This site runs on WordPress, an open source software that powers almost half of all the websites on the internet, and today marks the annual WordPress “State of the Word” address.

The Power of Language and the Word

Throughout human history, control over language and the written word has been synonymous with power itself. In ancient civilizations, literacy was the exclusive domain of priests and scribes who guarded their knowledge jealously, understanding that the ability to record, interpret, and transmit information conferred immense social and political authority. The written word was sacred precisely because it was scarce—each manuscript represented countless hours of painstaking labor, making texts rare artifacts that only the wealthy and powerful could possess. This scarcity created a bottleneck in human knowledge transmission, where ideas could only spread as quickly as scribes could copy them, and only to those who had access to these precious documents.

The relationship between language, power, and social control became even more pronounced during the medieval period in Europe. The Catholic Church maintained its theological and political dominance partly through its monopoly on Latin literacy and manuscript production. Sacred texts remained in Latin, inaccessible to common people who spoke vernacular languages, while the physical production of books was largely confined to monastic scriptoria. This created a profound information asymmetry: those who controlled the production and interpretation of texts controlled the narrative of reality itself. Knowledge flowed downward from ecclesiastical and aristocratic elites to the masses, who remained dependent on intermediaries to access written culture. The word was power, and power carefully rationed access to the word.

Gutenberg’s Revolution: Mechanizing the Word

The invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg around 1440 represents one of humanity’s most consequential technological breakthroughs, fundamentally altering the relationship between knowledge and power. Gutenberg’s innovation—movable metal type combined with oil-based ink and a modified wine press—didn’t merely make book production faster; it transformed the entire economics and politics of information. A single printing press could produce more books in a day than a scribe could copy in a lifetime. This dramatic increase in production capacity drove down costs exponentially, making books affordable to merchants, professionals, and even literate peasants. Within fifty years of Gutenberg’s first Bible, printing presses had spread across Europe, and millions of books circulated where previously there had been only thousands of manuscripts.

The social and intellectual consequences of this mechanical revolution were profound and multifaceted. The printing press enabled the Protestant Reformation by allowing Martin Luther to disseminate his critiques of Catholic doctrine directly to a mass audience—his Ninety-five Theses and subsequent writings spread across Europe in weeks rather than years, igniting religious and political upheaval that permanently fractured European Christendom. The press accelerated the Scientific Revolution by allowing researchers to share observations, data, and theories reliably and rapidly, creating communities of knowledge that transcended geographical boundaries. Galileo, Newton, and countless others built upon each other’s work through printed books and journals, establishing the cumulative, collaborative character of modern science. The availability of printed books in vernacular languages strengthened national identities while simultaneously creating cosmopolitan networks of scholars who could access the same texts regardless of location.

Perhaps most revolutionary, the printing press began to erode the information hierarchies that had structured medieval society. When books became affordable, literacy became valuable for broader segments of the population, driving demand for education and creating new social classes of educated merchants, artisans, and professionals. Ideas could no longer be contained within elite circles—revolutionary concepts in politics, religion, philosophy, and science circulated freely, challenging established authorities and making censorship increasingly difficult. The Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason, individual rights, and empirical inquiry was made possible by this democratized access to knowledge. The printing press didn’t just copy words; it fundamentally restructured human consciousness and social organization by making the word accessible to the many rather than the few.

The Digital Revolution and New Gatekeepers

The emergence of the internet in the late 20th century promised a new revolution in human communication, potentially even more transformative than Gutenberg’s press. Early internet visionaries imagined a radically decentralized network where anyone could publish, share, and access information freely, creating a truly global marketplace of ideas unmediated by traditional gatekeepers like publishers, broadcasters, or governments. The architecture of the internet itself—a distributed network designed to survive nuclear attack—seemed to embody democratic principles of resilience and accessibility. For a brief moment, it appeared that the age-old problem of information scarcity and control had been definitively solved.

However, the early reality of web publishing quickly revealed new barriers to entry that recreated familiar hierarchies in digital form. Creating a website in the 1990s and early 2000s required substantial technical expertise across multiple domains: HTML markup for content structure, CSS for visual presentation, JavaScript for interactivity, server administration for hosting, and understanding of protocols like FTP for file transfer. This technical complexity meant that despite the theoretical openness of the web, practical access to publishing remained limited to those with specialized knowledge or the financial resources to hire professional developers. The digital divide wasn’t merely about access to computers and internet connections—it was equally about the skills required to create rather than merely consume web content.

