WordCamp Canada 2025 Retrospective (Part 2)
Day 2 of WCEH kicked off with a timer shift for Track 2 of the conference — meaning, I got to wave little cards at the speaker from the back of the room to tell them how much time they have left.
Morning Talks
Lucky for me, they were the track I already wanted to see, so it was no hardship at all: Michelle Frechette and Dee Teal.
(Unluckily for you because I was on duty I did not take good notes of the talks. You’ll have to catch deeper insights from other attendees or watch the talks on wordpress.tv when they come out.)
Writing a book is a secret goal for me (I mean who hasn’t got that dream at some point in their lives?), so Michelle’s talk, “From Blog to Book,” was very much of interest. I appreciated her nugget of advice that if you want to start a blog or a podcast or the like, you ought to have ten pieces of content (10 blog posts, or 10 podcasts) over the course of the first year loosely mapped out. If you have that, you have a solid start.
She also shared the best goddamn book dedication:
Dee’s talk, “Cultural Algorithms: the Innovation Multiplier,” was about looking at cultural learnings/habits as algorithms that can be applied in a team context to enable everyone to be more effective. A lot of good little nuggets here especially for teams that span across nationalities and for leaders who want to maximise each person’s contribution.
Keynote: Dave Winer
I was also the timer for Dave Winer, the first keynote of the conference.
His talk, “WordPress and the Open Social Web,” was about revamping the text-based social networks of the interwebs, using WordPress as a core piece of tech for that revolution. There were a lot of open web people in the room (note that Dave doesn’t like to call it open web because for him open is the web’s default state — it’s the corporations who popularised walled gardens), so there was resonance right off the bat.
I wouldn’t say the talk went off without a hitch, because there were a few of those. There was a moment that was genuine panic on Dave’s part, and it wasn’t Clem’s timer alarm going off (which I knew about but did not have a graceful way of stopping so I opted to just wing it when it went off). Rather, it was when I zoomed in on Dave’s laptop so people from the back of the room could read it on the big screen.
We debriefed afterwards and he said (paraphrased): “man that could have gone so wrong, because that’s how these things happen when you change anything on the fly.” Turns out, despite his rich experience as a speaker, he’s a consummate professional and rehearsed this for over a week. He had the whole routine down to a T. You can follow the posts on his blog as he went back and forth polishing and rehearsing his talk… I can almost hear him swearing as he wrote those (“slides are so bullsh*t”). (Also interesting is when he recounts the times he was ambushed as a speaker. Reminds me of some of my political interviews.)
In any case, I agreed with him, and I think if I were in his position I would have felt the same way. In looking back, my thought process went something like this: “if this goes right, this is great for accessibility, it’s a little funny, because he’s a grumpy guy and I’ll play off that; if this goes wrong, I would have broken his demo exactly the way he didn’t want and that’s HILARIOUS” and so I just did it. In other words, my comedy brain took over and did a thing, consequences be damned.
Sorry Dave!
His table was quite full at lunch though (people so eager to talk to him about WordLand!), so I hope that means he got something out of it the day, too.
Afternoon Talks
After lunch, I went to Joe A Simpson Jr talk on the Full Site Editor. I’d had a similar trajectory as he had with site builders (Beaver and Elementor being my weapons of choice) and starting to moving back to FSE in the last 12 months or so. It really does feel much more optimised and gorgeous to work with. New clients are all getting the FSE experience now, and old clients will slowly get moved back as we refresh sites. As an aside: it’s hard to believe that Gutenberg itself has been around since 2018. With the project formally wrapping phase 2 (site editing) and barrelling into phase 3 (collaboration), now is definitely a good time to jump back into FSE if you haven’t already.
Ottawa is stunning at this time of year and it’s frankly criminal that I didn’t spend more time outdoors. So I went on the “Patio Track” and chatted with Clem a bunch on the “Patio Track” 😀 We discussed different cities in Canada, the future of AI and programming, his work, and I was just blown away by what a cool and driven dude he is.
