There is an uneasy feeling these days when surfing the web that the internet has irrevocably changed. Log on to social media and you’re wading through a sea of influencers psy-opping you into buying stuff you don’t need. Scroll through LinkedIn and you can barely tell whether a post was written by a human or generated by Claude to rack up clicks and likes. Everywhere you look, the internet feels a little less human—and increasingly, it is. Recent studies suggest that at least half of the content posted online is AI-generated.
How then do we reclaim the internet as a space for genuine human connection and creativity? That’s partly the question the Mozilla Foundation, the 23-year-old accessibility-focused nonprofit behind the Firefox browser, is trying to answer with this year’s MozFest in Barcelona.
Held this week, the Mozilla Festival is an annual global gathering of developers, policymakers, and tech builders focused on building a more human future for technology. This year, the festival is asking how to make the internet more human—or, in its words, how to “rewild” it.
Fast Company spoke to Nabiha Syed, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation about this year’s festival, its themes, and why she believes nothing about the internet’s future is inevitable. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell me what rewilding means in this context of MozFest?
We can acknowledge that we live in a moment where the Internet sometimes feels like a monoculture. There’s like six dudes in hoodies who are making decisions about what everybody should be consuming, the platforms we should be on, the things that shape the market. And what we know from nature is that monoculture works until it doesn’t. Until there’s a collapse in an ecosystem.
So much of the open-source ideology that is core to Mozilla is about creating the structures for things to be wild and unpredictable and to go off in different directions and then later cross-pollinate. Last year’s theme for MozFest was unlearning: “Hey, we need to pause. What got us here isn’t necessarily gonna be what gets us to the next place?” Wilding is about saying, “Hey, what would it look like if we just let things bloom?” What if we had more people have more say over the way that we think the internet’s supposed to unfold and be?
Describe what was the wild internet? And what is illustrative of a monoculture internet to you?
I think about when I first learned how to code it was because I really wanted my MySpace to be amazing. I would view the source and make my page look like whatever I wanted it to look like. When I couldn’t quite get it that way, I’d go to GeoCities and make my own site in my own way. And there was freedom, interoperability, and contestability.
Even in the blogosphere, the way that we spoke to one another felt like you were actually having conversations and not worrying about bot interjections. There was a feeling of possibility and not just predetermined ways of interacting like, “You can comment in this way,” or “You can engage in this way.”
You got to create and build with the architecture as you wanted it. Every generation is always creative on any communications medium, but within the confines of a platform like Instagram. They can be innovative in how they use Finsta, or the way they shitpost, or the way they talk. But it’s still within the architecture that someone else has designed.
What the early internet felt like to me, and to so many people who have nostalgia for that time, is that you could play with the rules of the game, and they were committed to interoperability, transparency, and being able to peer under the hood.
Say more about what the consequences of that lack of interoperability, or the confined nature of our current platforms.
To me, the big thing is that it creates what we call imagination deficit. If you think that innovation comes from what the platforms provide to you—and your job is to play within the sandbox as it is created for you—it starts to inhibit your understanding of what is possible. Everything’s gonna be an endless scroll. Everything starts to look the same. Everything starts to look like it’s Instagram but for X. It’s Uber but for Y. Things start to become cookie-cutter .
Over time that changes our understanding of the possibility which is ultimately very bad for, you know, big concepts like our cognitive liberty, but also our ability to play online.
I think what was so special about the early internet is the feeling that you could just make new things and people could stumble upon them. It wasn’t mediated by algorithmic pseudo-wisdom or nudging you towards commercial ends. We are creating for one another—not to sell a course or become an influencer, or that always-lurking commercial logic that’s on these platforms. Removing that logic or at least creating other spaces where it doesn’t matter as much, is what’s so interesting about early internet times versus platform-dominated times.
Right. Well, I guess then the question is, where are those spaces online undominated by commercial incentives?
There’s two kinds of spaces. You can see it in “dark social” environments. You see it in the group chat, you see it in the Signal chat, you see it in these closed spaces where people feel like there can be a clear organizing principle of why you’re there. You’re not trying to show off for everybody. We’re here to actually communicate and create for one another.
The second are Dark Forest Operating System, some of the Yancey Strickler (co-founder Kickstarter) stuff of recreating slightly bigger groups. What’s interesting to me about DFOS is that that mentality feels a lot like kind of bulletin board-y vibes. It feels like we’re recreating spaces that were very Usenet-y. But they’re there, and if you know, you know. You’re invited into them. And I think that’s useful.
I don’t think everything needs to be radically, radically, radically open in order to have meaning. That’s not how human beings organize themselves. But what I worry that we’re losing is that if you only have nodes of dark social, or dark social types of principles, and no common—or not as many common places to all be together—then we endlessly silo, and then we lose sort of the moments and spaces of cross-pollination.
Do you see any open spaces that still have that ethos?
Yeah, I think where we see it in the Blueskies of the world. Rudy Fraser from Blacksky is one of our fellows. We’re actively celebrating him as a fellow and supporting his work as a fellow. I think there are experiments there, and we want to encourage them.
One of the reasons we have MozFest is that you want enough of those spaces to have moments of intersection and cross-pollination.I think we’re trying to figure that out.We’ve been to a place of radical openness of Twitter, where everything is out there. Then everyone is swinging to, like, the dark social, where it’s, like, the eight people in your chat.