Moreover, as the web commercialized rapidly during the dot-com boom, corporate interests began consolidating control over digital publishing platforms. Proprietary content management systems were expensive and complex, requiring enterprise-level resources to implement and maintain. Hosted platforms like early blogging services offered simplicity but at the cost of control—users didn’t own their content, couldn’t customize their sites meaningfully, and remained subject to arbitrary changes in terms of service or even complete platform shutdowns. The promise of a democratized web began to look increasingly hollow as new intermediaries—web developers, hosting companies, platform providers—inserted themselves between individuals and their ability to publish freely. The means of digital production remained concentrated in relatively few hands, echoing the pre-Gutenberg era’s scarcity economics despite the internet’s abundance of bandwidth and storage.

The Philosophy of Open Source

Into this landscape of proprietary control and technical barriers emerged the free and open-source software movement, articulating a radical alternative vision for how software—and by extension, digital publishing—could operate. The movement’s philosophical foundations, crystallized in Richard Stallman’s GNU General Public License and the Four Freedoms of free software, represented a conscious rejection of software as private property in favor of software as shared cultural infrastructure. These principles insisted that users should have the freedom to run software for any purpose, study how it works, modify it to suit their needs, and share both original and modified versions with others. This wasn’t merely a licensing arrangement; it was a moral and political philosophy arguing that software, as the fundamental building blocks of digital culture, should belong to everyone rather than being enclosed as intellectual property.

The open-source model challenged conventional assumptions about how complex collaborative work could be organized and sustained. Traditional software development followed a proprietary, centralized model: companies employed programmers, maintained tight control over source code, and released finished products to passive consumers. Open-source projects inverted this relationship, distributing development across networks of volunteers who contributed code, identified bugs, suggested features, and improved documentation collectively. This seemed economically irrational—why would talented programmers donate their labor to create free software? Yet projects like Linux, Apache, and MySQL demonstrated that distributed collaboration could produce software rivaling or exceeding proprietary alternatives in quality, security, and innovation. The open-source model succeeded because it aligned individual interests with collective benefit: developers scratched their own itches by solving problems they personally faced, while contributing to commons that everyone could draw upon.

Beyond practical benefits, open source embodied an ethical stance about knowledge, creativity, and human flourishing. If proprietary software treated code as private property requiring protection through legal mechanisms like copyright and patents, open source treated code as something more like language itself—a shared resource that becomes more valuable the more widely it’s used and the more people who can contribute to its evolution. This philosophy resonated deeply with the internet’s original ethos of open protocols and shared standards. Just as no one owns the English language, and it becomes richer through distributed contributions from millions of speakers, open-source advocates argued that software should evolve through collective intelligence rather than corporate control. This wasn’t mere idealism; it was a pragmatic recognition that in an interconnected digital world, shared infrastructure serving everyone’s interests would ultimately prove more robust and innovative than fragmented proprietary systems serving narrow commercial interests.

WordPress: From Blog to Platform

In 2003, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little created WordPress as a fork of b2/cafelog, an earlier blogging platform that had been abandoned by its developers. Their motivation was straightforward: they wanted to continue using and improving software they found valuable, and the open-source license permitted them to do exactly that. This seemingly modest beginning—two developers picking up where others had left off—illustrated the open-source model’s resilience. Where proprietary software dies when a company abandons it, open-source software can be resurrected and continued by anyone who finds it valuable. Mullenweg and Little weren’t creating something entirely new; they were exercising the freedoms that open source granted them, demonstrating how this model enabled continuity and evolution beyond any single organization’s interests or lifespan.

WordPress was built on the Four Freedoms that defined free software: the freedom to run the program for any purpose, to study and modify its source code, to redistribute copies, and to distribute modified versions. These weren’t merely licensing technicalities—they were foundational design principles that shaped WordPress’s architecture and community. Because anyone could study the code, developers worldwide could learn from it, understand how it worked, and propose improvements. Because anyone could modify it, WordPress could be adapted to countless specific use cases that the original developers never anticipated. Because anyone could redistribute it, WordPress spread virally through word-of-mouth and organic adoption rather than through expensive marketing campaigns. Because anyone could distribute modified versions, an entire ecosystem of themes and plugins emerged, extending WordPress’s functionality in thousands of directions simultaneously.

The early years of WordPress saw rapid evolution driven by community feedback and contribution. Mullenweg articulated a mission to “democratize publishing,” explicitly linking WordPress to the historical trajectory from Gutenberg’s press through the internet’s promise of universal access to publishing tools. This wasn’t marketing rhetoric but a genuine philosophical commitment that shaped development priorities. WordPress focused relentlessly on user experience, striving to make web publishing as intuitive as using a word processor. The famous “five-minute install” became a badge of honor—where other content management systems required extensive technical knowledge to set up, WordPress could be running on a server in minutes. The visual editor allowed users to create formatted content without knowing HTML. The theme system separated content from presentation, allowing non-programmers to dramatically change their site’s appearance with a few clicks.

