Germany than like a US non-profit that you can donate to and whatever.

Like there's structures that could survive, like the person who started the project going away or no longer caring about it or no longer being able to run it, whatever. But the question really is, does that scale and how far does that scale? Like if you gave five bucks to every open source project that affects you, that you rely on in some shape or form, you probably wouldn't eat. That's just how things work. So how can we build better infrastructures that can last and who can maybe, where can we get the funds for it? And I think that's an unsolved problem and it works for bigger things like Linux gets funded because there's corporate donors that give a lot of money and like there's a lot of money slashing around to do that because corporations have a large interest in keeping Linux free and open and running and whatever.

Hagen: At the same time, like the thing that WordPress.com did, like they developed WordPress. But of course, the incentives are not the same that we want because we are like small, independent web publishers who might not even do it for money just because we want to. We love the freedom to publish ourselves. Like I make my money as a journalist, but of course, that has to go through an editorial process. that's different than I can publish my thoughts on my domain, on my server, which is all mine, that is owned by myself. But I will not make money for any of these companies. Their development priorities will never be, let's support the indie publishers that do it for fun, for the love of the game. So there will always be different incentives.

tante: Yeah, the question is how do we align these incentives and how do we also spread like, there is money sloshing around in the open source space, but where does it go and where is it invested in? Like currently, I mean, not for long, but currently Mozilla has a lot of money and they invested in basically AI right now and buying advertising companies, which is not what I'd want them to do, but okay, like they are a corporation, whatever.

Hagen: And they have a real reason to be afraid that the money is going to go away because all of the money they have is because google pays them to be the exclusive search engine and it's pretty clear that google will not be allowed by law to continue that practice which is as a whole i think a good thing but also a problem like okay apple gets 20 billion dollars a year from google for doing nothing but they don't need the 20 billion dollars a year mozilla will not be able to survive the

tante: Exactly. I totally understand that they need to find other ways to fund themselves. And that is the challenge. I think they made a few bad bets, but I understand their struggle. The struggle is real and the danger is very real.
Hagen: way it did before without the Google money. So they need to find other revenue sources.And they're not the only, like they're very big and very visible player in that space. But so many projects have similar problems. And there are, of course, initiatives that try to address that. Germany has the sovereign tech fund, but that's a bit different. You can apply for a grant there, but you don't get like continuous funding for basically forever. You can't be in there and now you know that you will be able to fund developers for the foreseeable future or whatever. Most of these things are project-based. You say, we want to develop this thing or we want to do this security audit. It's a project. It has a time frame.

It has an effort that needs to go into it. Then you get the funds for it. The EU has projects for that as well. There's a lot of stuff where you can apply for grants, but I think for many, especially for these critical infrastructure components, I think that's not enough. I think that's not how you run these projects. Because if you say you have an open source project, and the open source project has 10 features that you have to maintain, that is a lot of work. It's annoying. People write bug reports. They are sometimes dumb, sometimes smart. Sometimes you have to put a lot of work of fixing them. Now you can apply for a project grant. You say, hey, I'm going to develop these two extra features, and I need, I don't know, 100,000 bucks to do it, and it's going to take two years. Now you're paid for two years. Great. When the two years are done, you have no funding, but you have 12 features to maintain now. Like the load grows by applying for these grants. Like your task gets bigger, but the money doesn't continuously come.

Hagen: Yeah, and these infrastructure tools will never be done.

tante: No.

Hagen: Like, we need new web technologies to be implemented. I mean, remember the time when websites needed to become responsive, which was a good thing as a whole, but it took a whole lot of amount of work to make every website responsive. And this will continue forever.

tante: Yeah, and there are security updates, and you want, like, people's needs change. And that's not a bad thing. good that things are fluent that people can work on things that people can experiment with things but i don't know if we currently have good infrastructures that can support those projects in the long term and i think this would be for example something where governments could fit in and i'm not saying the government should we should have a government browser that's not the point but governments have the funds to set these things up to have like okay we you set up an agency that that basically takes over certain, that takes over, but like funds certain things indefinitely or whatever. Like there are ideas how you could set these things up, but they cost money and it's very hard to legitimize a lot of the time. Like you're spending tax dollars, if you believe that the thing exists, and you don't get like a direct benefit. You don't get economic activity,
like you're not funding your own little companies that will now become unicorns or whatever. You're just giving a few people money who work on shit and no one makes any money. That's sometimes very hard for neoliberal governments to understand and make sense of.

