Computer Says Maybe

Alix: [00:00:00] Welcome to Computer Says maybe I am sitting down today with someone who runs, I think one of the most important institutions in the landscape of technology companies and products, and thinking about our technology future, Nabiha Syed. And I'm really excited to kind of have. I feel like a, like a little bit of conversation about like how you got into this.

Alix: 'cause I feel like Mozilla is a very strange beast and who would end up running it I think was a question. People were like, what is the next generation of Mozilla gonna look like? You're a lawyer. I feel like most, I sure am. Most people might not know that. Um, so you wanna talk a little bit about, I don't know, how did you go from being a lawyer to working in media and journalism to running this foundation?

Nabiha: Great wild journey. Also. Thank you for having me. I love what you do. So I have always loved the internet. I got onto a OL via free 30 day CDs that were definitely not pilfered from our neighbors mailbox and the through line, through [00:01:00] everything as I was like, oh my God, you can just organize. The world's information in one place.

Nabiha: This is wild. Like my parents who are immigrants from Pakistan, I remember my dad was like, Biddy, I got Encyclopedia Britannica. I remembered what that felt like to like, he brought it home. It was an old version from the library, like we had an encyclopedia. And so the jump from that to the internet was like.

Nabiha: Oh my God. Yeah. So even when I went to law school, the area I gravitated towards was internet law First Amendment, right? Like if you think about, well, we're putting all this information on this commons. Who gets access to what? In what way? What rises in prominence? What do we protect? Right? Was like the.

Nabiha: Fascinating set of questions and I also love always loved building things like when I was in law school, I started with a few other friends, the country's first media law clinic, those providing freelance journalists with legal help because turns out speaking online. Also carry some risk. [00:02:00] She says, a propo of nothing happening in the United States or elsewhere.

Nabiha: And then, you know, and I was always a lawyer for journalists who I thought like we're using this medium to great dramatic effect. From there, I was like at the New York Times at Buzzfeed, which was like being a lawyer for the internet. I started the day before the dress. Broke the internet and was there for so many groundbreaking legal news gathering things.

Nabiha: So I just kind of thought like, oh my God, how incredible to be in this space where we're really thinking about the rules of the road and the contours of how this incredible, groundbreaking commons reshapes all of our lives. The thing with law and with journalism both is that they're expost interventions.

Nabiha: When you're a lawyer, you're like, something bad happened. I guess we have to find a remedy. Of course, you can do proactive litigation, but the vantage point of it, the posture is necessarily almost always after the fact. Same with journalism, right? Yes. You're sense making about things that are happening, but the things are happening and then you're uncovering, [00:03:00] you're framing, you're making sense of it.

Nabiha: The itch I always had was like, but what if we were building it upfront, right? What if we weren't waiting for something to happen? What if we were operating in the ex ante, not just the ex post. And I always kind of had that itch, which is why I like built things when I was a lawyer and wrote a lot. And then it was fun to go to a journalism startup like the markup.

Nabiha: But when this sort of presented itself, I was like, oh, you could go to an internet OG stalwart that builds things, but with people at the heart, not people as, let's maybe not hurt them later. That just, how could I say? No.

Alix: I can't remember who introduced me to this phrase, but this idea of a reference implementation.

Alix: Yes. This idea that like if you want something to exist in the world and it doesn't currently exist, this sort of act of building the thing as a representative of those political ideas. And that Mozilla, that's like one of the primary ways it's thought of itself as strategically in the world. So it makes total sense that like, rather than react, um, let's

Nabiha: just do the thing and to have the [00:04:00] space to do it in an unconventional way that isn't Oh, yeah.

Nabiha: We think of people as consumers, right? So much of what feels like it's gone haywire from those early a OL like CD days is that people, at least my experience, I don't wanna speak for everyone, but my experience of the early days of the internet was like I was looking at people's source code to make my MySpace better, and that's how I learned how to code.

Nabiha: And I was experimenting with ideas on message boards. I was a creator. And then so much of being a creator. That wasn't internet experience, it was consumer. It became receiving and not making, and even the act of being a creator, which obviously is now like a lucrative role for people. Creator economy is a phrase that didn't exist in the same way with the same relevance 25 years ago.

Nabiha: Even that is still around like capital creation, capital generation. We and the community piece often feels like it's. Ancillary or secondary,

Alix: like bolted on.