Alycia Leno‘s talk “From Overwhelmed to Augmented” was something I debated going to. I wasn’t interested in using AI to “enhance” my creativity, but in the end curiosity won out; I wanted to hear what a self-described creative had to say about using AI in her workflow. I had to leave the room about half way through the talk because I actually got… quite angry.
If you read my Contributor Day recap, you’ll know I have reservations about AI. Nowhere is AI more of a threat and a problem than the creative industries: writers, visual/graphics artists, playwrights, actors, singers, every single one of these have already been hit. Folks talk about LLMs and AI being mere tools, and wasn’t the camera a tool as well and people were so worried about it back then, visual arts didn’t go away, what’s the difference now?
Here’s one difference: photography did not make copies of other artist’s art and replaced artists. When it did, it did so illegally (therefore controlled and frowned upon, and people with money helped enforced the rules and norms around the thing) and also on a much smaller scale. What LLMs and AI is doing to art right now is illegal and hugely exploitative: human artists creating art worldwide are being replaced by AIs being illegally trained on their art, without their consent, without compensation.
Sure, there’s talks about updating copyright laws and such; the lawsuits are stacking up. Lots of dollars will change hands some day in the mid to long-term future when this is all sorted out. Meanwhile, the LLMs continue to refine their algorithms and datasets without any checks whatsoever.
And here’s the thing. People who love to create will always create. Many of us will choose to give away our art for free because the prime currency we trade in is the enjoyment of others. And, guess what? Little guys like us will never see the level of protection afforded to the big players like Sony, Tolkien’s estate, etc. who can afford lawyers — who, by the way, really want to use AI for “efficiencies,” so they’ll lobby for the advantages that AI affords them even while condemning its use. So these LLMs will always have a free source to learn from, to refine, to replace human craft.
Consumers might be taught to value non-AI art, but how much can we count on that? Look around. How much are people already using and enjoying AI-generated art without any thought to the ethics (and environmental impact) of the thing?
So what’s the end game then? Art will survive. Art will always survive. That’s not the issue. But there will be a mass transfer of wealth from creators (lol as though we get a lot to begin with) to “generators” (think: corporations that use LLMs to generate stock images rather than purchase stock photos from a human photog/artist).
Don’t feed me bullsh*t about democratising art or making art “more available.” This is just taking money away from artists who spent years honing their craft, to give to someone who “refined their prompts” over the space of maybe five minutes.
And that f*cking sucks, man.
I spoke with Alycia after the talk (or maybe I found her on day 2?). I asked her, given that she says she uses (and encourages others to use) AI to replace your Minion, Mentor, and Muse, what will happen to the industry as a whole? What will become of new artists who will never have the experience of being someone’s minion or mentor? She says, human-created art will be even more highly valued (and I supplied, “like handmade Italian shoes,” which she agreed with). It’s what Clem and I discussed too: that there will likely always be a market for websites that are handcrafted and high-end.
So, art will become one of two things: a luxury that few can afford, or hobby pieces continually exploited by the rich to get richer. Great.
(Mind, Alycia is very generous and gracious, and has a lot of other cool things to say. We just disagreed on this one thing!)
Keynote: Jill Binder
Wrapping up the day was Jill’s talk “From Canada to the World” which knocked the week out of the park, honestly. It was such a vulnerable and insightful talk about working across cultures, told through stories of mistakes she had made. Such a great complement to Dee’s talk earlier in the day.
I had the pleasure of sharing an Uber with her later and we chatted about that, how her experience shaped her work today and the new professional direction she is taking. Phenomenal and inspirational stuff!
Wind Down
There were multiple “unofficial” events that evening, some heading to a pub to continue discussions and others going to a Senators game (where they won in shootout! go sens go!). I went out to eat ramen and drink sake and read, though, since I needed some introvert time, before heading back to my jail cell for the night.