Hagen: which I would argue against because tools like WordPress are essential for small businesses who can't afford to have web developers. And if you wanted to do it in a way where the government doesn't control the trajectory there are tools for that as well like germany has the public broadcasters who are set up in a way where the government they're as far removed from the process as possible so there are ways to do the funding but i see one problem there as someone who grew up in leftist spaces the tendency to want to discuss everything as a democracy i don't know if the term is in english also plenum where everybody has a vote and everyone wants to discuss everything to death and nothing ever gets done. I feel like at least at the starting of something like this, it might still be a good way to have one person who just points at the way and this is the trajectory we go and then we need to find a way to transfer it into, okay, this is becoming infrastructure. Now we need to have a governance.

tante: Exactly. When you're just dicking around with a thing, you don't need all these processes. You don't need a foundation or that. You're just dicking around with a thing and you don't even know if it's relevant yet. But at some point, as you said, when it turns to infrastructure, maybe you need to rethink what you're doing.
Hagen: And I think at that point the problem is different as well because then it's important enough for enough people to care about it so that there will be a structure that can vote on it because it's important enough for everyone to be actually involved in it. A vote doesn't necessarily mean that every little feature gets voted on by everyone. Like there are structures, either you delegate votes to certain people or you vote on like a product management council and they actually make the calls based on the resources the project has. Like we all like every project to develop exactly the feature we want, but they also have like, okay, we have these many hours of developer time and so we have to prioritize. And I think that that's still doable, even though, yes, it's less efficient than one guy just deciding what he wants to do.

But I think for infrastructures, that is very important. And especially if we then move it towards, hey, this is infrastructure that the public funds, at least to a certain degree, then there needs to be a democratic process. The problem with these projects sometimes is that the people who can vote on these projects are oftentimes only developers. If you have code in the main line, then you might have some influence, maybe like a formal vote. But for example, with WordPress, I think it's relevant to say that if it runs 40% of the internet, there's millions of people who can't write a line of PHP or JavaScript or CSS code, but who are deeply affected by what happens with this project, who have a very important stake in this. And who should, to a certain degree, have a say, I think. It's kind of weird that we don't demand more often that as users, who have no idea how the project works, but the project wants us to use it, wants us to put parts of our life onto it, wants to be infrastructure for parts of our life, that we should have some form of representation, some form of influence. And it's hard to do and it's inefficient. And I think it hasn't been done very well yet. But I think that is something that we should strive for if we want to move towards infrastructures that don't go off the rails, either because of one weird dude or because of like Mozilla, an organization that's really just grasping at straws to find some magic money tree again to keep on doing what they are doing.

Hagen: Yeah, I think you nailed a pretty big problem that I have with a lot of open source tools is they very often seem to be playgrounds for developers, which I get because they started out as tinkering projects from developers. I get why it went there. But yeah, a lot of them don't seem to have a lot of involvement of UX designers, and it shows. Also, this is something I noticed when trying moving around CMSs. I'm not a programmer, but I can read a JavaScript file. I can understand the code if I see it, even if I can't write it myself. And the amount of times I had to open a text editor was like, I just want to run a blog and a podcast, which are pretty common things. I'm not doing anything complicated. I'm not doing code injection. I'm not even trying to implement a third-party comment engine. I just want to run the fucking thing. And it's hard, man. It's still hard. I don't know if this is something that could be mandated if you had a governance structure like this, where you say, yeah, the budget is X man hours for development, X man hours for usability design, something like that.

tante: If you had like a structure that has like, I mean, it's the same for every company. If you have a company and you're developing an IT product, you have product management and they have to like see, okay, how many hours of designer time do we have? How many hours of developer time do we have? What are the features that we need? and you prioritize them, and then you kind of try to make it work with the resources that you have. I think the thing is, currently we have commercial things. You buy it, and then you probably these days you just rent it a lot of the time. Or you have open source project. But open source project just means, okay, the license tells you you can have the code, which for many people doesn't mean shit. Like, even if the readme gave them the commands to run, they wouldn't know where to put those commands. And I'm not talking down on them. I know how to do that because I studied that. That's my day job. But many people don't because they have interesting things to do with their life. Which is why they maybe want to write. Because they want to write about the interesting things they do. Or do a podcast about it or whatever. And I think maybe we need to reframe the kinds of projects that we just talked about. They have this infrastructure quality that go beyond, okay, it's just an open source project. If it dies, okay, that happens. But that have reached a level of like, I hate the term, but I don't have a better one. They have enough market share or relevance that we can't let that happen.