Nabiha: Yeah. And a and a place like Mozilla, that's like not, especially as an open source [00:05:00] org, not only is community a nice to have or a euphemism for users.

Nabiha: It's actually the heart of what we do. Felt like an opportunity to like go all the way back to first principles and design from there, which is what feels really exciting about this next stage.

Alix: Well, let's turn to Mozilla as an organization. I mean, you're describing other philanthropies and how they think about disrupting what's happening and engaging in this world we find ourselves in.

Alix: I know the organization has changed a lot since you joined. Has just done a big rebrand is like stepping into Mozilla Festival later this year. Do you wanna talk a little bit about, since you joined, like all of the creative destruction,

Nabiha: maybe that's happened when you come into an org and you're a new later and you've had a perspective forged in the crucibles of other places.

Nabiha: There's always gonna be a little bit of disruption, but we had a lot and we had it quickly because. It was, as you say, creative destruction. I was looking at an organization that had really been a fantastic partner to a lot of civil society in a moment where I thought, we can widen the aperture. We can be bringing in the artists and [00:06:00] the designers and the developers and the parents and the teachers and so many different communities of people who are looking at the speed of technological development and saying, wait, what?

Nabiha: I don't want this. Right. And Civil society was extraordinary in calling out all of the ways that technological advancement was in fact not serving people and for a very long time. So it made sense that that was a focus for the last decade, but now. Civil society was successful in putting on the agenda.

Nabiha: The idea that like actually technology makes choices and makes possible different realities and it's not inevitable. And technology is in fact political, which was not a thing that people broadly accepted, I think 10 years ago and now is absolutely unavoidable. Like, yeah, tech choices are political choices.

Nabiha: So how do we, as part of a political project, bring in different kinds of people? To do what? Right At [00:07:00] that juncture you could be an awareness org. That's not what we wanna be. We wanna build different things. We wanna go back to those builder roots of the builder, DNA, of Mozilla and say, actually, if you were to gather together different swaths of people, you could be building technology that illustrates the alternative.

Nabiha: You don't just advocate for each, just don't talk about it. You actually build it and then say, we're building this thing and we're running into this. Problem with interoperability. So let's now talk about it from the vantage point of someone who's building something and being inhibited. This idea of like widening the aperture, but then focusing on building is really the core of the shift that's happened over the last year.

Nabiha: And then the other piece, which leads into the branding is what would it look like to be a tech company that's obsessed with humans, right? We could be talking about the pixels and like all, there's, there's a whole visual identity that goes with like, oh, we're talking about tech. And we very much wanted to say, Nope, we're obsessed with people.

Nabiha: People come first. Technology serves people. We're pro-human and we want that to be reflected in every single part of what we're [00:08:00] doing. So widen the aperture, focus on building, but for whom? For us, not for market benefit, not for some people's wallets to make sure it works for us. '

Alix: cause that introduces the question of how to fund the work.

Alix: 'cause I feel like building, especially in this environment, is a really resource intensive thing to do. Market share is something that Mozilla as a company with Firefox, it's like essentially a competitive brand within the browser world. Yeah. Um, people use Firefox as everyday consumers. That is an open source project, which doesn't necessarily lead to revenue to allow for the company to build other products.

Alix: I think it's a really innovative and interesting model where you have a company that's actually making. You know, large market products and then a foundation that's trying to disrupt and engage in the politics of the technology space within which that company's operating. So can you talk a little bit about how it's all structured and, and maybe a little bit on where the money comes from?

Nabiha: Yeah. Where the money comes from. One of my favorite topics, um, for the philanthropy, I think the opportunity of this moment is there actually are so many, not just. Philanthr, like [00:09:00] institutional philanthropies, but also family offices, high net worth individuals, just people around the world who do have capital, who have benefited from the extraordinary capital generating event that was the last 20 years.

Nabiha: Yeah. And they are looking around saying, oh no, are we Dr. Frankenstein? Like, did we do this? Yes, yes. The answer is yes. Yeah. And it's like, but you can do something about that. And it's not only the people who've made wealth through technology, but people are just waking up and realizing that we are living through something that is changing rapidly in ways that we do not understand what the second and third order effects are.

Nabiha: And they're not willing to just be like, well, let's see. Right. They're just not willing to do that. And so what we are seeing in just the first year of the foundation's like. Fundraising under this new strategy is that there's a lot of people who are like, wait, you're doing something about it.

