Thanks everyone for coming. My name's David Prager. I'm one of the executive producers of the film and I work at Automattic. Automattic's the company behind WordPress and Tumblr and WooCommerce and a few other companies you guys have probably heard of.
Before we begin, I wanted to give a quick shout out to the other two executive producers who couldn't be here. Chenda Ngak is our head of comms and one of the people who's been integral in getting behind this campaign and getting it off the ground. And also Scott Willey, our Director of Video and also one of the executive producers. And he's the creative bridge between the team and the filmmakers from the very first cut. So I want to give them a huge shout out and welcome.
Also want to thank our incredible events team for having helped put this together and everyone on the comms team that's out here also for helping put this together. It's been a lot of work and we're really excited to do this.
So a little over a year ago, I wrote down a treatment for a film and it started with a simple question, what happens if the web disappears? Not in some distant theoretical future, but now gradually as the platforms we all depend on get more closed, more controlled and more extractive.
We wanted to make something that would help people understand what open source actually is, not as a technology concept, but as an idea about ownership, about who gets to build, who gets to participate and who gets to decide what the internet becomes. We partnered with an extraordinary filmmaker named Bao Wen to bring this story to life. What they created exceeded everything we can imagine. And it's not a branded video. It's not a commercial. This is a film about the movement and it belongs to everyone.
It's about 20 minutes. And in those 20 minutes, you're going to meet some of the people who are in the building and who are also building the open web. Some of them are in this room tonight and after the screening, we'll introduce a pretty cool panel and have a conversation about this and I hope you guys enjoy it. So please enjoy the film. Thank you.
Howdy. I'm Ethan Tobin-Lindsay. I'm the editor-in-chief here at QED and it's a genuine pleasure to co-present this evening with Automattic.
Can I have the panelists join me on stage? I'll introduce you when you're up here. So come on up.
So you just watched a film that calls itself a manifesto for the open web and it lands at a specific moment that I think we can talk about tonight, which is that right now the web is sort of quietly resorting itself. Sites are blocking AI crawlers by default. Publishers are suing AI companies over training data and more. And infrastructure providers are literally putting price tags on what used to be free and open.
So joining me is Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic. Good to see everybody. I like that the curtains came up. It's like the open source. The light is coming in. There you go. Michael Dinh, the producer of Code for the People. And Paula Smith Arrigoni, the executive director of BAVC Media, for those of you don't know, used to be the Bay Area Video Coalition.
So Matt, let's start with you. You spent the two decades saying the open web is worth fighting for. We see a lot of that here. You've called WordPress the dark matter of the web. So one of the things I was thinking in watching it is that it feels like it's trying to connect with those of us who went to computer camp and did build our own computers. But also just like those of us who live and operate in the world. So when we look at this, what happens for those of us who don't know the depths of open source? What actually changes in their life if the open web loses? Like what do we lose if they can't get back?
Ooh, what do you lose? Well who's ever been on a network that was mentioned that closed down or on a current network that hasn't closed down, but you know someone whose account has been closed, right? You lose your Google account or your Apple account and your life's over and you have no recourse. Have you ever tried to contact support in one of these companies? You can't depend on them. And it's not because the companies are necessarily evil. They're just like, they got other things they're doing.
And so I think as people start to experience this, particularly some of the folks who have grown up in sort of the mobile age, which the sort of mobile app era was much more mediated, intermediated perhaps by centralized marketplaces like Apple's store and the Google Play Store. So they've seen probably an app go offline that they used or a game be banned because the companies are fighting with each other or things like that. So they started to see part of it. But we haven't yet experienced like the huge wave of things shutting down unless they were into crypto.
You know, it's funny. I set up my own self-hosted server and it's the first time I felt like when I took the box off my x86 and started putting stuff on it, it's one of those moments that we haven't had in a while because it's sort of mediated for us in a way. One last question before I move to others, which is I think we get to it at the end which is that we're at a crossroads right now, which is that with AI, AI could be built openly and accountably or closed. So right now the most powerful AI systems in the world are mostly closed and proprietary. So is open source winning or losing in the AI world right now?
Well, actually it's funny since this came out the open source has caught way up. You know, you've probably seen a lot of the stories about how for a tenth of the cost you're getting 80 or 90% of the performance just a few months later from open source model, which is going to create some interesting pressures on the funding and everything around this current investment cycle. But I think one beautiful thing is they're not necessarily at odds. And in fact, many people who started their careers proprietary later go on to do open source.
In fact, actually part of the reason I was talking about my dad there is his whole life was like building Microsoft stuff. And so we grew up, it was all proprietary, proprietary, proprietary. But he very much encouraged me like as the web was coming on to like check out this Perl thing, check out this Python thing, check out the web. And so I was kind of like the next generation that went open source, but now we're seeing it happen like look at a Jack Dorsey, very successful like Twitter and Block and invested a ton into Bitcoin and Nostr and Bluesky and all these sort of open systems. And you see that over and over. The WhatsApp founder now running Signal, which is open source.
So I like this that you know, as we grow and learn that you can start to incorporate more and more in open source, it can actually be part of someone's season of giving back.