And then say, okay, building up wherever the money comes from. There's an infrastructure that you can attach to and get some money out of, but that requires you to have certain things in place, like certain formal governance structures, user participation, I don't know. The structure even gives you best practices. Say, okay, hey, if you have no idea how to set that up, here. Here's three templates that we know that work. And I think it is an interesting task to kind of define what this thing is.

tante: What a project like the one we just described, what makes a project like this, And what should it get from wherever?

Hagen: And I think that is actually doable. could put it in writing as the requirements for this to happen. You can define infrastructure as like market share you should define pillars for value for democracy i don't think every tool needs it but i think a wordpress that helps everyone to become a publisher and publish their thoughts on the web it's important for democracy to give everyone a voice firefox the same to be able to browse the internet without the involvement of companies would be something like that wikipedia would be something like that linux would be something like that but I can think of a lot of tools where I don't think that's that necessary at this point.

tante: The way I think about it, this doesn't take over projects. I think it doesn't make sense to say, we're going to take this. It shouldn't be like the job of that kind of institution, but that kind of institution should offer guidance and should offer projects that realize that they might have grown into the need for this. Allow them to apply for us. We're going to check if you really fit into this, because I think it's hard to really say.

Market share is hard to measure sometimes. user amount of users is also hard to do, but you can apply. There's like a transparent process where people check it and make a decision whether you fit or not. And if not, what's missing, which is also being transparent, like this is why you couldn't fit in, but well, and then, you know, okay, you have a contract and that contract has requirements saying, okay, you need to guarantee this. You need to guarantee user involvement. And– yeah.
Hagen: user involvement wage caps. So if you say you need the funding, you can't have CEO salaries that reach into the millions. That just won't work. But I think coming back to Germany, we have examples like this in the real world where you can have voluntary firefighters, but if you don't find enough people, the state is forced to hire firefighters. Then they have to be commercial firefighters. And I think this is a nice equivalent. Like, if a project works like this and it's fine and it doesn't need the funding, sure, run it your way. You're funded now.

Hagen: But at some point, if you need funding, no, there are rules that you have to follow then. But also, this will come with a guarantee from the government.
tante: We take you under our wing. You're cool now. You still might want to do more fundraising because you want to do more, whatever. But we guarantee a certain baseline that has been agreed upon beforehand. I don't think it solves all the issues. but I think it could create a space where digital infrastructures or like digital commons and not data commons like Wikipedia or Wikidata or that kind of stuff but like commons of infrastructures But yeah, that would be great.

tante: that you can use which is software which could potentially even be compute I'm a big fan of setting up compute like data centers in that way so you can have like a fair access to certain amount of maybe space or computer or whatever you want to call it. But I guess the second step.

Hagen: I remember the times where the five Euros/month server instance to run my WordPress would have been tough on me. Every citizen should be allowed an amount of space to publish their thoughts on the web. I 100% agree that there should be this public infrastructure.

tante: Yeah. And at some point you grow out of it or you want something that the thing doesn't provide, That's fine. The market offers everything you want. Yeah, I think it's just important for us, with our lives being so heavily based on digital infrastructures and so large parts of our lives being run on these digital infrastructures, that we find ways to keep those infrastructures alive outside of corporate control. And the thing that we do with open source currently, I think it rests, it's kind of a house of cards. And I think in 10 years, we'll see a lot of projects having big trouble to stay alive because the people who ran it and to started it, aged out of it or died, which I already see in certain projects that have a very old developer base. And this is something that we need to work on now. So in 10 years, we don't sit there and say, okay let's let's all go back to microsoft they'll run our lives

Hagen: you just invented communism.

tante: i tend to do that.