Alix: Yeah,

Nabiha: we're in.

Nabiha: And I think the piece that's really critical is that. We're not just saying we need to stop what's happening now. I believe in [00:10:00] harm mitigation and harm reduction as a strategy. Absolutely. And that's why we, you know, have fellows and fund folks who are doing that work, but it's not enough. Like it's necessary but insufficient.

Nabiha: I think in order to say credibly, there is a different way of presenting data sets to developers for them to build, you have to do the thing and say, I'm not just over here. Saying, I wish it was different. I'm building the alternative. Do you want to resource it? Mm-hmm. And if people like the clarity of that vision and activity, 'cause it does feel like it's breaking up a binary of, oh, there's the naysayers over here and there's the real innovators over there.

Nabiha: A binary perpetuated by monopolistic acting companies because the binary serves them. They're like, we are the good ones who are building stuff. Those people are just the haters and our positioning is like. No. Yeah, there's a whole swath in between of what people are doing and critically [00:11:00] not all of those things need to like be venture backed scale businesses.

Nabiha: Yeah. Some of them could be small businesses, some of them can be nonprofits, some of them can be volunteer code libraries that people just maintain for love of the game. Like there's a whole universe of how you can build technology that's right in here.

Alix: Yeah.

Nabiha: And that's success too. So if I were to take like a direct line of sight shot at something, it would be the idea that scale is the only way to be successful.

Nabiha: Because what that has motivated for an entire industry and then people who've like been in that zeitgeist is like bigger is best. And the way you get to bigger the fastest is by dark patterns and manipulation and all these things. You gotta just break some eggs to make an omelet. That mentality broke everything.

Alix: Yeah,

Nabiha: it broke everything. And so now's the time to be like, we're building in between and we just see that that is really a message that resonates.

Alix: Yeah. I would also say if you just accept that binary and then add time, we don't get anywhere good. I think if it's [00:12:00] only these companies and a small handful of nonprofits who are screaming at the top of their lungs that this is all bad.

Alix: I feel like we don't, yeah, we don't actually, nothing gets better.

Nabiha: Nothing gets better, nothing gets better. Also, it's like not clear to me that that plays out really well. If you're to take the time analysis over how much time, right. To like. Centralized power in a few is really powerful some period of time, and then ultimately gets brittle.

Nabiha: The lesson of humanity is like the many does beat the money every time. It often implodes in a way that's really unpleasant, and I don't want that. I'm not trying to like 1789 myself, like, I don't want that. So I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Before this binary becomes. Even more tempestuous than it already is.

Nabiha: Yeah. What if we were to just fill in the middle, complicate

Alix: it. Yeah. With all these

Nabiha: other alternatives and they're all good and valuable and meaningful, and create value in people's lives. It's cool.

Alix: I will say Abe Hanni says that critique is a service, and I think that's true. It is not to say that there aren't important roles to be played on the end of those spectrums, [00:13:00] but I totally agree that being more dynamic and sort of thinking about alternative models, which is why I think Mozilla is something that people return to again and again to say.

Alix: Wouldn't it be amazing if you had a company that could build things and also wasn't trying to scale as fast as possible and exploit as much as possible? Totally, yeah.

Nabiha: And I will say on the critique point, I actually take a lot of the critiques as forms of instruction, right? Mm-hmm. If the critique is, hey, the thing that you've innovated is harming these people, well fun fact, that means you're not done innovating yet.

Nabiha: 'cause you can't be. A good innovator and be like, and by the way, some people just die. Hope. That's fine. Yeah. And so the critiques actually create the problem space often in deeply articulate, well-researched robust ways. This isn't like people like writing comments on the internet. When I look at so much of the tech critique literature, it is.

Nabiha: Documented. It is rich, it is engaging. It's a dream for someone who wants to solve a problem, to be like, oh, you've outlined the shape of what's not working. Can we fill it with something that's better? What I think is more complicated, [00:14:00] frankly, is the idea of like, where are the areas in which like we just don't need tech at all.

Nabiha: Like there isn't a tech solution that fills this because this is not something that should be. Teched. Yeah. And I find I have no answers in this space. I just struggle. I'm presenting it as a like authentic struggle. The issue of people turning to chatbots for therapy. Is one that actually stretches my mind in a lot of different directions because I'm like, actually I want everyone to have access to mental healthcare services.