Michael as a producer of the film, I'm sure you worked with Bao Wen, the filmmaker. Those of you don't know, Bao has made films about BTS, Bruce Lee. And the one that I have seen is the We Are the World documentary. Have you seen that? Oh yeah. Phenomenal. So what does it say that a director known for cultural icons decided to work on an open source code as the next project?
I mean, on the surface level, those are very different subject matters, right? I mean, but you know, when you look at the impact that these people have made on the world, there's a through line there. You know, there's people that have kind of rallied behind and supported something that was bigger than themselves, right? It's the impact on culture.
So even though, you know, open source doesn't have a face like BTS or Bruce Lee, you know, it's impacted millions of people around the world. And so I think that that was kind of the early start of like, why is this worth exploring? Because the impact on people. So yeah, I think it's different subject matters, but the impact is tremendous, so.
Was it a challenge? It feels like the film and kind of what Matt's saying, there is optimism. I think oftentimes tech documentaries are not optimistic. They're sort of like here's the movie and then algorithms are going to destroy us all. So how do you frame that? How do you think about optimism in that way?
I mean, first and foremost, we're naturally optimistic people. We're realist. You know, we know the gravity of what we're up against. But when you tell this story and we were looking at the cinematic optimism connection, like how do you tell that story? You know, coding, typing, as sexy as it is, it's not cinematic, you know, naturally. But you peel back the onion and you see that it's a human story.
And so, you know, we kept on going back to the early discovery of it all, you know? When somebody made something online for the first time, when somebody felt connected, when they were able to express themselves, like all that moment of discovery, that gives you optimism. You know, then it becomes less abstract in that sense. It's an emotion. It's something that you feel. It's something that you work towards in your daily life.
So then you look at all these stories and the humans behind these stories and you realize that they're not just idealists writing code, you know, they're trying to save something that is about freedom, expression and connection. So I think that in a nutshell, that's what we consider optimism.
Can I add something to that, Ethan? Yeah, for sure. I really love that. And I think a couple of things that I really liked about this film, I love seeing Matt, just your origin story in the beginning and like, you know, kind of tinkering and looking over your dad's shoulder. And I feel like so many people can relate to that experience and it's also active. And you know, what I love about open source, particularly in this moment, but also before is just that you are an active participant. You have agency.
You can take code, you can take pieces of it from different things and build something new for a new purpose. Like at my organization, BAVC, our preservation team does open source and one of our preservationists here. You wouldn't imagine that that happens, but it does. And we share that with librarians and universities and small arts and culture organizations around the country. So it's actively being used. And I think what is so needed right now is this sense of control and agency. And we're not just being consumed. We're actually making things for ourselves and for our communities and putting it to use. And I think that's so powerful because so many people feel overwhelmed right now.
Well, do you think specifically for the independent content creators you work with, the themes of ownership of digital platforms, you know, specifically they're probably thinking about a lot or dealing with?
Absolutely. And I think yeah, ownership, I mean, your own work not being stolen, that's a huge one. Having the ability to consent that, you know, somebody's going to use our content that you've worked so hard, you've pulled all these resources together to make and it's just stripped away, you know, so easily. So I think absolutely. I think open source combined with also the idea that you could have a small language model and have your own proprietary data instead of using stuff that maybe you can't trace the source to. There's a lot of exciting things that I think within independence people are more excited about than some of the other, you know, just using the standard big foundational models.
You know, one of the things you were talking about is how BAVC has been supporting independent storytellers. So specifically whether they're open source or another, how are the tools changing, whether it's AI or otherwise right now for them? Like sort of with open source as a back or maybe even the ownership of those tools. How does that influence them?
Well, that's such a great question. I mean, I'd love to pitch that back. I think it's a both. I think in some ways there's so much more ease. You don't have to be a developer to create code. There's so many tools. That's the beauty of this AI moment right now. And I know, you know, WordPress, you all are doing that in making it easier for anyone to build a beautiful website. That's so important. But I think that this point of open source and not giving up the act of becoming knowledgeable, you know, not learning about how is this made? Where is this data coming from? How do I integrate this into other things that I do? Like we actually still need to do that. I think that's part of our digital civic participation requirements in this new era.
So to me, it's a both, but I would love to hear what Matt says.
It's also a lot of fun. Yeah. You know, you break it and then you're like, oh, what happens? You're Googling. Has anyone ever done the view source on a webpage? It's a little trickier now. It's a little more complicated, but just that idea that you're going to kind of like open the hood, see how it works. It's beautiful in open source. And to know the optimism of things, I mean, I think part of the reason that tech sometimes gets, rightly so, because it's very powerful, a lot of criticism is that almost all of the companies start out with a very idealistic, optimistic story.
And we can all think of ones that we feel like let us down at some point. Make the world's information free for everybody or whatever it used to be. Oh, but not my information. That was too free. No, but the beautiful thing about open source is that it's like trust, but verify. You don't have to rely on the benevolence of whoever's leading it or anything else. It's built into the constitution of the software. The legal rights that you have for open source software are inalienable. It cannot be taken away. And so that is really powerful.
So even if I go away or Automattic or anyone else in that video, if we turn evil, if whatever happens, the software is still there. It's still yours. And you can fork it, you can change it, you can keep it forever. It's great for preservation and continuity. So actually my very first post, I talk not about backwards compatibility, but forwards compatibility. Like how do you build things in a way that it's likely to still work in 10 or 50 years?