Hagen: yeah it happens to me as well yeah

tante: let's call it social social democracy it sounds more palatable to the liberals

Hagen: but in germany there's there are people attached to that term that i don't want to be associated with necessarily

tante: yeah yeah yeah true true true

Hagen: One thing we have to all be fine with and that i would be fine with is that it essentially would be choosing winners. Like you are infrastructure now because we don't need multiple CMSs like this being funded because you are public good now. We only need one highway system to talk in a way that the liberals will love. And that's one thing I do not get. Like the government loves to pave the shit out of this country for the public good because they say it's good for business, it's good for businesses. But that just doesn't happen in the digital world. There they love funding some weird startups, some weird helicopter plane companies who claim that they're the next taxi. But they will not fund common infrastructure.

tante: I think that you used a very important term here, picking winners. And yes, that's what it would be. It doesn't make sense to give every CMS on the planet all the money. maybe a bunch of them because they serve different needs or whatever but not many so that's where i think some of the organizations that hand out money also have a hard time to do that like because i think say you are that organization and you're picking winners you probably look for a certain level of consistency this is basically our target platform that we think most of the things should.

But I think that you used a very important term here, picking winners.work on because we think that is important. This whole idea of picking winners is, I think, A, important, but B, also not trivial. To structure this organization in a way that the way they pick winners makes sense and doesn't just create friction and alienation where, okay, they pick this project and now the others hate the other project because it needs to be a very clearly outlined reasoning behind it.

Say, we didn't fund you because you suck or whatever, but we have characteristics that we look for in a project that your project doesn't serve. And I think that in order to get that going, you'd need a lot of money to start. Like, it's not something that you can do with like, here's 10 million. Like 10 million sounds like a lot of money, but it's not. Not if you want to develop software. It's ridiculously little, to be honest.

Hagen: True but I don't think the amounts will be as large as like we are also used to the big tech amounts and I don't think we need that kind of money as well

tante: It's hard to say depending on what you want to take over. If you want to take over browser development, that is expensive. Like that is fucking expensive because it's hard. It's one of the hardest things you can build today, I think.

Hagen: sure but I don't think this is something that should happen on the country level but at least EU level maybe it would make sense to work together with the US as well at that point honestly especially with a browser and with Linux you could make a defense argument and get some of that sweet, sweet NATO money if you really wanted to.

tante: That's true. That's true. But on the other, Europe loves to play innovation with their legislation or whatever. We are the first with the AI, blah, blah, blah.

Hagen: Which they weren't. Just to remember. China had the first AI law, not the EU.

tante: Exactly, exactly. But China are the bad people, you know. I was set. Yeah, but yeah, they were first.

Hagen: I never said it was good, and I wouldn't agree that, and I would agree that China does a lot of bad things, and they just were first at this point.

tante: But like for Europe's size, if you're the EU, the money you need to put into this thing would be negligible. It wouldn't hurt that much. Of course, you'd have to cut down on something. You're no longer funding blockchain shit or whatever. I don't give a shit. Find some money.

Hagen: Just don't fucking build the highway that is running right in front of my door that nobody fucking needs. And that's going to destroy a lot of clubs.

tante: Yeah. But like finding a significant amount of money that you can reasonably say, hey, we can carry a certain amount of load. And probably it's not going to be the Linux kernel. I don't think the Linux kernel wants that. But there's a lot of things where you could look into, okay, what do we want? And there's a few hard decisions where things that I personally would probably like to be funded probably won't be. Like I think the GNOME desktop for Linux, like the free software desktop, should be funded. But I think it's not having enough traction, not enough relevance for people. But I can see a lot of things that would fit and that could where you could try out those things. And many projects maybe don't need billions of money. Maybe they just need a few thousand bucks a month, a few thousand bucks a month or a few thousand bucks a year to keep going in a reasonable way where a person says, hey, I just need like half my paycheck to come out of this and this project is golden. And we can guarantee that this that it exists because I no longer have to do it in my free time or just thinking about these kinds of initiatives that go beyond this whole. Here's a project. And I know that even with government, it's hard to do because they always just they have their funding periods and it's either a year or maybe four years, whatever. And then everything gets reshuffled again.