Nabiha: And also, yeah, and, and I want it to be quality mental healthcare services. And I know that. That's not possible because of the healthcare landscape and access that we live in. Is this better than nothing? But then does that create attachment to a non-human? Like, what is going on here? This is a problem.

Nabiha: Yeah, and abstention is one option there. There are areas where I'm the first to confess, like I don't have. The answers. Yeah. But I think that's what's great about the Mozilla community oriented model, which is like, yeah, I don't have [00:15:00] answers, but I sure shit believe that someone does. And our job is to run into the void and say, this is really hard.

Nabiha: We don't know what to do. Someone has to grapple with it though. And we can use the festival in these other spaces as really honest broker convening spaces to be like, I don't know. And you might not know, but I really do believe that someone can figure it out. So

Alix: let's

Nabiha: go.

Alix: I wanna go back to this thing about when harm happens, it's basically just a sign that the innovation hasn't completed.

Alix: 'cause I feel like when you, we were first starting this conversation talking about the tension between reacting versus being proactive in terms of how we construct, you know, the world that we wanna see. And I think a lot about an interview that Sam Altman did with Casey Newton, like the week before he got fired.

Alix: Um, yeah. And he was describing the process of deciding to launch Chachi PT into the world. And he said. He needed to see how society was going to engage with it to understand the path to productizing it. And there was this, obviously because Casey Newton is Casey Newton, there was no [00:16:00] follow up and pressurizing and saying like, oh, so you wanted to generate a lot of harm and then figure out the path to like monetizing this product.

Alix: Is that an okay way of thinking about the world? But it makes me wonder, how do you square this sort of. Need to be thoughtful enough to put products into the world that aren't gonna cause harm, but also needing that kind of iterative exploration of how people are gonna engage with the technology to actually advance it.

Nabiha: Ooh, it's a juicy one. Right? Because like I always wanna start with the humility of like, we don't know Yeah. What's gonna happen? People have many different lessons from the existence of 2020, but the big lesson for me was like, I did not have global pandemic shut down on my dance card. I have limited faith in my ability to predict the future.

Nabiha: Sure. Yeah. It's not gonna stop me from trying. Yeah. But I just have humility about the fact that I'm not always gonna know. Yeah. And so I am initially sympathetic to the idea that like, you don't always know how people are gonna use something. Totally. 'cause people are real creative. Yeah. Um, yeah. I didn't have it on my dance card that people were gonna use AI for therapy.

Nabiha: Chatbots like never, would've, never would've thought of [00:17:00] that. Fall in

Alix: love with them as well. Yeah. Did not like, would never have thought

Nabiha: it, I'd be like, cheating on their homework a plus. Definitely saw that happening. Yeah. Right. Didn't see this

Alix: cheating on their spouses. Not so much. Yeah. Like,

Nabiha: like, didn't see that.

Nabiha: So like I start from the humility of like, yeah, there are some things that you're not gonna be able to predict. There's other things where just there's just table stakes testing that you need to be able to do. Totally.

Alix: Yeah.

Nabiha: That like, just 'cause you don't know everything doesn't mean that the binaries, that you know nothing.

Nabiha: Right. So like what would've the rollout have looked like if it was like we're gonna, especially with the money that they had, we're gonna have we robust focus groups throughout the world using and testing. And like red teaming it. What would that have looked like if they were like, what if we took five years and like played around with it?

Nabiha: Yeah. What would it look like if we like rolled it out to like research labs in this way and had them test it? What if we went to experts with other areas of domain expertise? Mm-hmm. Because actually maybe therapists or psychologists would've been like, you know how people are gonna use this? They're gonna use this 'cause they're lonely.

Nabiha: Which I [00:18:00] wouldn't have seen and you wouldn't have seen, and Sam Altman wouldn't have seen. But someone might have

Alix: a non-judgmental space with continued conversation that like, I mean like a therapist is probably gonna clock that like immediately, right? Yeah. And

Nabiha: so I think you have this responsibility to be like, I don't know, but who might?

Nabiha: One of the things I love about just open source, not just as a development modality, but actually as a whole mindset and a philosophy. Many eyes, all bugs are shallow. Right? So like could you be the version of that for chat? GPT wasn't like open it all up and let's go. It was how can we in a responsible way, engage all of these different eyes?

