What could Heidegger teach us about Wordpress?

If you are not confused by the title, you might already imagine where this article could be heading to: the never-ending bashing of Wordpress, the 20-year old CMS that plagues the internet.

If that is the case, you are my target audience. But let me tell you. No, that is not where this article is going.

Don’t get me wrong: I will most likely agree with any argument that points out flaws in the infamous CMS.

See: I am aware of many of the technological shortcomings. I have suffered the framework, too. I have seen greener pastures. I will attempt to be true to you and remain as precise as possible when describing its challenges and roadblocks.

But if I can even get to my point, without being so apologetic… I will try to elucidate a question that I bet you might have also asked yourself about. If Wordpress is so crappy, why is it still so dominant?

If you have spent some time in PHP and Wordpress forums, you might have probably seen some attempts to answer this question. Most come from a place of great cynicism. People are lazy, people are cheap, people don’t want the good stuff.

I think, though, there is a more valuable, hidden gem of knowledge to extract from Wordpress’ 20-year-run as the leading CMS.

Let’s get things straight, first

There are other tools out there. Beautiful tools. They mostly succeed where Wordpress fails, for example:

• The fact that Wordpress is built on backwards-compatible PHP code makes it mostly a pain to work with if you always prefer OOP.
• WP is a kafkaesque nightmare of functions run through its hook system. Sometimes you can’t even know where some of the HTML is generated.
• Most of its content could as well be statically generated. Performance sucks if you don’t have some form of caching in place. Otherwise, vertical scaling can’t hurt, right? Right?
• Wordpress expands with plugins and themes that bloat the frontend with scripts and styles. This would make a GatsbyJS developer puke.
• Due to being based on PHP, it naturally lacks the DOM-awareness of a Javascript SSR framework.
• Yet although being based on PHP, it still lacks the request abstraction and object-oriented architecture of better PHP frameworks.
• Content vs. configuration issues. How can I deploy a new meta field to production that can not be versioned?

I don’t plan to deny any of that. It is a valid perspective that comes into play when working with Wordpress, which you cannot overlook if you want to be well-prepared for the task at hand. But it’s not the only way to see things.

Where the usual perspective falls short is when it moves out of the area of technicality. We developers love the technical aspects of software: how to do stuff with code. When you are used to doing stuff in some way, and you love that way to do it, the feeling of incapability that comes with Wordpress is annoying.

But here is the problem with us, developers. We love everything about how to code. But many of us have not really entertained the philosophical question: what is code?

Where the usual perspective falls short is when it moves out of the area of technicality.

Heidegger and his views on technology

In his article The Question Concerning Technology, (originally published in 1954 as part of Vorträge und Aufsätze) Heidegger asks himself about the essence of technology.

One might be tempted to answer. Pfffff... Technology. Buttons. Computers. Rockets. All that stuff.

And this is what philosophers do and why they’re hateful people. They take concepts we take for granted and inquiry what we really know about them.

A more elaborate attempt to answer the question would then be: technology is what we humans come up with to control nature. Heidegger would ask: control what about nature? To do what, specifically? In which ways does technology come up with something?

See, Heidegger is taking the question very seriously.

His conclusions are very interesting.

Note: I am not going to expand too much on his thesis and its corolaries, though I would definitely encourage you to read the book which is very sweet —you know somehow Heidegger has this sweet, gentle, n*zi grandpa vibe going on… Seriously, though. Beware it can be dense, due to terminology. But if you don’t feel in the mood for reading the philosophical text directly, I would strongly suggest to watch this video by CuckPhilosophy in which he explains Heidegger through examples in Hayao Miyasaki’s movies.

For the purpose of this post, I will try to provide a very skimmed down interpretation.

To Heidegger, technology is a mode of revealing some truth about the world. It might be the cure for a disease, the nature of distant planets, what other person accross the globe is saying right now, or Mark Zuckerberg’s latest wet dream. Revealing, to Heidegger, can happen it two ways.

One is enframing. This is the most tipically modern view of technology. Enframing consists of revealing nature as objects. It reveals wood as fuel, humans as workforce, the energy behind “the elements”.

Enframing lets us control and predict the world. And it has worked great. This is what most of us first think of when we think of the advantages of science. It has helped us control child mortality. It has helped us forecast plane arrivals.

But for Heidegger, modernity has focused too much on enframing as a mode of revealing the world. And it’s not only modernity’s fault. Enframing as a method, Heidegger says, has a tendency to reveal itself as the only valid way of seeing the world.

When looking at the world through the glass of enframing, the aesthetic experience of life, the emotional aspects of life, seem to dissapear. One must disregard any bias on the object in order to study it.

Another possible way to see the world, and technology itself, would be one that brings forth nature, one that doesn’t dispose of it as an object, but draws light upon its uniqueness. One example of this is woodcarving. The craftsman works with the piece of wood to highlight its features: it’s colour, texture, resonance.

Compare this to how wood is seen, for example, in an industrial sawmill. How the cualitative aspects of each piece of wood are ignored in order to quantify it and measure it.

This poses a greater question about the relationship between humans and the rest of nature. Again, we’re not even touching the surface on how deep Heidegger’s theory works, and I would strongly recommend reading more of his own work. But it should be enough to ask ourselves some questions about the infamous CMS.

How does this relate to Wordpress?

Well, I think that many of us developers get way too focused on a certain way of seeing technology that works as enframing. At some point, we become too focused on reusability, code coverage, requests per second, milliseconds, terabytes of data. These are all abstractions about the world that we try to control and optimize.

Then, we forget a simple truth: none of that has any value without the more alive, more vigorous force of human nature pushing data into the system, creating meaningful use cases.

Many developers focus too much in reducing the last millisecond in the TTFB, and forget that content creators are a more important part of the ecosystems for which CMSs exist in the first place than, say, search engines.

If you ever try to editorialize your own content, and then add a subscription form, and then maybe sell a product on your blog, or maybe add a small SEO feature, you will find that Wordpress has an immeasurable amount of value in its ecosystem that goes way beyond the framework itself.

The shortcomings mentioned before seem small when the Wordpress community has always been able to come up with a response, either in the form of a plugin, or a SaaS, for even the less tech-savyy in the industry.

In the end, systems are alive as long as society gives them meaning. And the millions of lines of code written for Wordpress speak for themselves.

I recently switched to a more PM-like role in my current company. And this has helped me to see publishers, clients, managers and developers as the driving force behind entire systems.

It is an interesting exercise to think in which way can technology bring forth the best out of people’s uniqueness, instead of trying to adapt people to simpler, more efficient, more predictable systems.

Wordpress’ ecosystem allows people to easily bring to fruition the dynamics behind publishers, retail sellers, community managers and writers. Gutenberg, for example, has positively affected the quality of life at work for millions of people that interact with the CMS. The same can be said about Wordpress’ REST API, Cron and ActionScheduler systems.

The key here is that you start with the demand of millions of people, not only developers but integrators, designers, writers, and then attend to their needs, instead of starting from a system and then cascading down.

Am I asking you to ditch NextJS and switch to Wordpress?

No, please no. We probably need better tools out there than Wordpress. Hopefully by 2030 it won’t be the #1 CMS in the world.

Instead, I would like us developers to reconsider our relationship with technology. Maybe we don’t need to put technology by itself at the center, and understand that humans are the driving force that give life to any system.

Maybe then we will respect and understand better the role that Wordpress has held.

Maybe then we will be able to build something that really brings forth the qualities of publishers, developers and readers, as much as Wordpress has done during 20 years.