As WordPress matured, it evolved from a simple blogging platform into a full-featured content management system capable of powering virtually any type of website. The plugin architecture allowed developers to add e-commerce functionality, membership systems, forums, galleries, forms, and countless other features without modifying core WordPress code. This extensibility meant WordPress could grow with users’ needs—someone might start with a simple blog but gradually expand to include a podcast, online store, and member community without switching platforms. The REST API opened WordPress to integration with external services and applications, making it a platform rather than merely a standalone application. WordPress became infrastructure—not just software for creating websites, but a foundation upon which an entire ecosystem of themes, plugins, hosting services, development agencies, and educational resources could flourish.

The Numbers Tell the Story

Today, WordPress powers 43.2% of all websites globally and commands a 60.5% market share among content management systems. These statistics represent more than market dominance—they reflect a fundamental shift in who can participate in web publishing. To put this in perspective, there are approximately 1.35 billion websites in existence, meaning roughly 580 million sites run on WordPress. This represents an almost incomprehensible democratization of publishing capability. Each of these hundreds of millions of sites represents someone or some organization that gained the ability to publish online using free, open-source software requiring no specialized technical knowledge. The scale of this achievement rivals Gutenberg’s press in its impact on human communication.

The diversity of organizations using WordPress demonstrates its versatility across every domain of human activity. The White House official website runs on WordPress, as do government agencies worldwide, showing that open-source software can meet the security and reliability requirements of institutions operating at the highest levels. Major technology companies like Microsoft News and Facebook Newsroom use WordPress, despite having resources to build any custom solution imaginable—they choose WordPress because it works exceptionally well. Entertainment giants like The Walt Disney Company and Sony Music manage their complex multimedia content through WordPress. Influential media outlets including TechCrunch, Vogue, Wired, and Time Magazine have built their digital presences on the platform. Universities like Harvard use WordPress for official communications. Celebrities, small businesses, nonprofit organizations, and individual bloggers all use the same fundamental software, adapted to their specific needs through themes and plugins.

This universality represents something qualitatively different from previous publishing technologies. Gutenberg’s press was expensive machinery requiring specialized skills to operate—printers were craftspeople with technical expertise. Radio and television broadcasting required licenses, expensive equipment, and technical knowledge, limiting participation to institutions wealthy enough to afford the barriers to entry. Even earlier web publishing, as discussed, required substantial technical skills that excluded most people. WordPress, by contrast, genuinely enables anyone with internet access to publish to a global audience. The software is free. Hosting can cost just a few dollars monthly. No programming knowledge is required. The only prerequisites are literacy and something to say—the same prerequisites that defined writing itself before any publishing technology existed. This represents the closest humanity has come to truly universal access to publishing capability.

What Democratization Really Means

The concept of democratizing publishing extends far beyond simply making tools available—it fundamentally concerns the redistribution of communicative power in society. Throughout history, those who controlled publishing controlled which ideas could circulate, which voices could be heard, which narratives became accepted as truth. Publishers, editors, broadcasters, and other gatekeepers determined what reached audiences, creating profound asymmetries between those who could speak to millions and those who could only speak to those within earshot. Even when motivated by high professional standards rather than censorship, this gatekeeping concentrated cultural authority in relatively few hands. Democratization challenges this concentration by removing intermediaries between creators and audiences, allowing anyone to publish directly to the world.

WordPress enables this direct publishing in ways that fundamentally alter power dynamics. A small business owner can create a website as sophisticated as a Fortune 500 company’s site, competing on the quality of their content and offerings rather than their budget for web development. A marginalized community can create media platforms amplifying voices that mainstream outlets ignore or misrepresent, challenging dominant narratives with alternative perspectives. An individual expert or creative person can build an audience directly without requiring validation from publishers or institutions, allowing ideas to find their audience organically rather than through curated selection. These capabilities don’t merely supplement traditional publishing—they create parallel systems of cultural production and distribution that operate according to different logic and serve different interests.

The democratization WordPress enables is incomplete and imperfect, of course. The digital divide means billions of people lack reliable internet access or devices capable of running WordPress. Technical literacy varies enormously, and while WordPress is relatively easy to use, it still requires some learning and comfort with digital tools. Algorithmic curation by search engines and social media platforms creates new gatekeeping dynamics, where visibility depends partly on gaming systems designed by corporations pursuing their own interests. Misinformation, hate speech, and low-quality content proliferate alongside valuable contributions, creating challenges for audiences trying to navigate an oversaturated information environment. These limitations are real and significant, deserving serious attention.