Nabiha: Mm-hmm. To catch the bugs. And I do think that you can't talk out of both sides of your mouth saying this is gonna change the entire world and upend the entire apple cart. And it's so bad. And we might not have jobs and like the whole planet might be covered with data centers, maybe, I don't know. Or space

Alix: also.

Alix: Yeah. Yeah. And

Nabiha: be like, but we didn't take five years to talk to people.

Alix: That was also happening at the time. And I think that like. One of, I feel like the untold [00:19:00] stories of this is that Sam Altman released a technology into the world that all the other labs were not going to release yet. Yep. Because it wasn't ready.

Alix: Yep. And he's just like, basically like upended the entire global economy and our entire social fabric because he was just like YOLO with

Nabiha: Yeah, let's go. User interface.

Alix: Yeah.

Nabiha: Like imagine if we had just been like, Hey, nuclear weapons. Everyone, everybody, everyone gets it. Bio weapons. Yay. You get, watch the Oprah that you get one.

Nabiha: I'm so curious how you're gonna use this like, yeah. We, uh, restraint is also a design principle. Totally right? Yeah. And knowing when to engage and who to consult and that, I think there's a lot to look at. The other piece though, just thinking back to like late 2022 and everything throughout 2023 that, I don't wanna just say it was those people over there.

Nabiha: Like, I wanna take, especially with civil society, philanthropy, accountability for. It's important to know your piece and everything. The response of like, okay, well we've just gotta figure out the right tooling. What's the right tool? You should use this tool. What's this tool? What tools are [00:20:00] you using that the analysis and engagement of it was, how am I going to use it right now?

Nabiha: Right. And that that's where the conversation gravitated towards and we see a lot Yeah. Of incentive around that. Wasn't created by Sam Altman No. Or Silicon Valley. Right. We, there's a moment can be made, but you gotta meet the moment. Totally. And we met the moment with a lot of like, all right, let's get in.

Nabiha: And I say this now, I was just talking. To a group of nonprofits we were supposed to have a workshop on, like how to use AI in your company. And it was like, Hey, so I'm actually not gonna tell you any tools. I'm not gonna tell you like chat GPT versus Claude. I'm going to ask you to sit down with your own stakeholders and identify what are the pain points in your organization.

Nabiha: Where's the actual friction? Do change

Alix: management exercise. It's not a technology exercise. Yeah, it's not

Nabiha: exactly. Yeah. Like there are other modalities of engagement of analysis here. Yeah. And I kind of feel like that was the message we needed to come out with to be like, okay, cool, cool. You're right.

Nabiha: There's a new tool. [00:21:00] You're right. It could really change the game. Do you know yourself? Do you know the org? Do you know your entity? Do you know the society? Only after you do that, can you really apply a tool? There was a techno solutionist reaction

Alix: Yes.

Nabiha: To this. The I playing armchair psychologist. I have no qualifications for this.

Nabiha: Yeah. Legal. Yes, journalistic. Got it. It's okay.

Alix: Caveat accepted.

Nabiha: I think there were so many people that were caught unaware about the extent to which the internet infiltrated every part of our lives and our politics. That there was a, we're not gonna miss out again. It was like FOMO on steroids. Yeah. Right.

Nabiha: And I especially felt that with a lot of journalists, not so much journalists, the people in the business of journalism, a lot of, we didn't rise or clock the Internet's disruption to our business model fast enough. We thought we could resist it. We thought we could opt out. We thought we weren't going, and then it just like ate lunch.

Nabiha: Then we tried. Tried to pivot

Alix: to video. Yeah.

Nabiha: It ate everyone's lunch. Right? Like we saw the decimation of the business model [00:22:00] to great harm to all of us. And so I totally get the instinct to be like, not again. You're not gonna catch me again. And so there became the like, I wanna experiment with it, I wanna engage with it, I wanna understand it, and I don't denigrate the desire to experiment, but experimenting and applying it and then championing it and then accepting it as inevitable and that everyone else needs to, it was a whole thought spiral.

Nabiha: Totally. That was actually spiraling.

Alix: Totally, and I feel like, I mean, this is a long standing thing that I've struggled with, which is. There are a community of people who get really excited every time there's a new technology in terms of how it can be used for social services delivery or for nonprofits to be more efficient with limited resources.

Alix: It's a whole space that I have felt like historically just hasn't engaged politically with the sort of underlying politics of the technologies that they're rushing to adopt. Like if you look at the trajectory of Salesforce, for example, it was so obvious when they were like, we're gonna roll out these.

