I like to imagine that somewhere Thomas Kuhn and Everett Rogers meet once a week for coffee. The conversation is always the same. Kuhn pulls out a stack of papers and Everett Rogers goes through every page pointing out every instance where someone misused the term ‘paradigm’ and attributed it to him. Then Rogers pulls out a stack of papers and Kuhn does the same for all the ways people completely miss the point of everything Rogers ever wrote about the diffusion of innovation. The only thing I don’t like about my scenario is that I’m pretty much saying they’re both in hell, and I think they both deserve a lot better.

Roger’s 1962 book was about how farmers adopted new agricultural technologies and practices. I’d say farmers, as a group, are even more stubborn and set in their ways than web developers, though there are remarkable similarities in the amount of manure each encounters day-to-day. It was a landmark piece of scholarship. And it has almost no practical applicability to WordPress and Gutenberg, mainly because the focus was on products and practices that had already succeeded.

Gutenberg isn’t done. Heck, you still have theological debates over what Gutenberg even is. Seed corn doesn’t have that problem. VCRs didn’t have that problem (though individual VCR formats did. Betamax, anyone?). The Classic Editor plugin doesn’t have that problem. Disable Gutenberg doesn’t have that problem. They can be evaluated. They do a thing and people can kick the tires and talk about it and compare notes with others.

Automattic has the absolute right to try to rebuild the wings while the plane is still in the air. Would I have done it? Nope, but it’s neither my monkey nor my circus. And a lot of well-intentioned people are working very, very hard on it. I get that. I salute them. There’s nothing easy about any of it.

What does rub me the wrong way is the tut-tutting about being a “late adopter.”. Give me something to adopt. Something that works. Something that’s done. Then we can talk about growing corn. Until that point we’re just shoveling manure.