Hagen: Yeah, but that's why you need to build agencies that like, I mentioned the public broadcasters. There are other examples of just institutions that run parallel to the government that can be influenced by the government, but who do their thing and who aren't political institutions in themselves. And one last thought I wanted to bring into it with the whole, yeah, it would be choosing winners thing. One requirement would be it's open source. Okay, it's a winner, but somebody else could build on it. And even to make a capitalist argument in the end, I think that could even bring a lot of business in. Like, let's go back to the Linux kernel and what Valve is currently doing with their proton layer. And what the fuck? Why are we tying ourselves to Microsoft? Just let us do our own thing and we can build on this free thing and do some software magic that can be done by a few dozen people. Like, Valve isn't a big company. And now every game runs on Linux. And it's better than Windows. It can run on small handhelds. It just seems to work.

tante: Yeah, like I don't super love the term, but it would be a great antidote against what Cory Doctorow calls "enshitification".

Hagen: And that's because somebody else funded the infrastructure of Linux. And that would happen with all of these things. You could take what the infrastructure fund has funded and do your own thing on it. And it would save you a ton of money because you wouldn't have to start from the beginning.

tante: Because these projects wouldn't need to "enshitify", because they know that they're taken care of. That is what we all get so tired of in this digital life where you find a cool tool and you like it. This really solves a thing that I had. And now, like even WordPress, even months ago, they started putting AI everywhere. And now it wants to generate my posts for me.Like, no, I want to write this thing. That's why I have this. I don't want. That's what it's for.

Hagen: that was the whole idea! That's like buying drawing supplies and it's like yeah we can draw your image … but i bought them because i want to draw for fun like i don't publish blog posts as a business it’s literally what i want to write that I don't make money on because otherwise i would pitch it to make money on it it's literally the things i want to do for fun let me have my fun

tante: Yeah. Here is a joint, it smokes itself. Exactly.

Hagen: the important term that should carry over is infrastructure and people have to see tools like WordPress like Firefox as essential infrastructure and not a piece of software it's like the things we need to run the internet on hich means to run our current form of civilization on.

tante: Yeah, there's a great book by Dev Chakra. It's called How Infrastructure Works, The System Shaping Our World. I recommend everyone to read it. It's brilliant. And it really gets down to, we think about infrastructure, this is this technical thing. and some engineers built or whatever, but she reframes it. No, infrastructure is a gift we as a society give to us.

It's something we give to us and our futures and our kids and whoever. It's a thing that makes everyone's lives and everyone's experiences better if we build them. I think infrastructure should be open source, but so far we often stopped at, okay, now it's open source, now it's fine. And I think it's not enough. And the next few years should be about how to move further than just open source.

Hagen: And I think the description of infrastructure is pretty good because I wouldn't have time to do this podcast or to write a blog post if I had to shovel my own shit because I wouldn't be connected to the sewer system. It frees us to do the things we love because we don't have to do them. Somebody else did it for us.

tante: Yeah, exactly.

Hagen: And with that, I think we're done.

tante: Yes, thank you for the invitation.

Hagen: And that's it for the first episode of this new podcast. The book that Tante mentioned is of course linked in the show notes. And to be perfectly honest, I hate call to actions. So it's just bye.

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So what's a guy supposed to do who already has a few podcasts that haven't released new episodes in a year or more, but that aren't officially dead yet? I think the answer to this question is to start a new podcast, obviously. And that's what I'm going to do.

But this one is going to be a bit different because it isn't meant to be a standalone podcast. It's meant to be an extension of my blog. In my blog, I share ideas about topics that I think about where I feel like I can add to the conversation or have feelings to share, thoughts to share. But there are times where I have questions that I want answers to, where I don't have an opinion, and where it doesn't make sense for me to write a blog post.

So I thought for these topics, I should talk to people who I think have interesting thoughts about these things. And that's what I'm going to do with this podcast. So it's not on any regular schedule. It's just conversations with people I want to talk to and where I think there's a value in hearing their thoughts.

One thing I haven't decided yet is the language the podcast is going to be released in. The problem is I'm German. Most of the people I will be talking to will be German, but it's also meant as an extension of my blog that is in English. So no final decision has been made yet, but the first episode for this new podcast will be released next week. And by then I will have made my mind up. You'll just have to see.

But anyways, this was just the announcement so that I could put up something to add to the podcast directories. The real first episode will come out next week.