Alix: Pro bono [00:23:00] tools for civil society, and then every nonprofit rolled onto these CRMs with Salesforce and then. It was always gonna happen that five years, six years later, they roll that up and then basically say, now we're gonna charge you for these things. And we're probably using your data to train whatever models we're using internally, which is

Nabiha: very logical for Salesforce.

Alix: Totally, totally logical for their s sales operating in this Makes sense. Yeah, totally. But I feel like not, I haven't seen the maturation of a civil society that can say. When a new technology arrives on the scene, the first thing to do is not have foundations fund a ton of trainers to go into every nonprofit and be like, are you using ai?

Alix: Like, I know there are a lot of well-meaning people that are just trying to improve the efficiencies of organizations that are trying to do good in the world, but those people then don't engage in the underlying political conversations that I feel like are so essential of understanding how these technologies are changing the world.

Alix: And I just wish there was more engagement between. The technology, politics people, and the technology service provision people. And I don't necessarily know how to make that happen, but it's [00:24:00] just a thing that I couldn't, you could,

Nabiha: like it's fun to play the counterfactual, right? Yeah. Like what would we have done?

Nabiha: Like look, knowing what we know, what should we have done, right? Because you could imagine a universe where like, hi, okay, so you may be hearing a lot about this new technology that's out there. I wanna do a readiness evaluation. Do you guys actually have the data? Is your data structured and cleaned in a way that could be useful for you to use these tools?

Nabiha: Oh, it's not. Okay. That's the intervention for you? Oh. Do you have a service delivery problem that could be solved by something else? Very straightforward. Like yeah, maybe digitizing your records or having a spreadsheet instead of just like reams and reams of paper. Because nonprofits are in all various states of Totally, yeah.

Nabiha: Technological sophistication, and they're doing a lot for a little, so that's not a critique, right? Yeah. But if the approach had been a readiness one, like how do you know if you're ready to do this? What are your actual problems? A holistic evaluation.

Alix: Yeah.

Nabiha: Regardless of whether they adopted the technology or not, it would've been net beneficial to the field.

Alix: Yeah. [00:25:00]

Nabiha: And it could have still been prompted by the hype moment, right. But it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Before you leave. Yeah. What else do you need to do? Get your house in order. Can we help you get your house in order? Can we give you AI readiness or prep, like technology prepared? I don't even link it to ai.

Nabiha: Technology preparedness. Yeah. Training. And then it's like, do you have data scientists? Like have you thought about this? Oh, actually what you need is like you need a strategic planning consultant. Like you don't even need this. It's a something else problem. That is the counterfactual universe that I wish we had lived in.

Nabiha: Yeah.

Alix: I also think philanthropy incentivizes. Very specific focus on new things. So those organizations are not getting resources maybe to do strategic planning, but they are getting resources to go to a workshop on ai. And I think those, some of those incentive structures get kind of complicated.

Nabiha: Totally.

Nabiha: I mean, I think about this with businesses and organizations generally. It's the uns, sexiest things that are actually the most catalytic in the same way that people like, I love reading Architectural Digest. Do they ever show you about the plumbing of a house? [00:26:00] No. Would you buy a house that didn't have plumbing?

Nabiha: Probably not. Probably not. Yeah. And so there's just like necessary components of something Yeah. That you need to deal with before the pretty pieces? Yes. And honestly, if people thought of Mozilla as a place of like they're handling all that unsexy shit, I would not hate that.

Alix: Yeah.

Nabiha: I would not hate that universe because it is fundamentally what's more catalytic to the work that needs to be done.

Alix: And you build those foundations that you can build on top of. I mean, I think the architectural one is a really good metaphor for this.

Nabiha: Yeah. And who knows where you can go from there, but you gotta get your house in order. I also think from just a pro innovation perspective, if you are able to equip people to engage with tools in their own way, they might just surprise you with what they come up with.

Nabiha: Right? Because I so fundamentally believe in like people's creativity. Which is why I loved former version of TikTok and who knows what's gonna happen with that. Like I just like, people are so creative and they're so funny and they can think of things that you can't think of. If we [00:27:00] actually equipped people to be like.

Nabiha: We're just trying to get your house in order so you're ready to experiment with this. Mm-hmm. On your own terms. And PS you, you could also not like, you could just opt out. I actually think we would get something way more dynamic and interesting than, here are the seven tools, select from them.