Yet these imperfections shouldn’t obscure the genuine transformation WordPress has enabled. People with limited tech experience can use it out of the box to create functional, attractive websites, while more tech-savvy users can customize it extensively to meet sophisticated requirements. Any nontechnical person can create a website, while the same software scales to enterprise clients with complex needs requiring high performance and security. This dual nature—simultaneously accessible to beginners and powerful enough for experts—represents a remarkable achievement in software design. The Four Freedoms and the mission to democratize publishing have inspired thousands of volunteers worldwide who contribute code, design, documentation, support, and translations, creating a self-sustaining community invested in keeping WordPress free and accessible. This community model ensures that WordPress serves users’ interests rather than shareholders’ interests, maintaining its commitment to democratization over time.

Language, Open Source, and Human Flourishing

The story of WordPress ultimately connects to something deeper than software or even publishing—it concerns language itself as humanity’s fundamental technology for sharing consciousness. Language allows us to transmit thoughts, experiences, knowledge, and imagination across minds and generations, making culture and civilization possible. Writing extended language beyond the limitations of memory and physical presence, allowing ideas to persist across time and space. Gutenberg’s press amplified writing’s reach exponentially, enabling the emergence of modern science, democracy, and global culture. The internet promised to complete this trajectory by making everyone both publisher and audience, creating a genuinely participatory communication system where knowledge and creativity could flow freely in all directions.

Open-source software represents a crucial infrastructure for realizing this promise. Just as language itself belongs to everyone who speaks it and evolves through distributed contributions from millions of speakers, open-source software treats code as collective cultural resource rather than private property. This approach aligns software development with the collaborative, cumulative nature of human knowledge creation generally. Science progresses through shared methodologies and openly published results that others can verify and build upon. Democracy requires informed citizens with access to diverse information sources and the ability to participate in public discourse. Culture flourishes when artists, writers, musicians, and creators can draw freely from shared traditions while contributing their own innovations back to the commons. Open source applies these same principles to the digital infrastructure increasingly mediating human interaction.

WordPress embodies this philosophy concretely, making the abstract ideals of open source tangible through a tool that millions use daily. When someone creates a website with WordPress, they’re exercising freedoms that open source guarantees—freedom to publish without asking permission, freedom to control their own content and data, freedom to modify and extend the software to meet their specific needs, freedom to build upon work others have shared generously. These freedoms compound and amplify: every plugin created adds capability that all WordPress users can benefit from; every theme designed provides aesthetic options for thousands of sites; every documentation page written helps future users learn more quickly; every translation completed makes WordPress accessible in a new language and culture. This is open source’s generative magic—individual contributions create collective abundance that benefits everyone, including the contributors themselves.

The democratization of publishing through WordPress and open source more broadly represents an ongoing project rather than a completed achievement. Billions of people still lack access to the internet and digital tools. Technical complexity continues to exclude many who might benefit from creating online presences. Corporate platforms compete with open systems by offering convenience at the cost of control. Government censorship and surveillance threaten the open web in many regions. These challenges require continued attention, innovation, and advocacy. Yet the progress already achieved provides grounds for hope and continued effort. WordPress demonstrates that alternatives to proprietary control and gatekeeping are viable—not merely as utopian visions but as practical systems serving hundreds of millions of users effectively. The same principles could extend to other domains: social networking, messaging, video sharing, document collaboration. The vision of a truly open, participatory web remains worth pursuing.

Conclusion: The Continuing Revolution

From Gutenberg’s mechanical press to WordPress’s digital platform, the democratization of publishing represents a continuous human project of expanding who gets to participate in the conversations shaping our collective future. Each technological advance—movable type, mass literacy, radio, television, the internet, open-source software—has expanded access while creating new challenges and limitations. WordPress stands in this tradition, imperfectly but genuinely extending publishing capability to hundreds of millions who previously lacked it. The software’s success demonstrates that open-source principles can produce tools rivaling or exceeding proprietary alternatives while better serving human flourishing and social justice.

The mission to democratize publishing matters because publishing is power—power to share knowledge, tell stories, build community, challenge injustice, express creativity, and participate in the democratic process. When publishing remains concentrated in few hands, whether aristocratic, corporate, or governmental, society suffers from the loss of voices, perspectives, and ideas that never reach broad audiences. When publishing becomes genuinely accessible, culture becomes richer, democracy becomes more robust, innovation accelerates, and human potential expands. WordPress hasn’t achieved perfect democratization, but it has moved us significantly closer to a world where anyone with something to say can say it to anyone willing to listen, without requiring permission from gatekeepers. This represents a worthy continuation of Gutenberg’s revolution and a foundation for whatever comes next in humanity’s ongoing effort to make knowledge and creativity truly universal.