And now, if there’s, you know, community-run federated platforms, then the work is like, “Okay, it’s not super small, it’s medium-size. How do they intersect in a mosaic together? Where does that happen?” And that’s really a lot of the purpose around MozFest: to have people’s own communities intersect with other communities in a dynamic way.
Well, let’s talk about that a little bit. You mentioned Rudy from Blacksky as a Mozilla Fellow. I think we should give readers a little bit of tone-setting about what it means to be a fellow at Mozilla, for people who might only know Mozilla as the cute fox browser. What programs, establish these spaces and foster these connections?
Thank you for the invitation to share that: Mozilla Foundation’s sort of core thesis at this moment is that imagination is not the domain of Silicon Valley. It belongs to the world—and that reflects the core initial promise of the internet.
Our work is to build from that imagination. We know that people are imagining different technology futures that are actually pro-human agency, pro-community—but they don’t always get the resourcing and the support that they need. Our interventions into that: our fellowships. Over the last few years, we’ve supported over 200 different fellows who share our one fundamental belief, which is, like, no part of technology is inevitable, and we get to decide. And that can be everything from, you know, spinning up OpenNews and talking about a new way of doing journalism, to having fellows like Camille François, who just started Robust Open Online Safety Tools—ROOST—to having fellows like Rudy to having fellows like Matisse, who’s working on open-source quantum. And so there’s a lot of different areas of technology that all benefit from the idea. We’re looking at cybersecurity. The internet is not what the internet was 25 years ago. It shows up in all these different ways.
Tell me about Mozilla’s incubator—what kinds of projects does it fund?
Earlier this year, we incubated Mozilla Data Collective, where we invested $10 million into a double-sided data marketplace that has ethical, fair licensing as the core of it. For a lot of creatives, they’re not against AI wholesale. They’re just against having their content taken and not getting compensated for it, and used to enrich a few. So creating a data marketplace where people can actually decide the terms under which they license their data is a way of having infrastructure for a better balance between creativity, intellectual property, and the reality of tech. We have an incubator cohort on democracy and AI, where we were like, “Is it democracy and AI? Democracy versus AI? We don’t know. Let’s figure it out.” And so we use our studio to step in to say: There’s a lot of hype on all sides of the AI conversation. What does it look like to put, you know, half a million dollars behind folks—each different project—that are actually trying to figure out how this works and what it looks like to build in a good way?
Half a million dollars is intentional. It is the same amount of money that, like, the Y Combinator gives out. But we think it’s important to have a different incentive of not short-term financial return, but building for mission and building for what we call product-community fit, not just product-market fit. So that’s the second big thing that we have, which is our studio. We just opened yesterday our open call for what we’re calling human-scale AI. Bigger is not better when it comes to AI. You do not need to rush for superintelligence to get a lot of the benefits. You can use small, local, private, tailored models, and we are incentivizing people to do exactly that. I’ll share that with you too. And then the last is: Look, you can champion amazing ideas, amazing people, amazing prototypes, and early-stage concepts, but you want them to find each other, and that’s where MozFest is really this flagship offering. Once a year, it has been happening for over 15 years, and it is a place for people all around the world to come together and say, like, “Hey, what are you building?”
Could you go into that incubator a little more? How are you rethinking incentives around funding and what’s the intention behind that?
This was born out of a very simple observation: For a lot of ventures, the core incentive is getting a financial return—often in the short term.
That incentive creates a whole lot of different behaviors that we think don’t encapsulate the full universe of everything that needs to exist in the world.
We’re asking what it would look like to fund people who have projects where they’re like, “Hey, I don’t think I want this to just be venture-backed.I’m not trying to make crazy money off of this. I just think this should just exist.”
Where are the spaces to do that? Philanthropy is one space to do it. You can get grants. We have philanthropic risk capital. We can make grants and also say, “Hi, welcome to the entire ecosystem of Mozilla”—of security researchers, of engineers, of developers, of policymakers, of operators who, over two decades, have this wealth of experience and this incredible network in over 120 countries—and open that up to people who are building.
In our incubator, we offer $500,000 of support. It’s $300,000 at first and then $200,000 follow-on.
We offer wraparound support, coaching, business model coaching, connections to other folks. It’s really bespoke support of, like, “What do you need?” In the last year, we helped someone figure out how to get a government contract, figuring out whether they should merge with another organization or not. Like, all of that messy reality of building something that’s beyond money, we bring to the table too, and the repeated encouragement that building for your community is gonna be more important than building for a fast buck.
I think that’s especially true in the AI age, where the cost of spinning up software is plummeting. The thing that will give durability and sustainability is having a community that’s bought in on what you’re doing, that will help you figure out the right business model. We do a lot of support around: What are the right business structures? What’s the right mission lock? How do you write your bylaws? (Obviously, as a nerdy lawyer by training, I’m like—a lot of this happens in governance—and all of those are the facets of what we bring to the table.)
It leads me to think that there are probably certain qualities that Mozilla’s risk capital looks for in founders or people looking to start projects that are out of the norm for other investment financiers.
We have a spirit that we try to select for which we call defiant optimism. You gotta believe the world is gonna be good ultimately, and can be good ultimately, but also stay ready to fight to get there, right? Hopeful optimism is “Yay, it’ll be fine.” That’s not our vibe.
Our vibe is you gotta be scrappy, you gotta be willing to fight, you have to have a little bit of that defiance—and you also believe that things are gonna be okay.