Alix: Totally.

Alix: Like that means pressure chamber of you must, you must select one.

Nabiha: Like no one who's ever worked with people who create things. Would be like, ah, yes, create a pressure chamber with financial incentive. That's where the best ideas come from. No way we know that's not where ideas come from. And so I actually think like as a person who deeply, deeply, deeply believes in innovation and not just in the like buzzwordy way, like I believe in people's creativity, we need to incentivize the conditions for that deeper creativity to happen.

Alix: Well, let's turn to where for Mozilla, I feel like a lot of that creativity comes from, which is Mozilla festival. Do you wanna talk a little bit about. What it is and what this year's means. It feels like a signpost to where you all are headed more broadly.

Nabiha: So I'm gonna tell you about this year's theme.

Nabiha: [00:28:00] Then I'm gonna tell you about like what it was and kind of what we're trying to do. So this year's theme is unlearning. Both a play on machine learning and also the idea that like what gets you to the future is probably not what got you to the present. And there are a whole lot of really difficult conversations that need to be had that aren't gonna be had on a shiny, shiny, you know, like, oh, and so then what did you think about this?

Nabiha: Kind of like gloves off. Setting right. We need to get into the messy bit and like challenge some of our assumptions, both as a way of building bonds, but also getting to the meat of real problems, for example. If you hate advertising and all the incentives it creates. I understand that. How else do you fund a free and open web?

Nabiha: I'm not saying it has to be advertising, I'm just saying like I'm taking a lot of like ideas here. We should have that conversation. What does the future of SEO look like when we're trying to appeal to AI agents? 'cause that's how people are searching like. What, [00:29:00] and we have Nelly Mensa, who's the head of innovation for LVMH, like thinking about like a luxury brand that's like, how do you create luxury experiences for.

Nabiha: An AI agent. Like what? Having those conversations that feel a little like off the beaten path, but also just getting into it, what are assumptions we made in the early web that like, could have been different? What are we doing that's right and wrong and trust and safety? Like, I want the unlearning aspect of the festival to really come to, its for to open people up to challenge themselves and shift their perspective.

Nabiha: So confession time, I've never been to a MozFest.

Alix: That's fascinating.

Nabiha: Never been to one, heard so much about it for years. Like every year wanted to go, something happened. There's some reason I couldn't, yeah. Couldn't afford to go when I was a student. Couldn't figure something like there was always something.

Nabiha: Mm-hmm. But I heard about it, like existed as a lore in my mind, and the lore was always. I learned something that I had no idea about, or I didn't know how to work this problem, and someone random was [00:30:00] like, I'll help you. It was collaborative. It was chaotic, it was messy. It was like artists and designers and activists and technologists like all kind of hanging out and figuring shit out together in a way that fell.

Nabiha: Unplanned, but the emergent property of it was always dynamic and that lure is part of what lured me to Mozilla, where I was like, oh wow, think about that magic. It's so different than we all go to conferences and they're. Very slick and very curated, and you're not really surprised by anything. I want it to feel a little sharp, a little raw, a little edgy, but not in a way that's meant to be like provocative for provocateurs sake.

Nabiha: It's like, we gotta figure this stuff out. No one is coming to save us. No one else is coming to save us. It's just gonna be us. And that's kind of the vibe.

Alix: I feel like there's also a shift I've, I've only been to. Two fests. Uh, one was a small one and one was a really big one in London just before. Yep. The pandemic.

Alix: But I, I feel like there's also this kind of history of community that [00:31:00] was like very. I'm just gonna say it, white, nerdy, like Northern European, privacy oriented. I would say like as a primary way of thinking about the world that like basically a lot of corporate technologies are plays for data and access to things about you.

Alix: So let's build our own, because that's actually a really kind of beautiful way to construct the technology we want. But it was a pretty exclusive space. Because it ended up being, you know, engineers who, maybe this was like hobbyist projects and they would come to MozFest and be like, come hang out. And like really like beautiful, like I think that probably are very social spaces for people.

Alix: Pretty small number of people. But it feels like you all are trying to kind of make this a much more inclusive, much bigger. Conversation. Yep. I feel like there's gonna be growing pains with that. Like how are you, how are you thinking about it? My, yeah. I mean,

Nabiha: can I tell you the growing pains alone for this year?

Nabiha: We're holding it in Barcelona where we have a relationship with the city. 'cause the very first Mo Fest happened there.

Alix: Wonderful city.

Nabiha: Wonderful city. Visa access.

Alix: Oh god. Yeah.

Nabiha: [00:32:00] Sheen.

Alix: Man. It's a, it's not a joke, it's a thing. A joke. Yeah. It's

Nabiha: not a joke. It happens to be a year where so many in civil society that we're reaching out to had their funding cut in very dramatic, unpredictable ways earlier in the year.

Nabiha: Everyone's trying to figure it out, and we're trying to figure out how to resource more people to come. So between Visa woes, restricting access from global majority to real financial gaps of getting there, the number of people who are reaching out saying, I really, really wanna come, but like, I don't know if I can get a visa in time.

Nabiha: Like that's a real growing pain. And it's a real part of the analysis of like, okay. Maybe this year we'll have first pancake vibes, taste delicious. Not fully ready yet. And that's okay because it's actually part of like building in the open. We gotta try it, we gotta do it. And maybe we'll find that there's a relationship you can build with the government to like ease visas.

Nabiha: Like we're gonna figure out what all the interventions are, but the pain points are real between travel restrictions, financial restrictions. That's [00:33:00] a lot of the world that we're trying to call in. There's also gonna be the. Mozilla Why? Right? With some of the communities that we've reached out to, they're like, oh, we don't even know what you do.

Nabiha: Like what is a Mozilla? And I'm like, great, let me tell you. And that'll take a couple years to iron out too. But anything worth doing takes a little bit of time to do, but you still gotta try. And that's really what we want this to be. And the programming all I will say, even with all those hurdles. The programming is wild and incredible.

Nabiha: Yeah. Who are some of your favorite people coming? Oh my God, there are so many good ones. Josh Nesbit is doing a mutual aid wall, just like a living technology enabled mutual aid wall as an installation. That's there. That's like everything we need. We actually already have within us the idea of relational technology that actually helps us facilitate closeness and bonds rather than like broadcast consumption is an area that I'm really excited to play, and there's a lot of work happening there.

Nabiha: There's a lot on feature of creativity and [00:34:00] critical thought, whether it's from a feminist lens or from a children's rights lens. Like a lot of different vantage points on that. A lot of your like. Reliable privacy, encryption fair, but also like quantum. What's gonna happen with our, with encryption? Are we gonna break it?

Nabiha: Let's discuss. And so even in the sort of mainstays of Mozilla work, there's a lot of, are we ready for what's coming? And that's what's so fun about bringing in experts because. There are people who work in Quantum that this is all they've been thinking about. They have a real line of sight of what we need to do that has not been broadly normalized.

Nabiha: Right? So how can we also act in that way? We also have like futurist thinkers, speculative design folks, like there's just a really motley crew of people that'll help us unlearn what we think we need to know.

Alix: I mean, I feel like this is the biggest challenge right now for people that have worked in this space for a long time.

Alix: Is that like. It's no longer an elite nerd club, um, of people that are passionate about the intersection of technology and society. It's like everyone, and I think finding a [00:35:00] way to build bridges and open up spaces that have historically been expert oriented, like very technical people who like, that's their jam getting together.

Alix: We now have to find ways to make those spaces bigger, make those spaces more inclusive and more complicated. And I think that's just like for everyone. That's an extremely challenging proposition.

Nabiha: Oh my God. It's so, I mean, I, let me tell you, I'll tell you about a moment in which I was severely wrong about something because I think it's important to lead with those, like everyone has them.

Nabiha: I was talking to a group of like youth activists and I started with my normal, like I fell in love with the internet. Yeah. And some, I was like, done with my spiel and she, this woman raised her hand and she's like, I'm glad that you had that. We don't have that. I've never experienced, like what you're describing sounds like when people say that they bought soda pop for 5 cents in 1920s and I was like, Ugh.

Alix: Yeah,

Nabiha: she's not wrong though. Right. And so I'm Aging

Alix: is really irritating, isn't it? It's challenging. I

Nabiha: literally trying to pay a lot of money for that to not be visible, but it just still happens. Um, but what she was saying was profound. Yeah. Was that I [00:36:00] have. A dream that's nostalgic in its origin that I felt the glimmer of.

Nabiha: So in my heart I'm like, it could be good again. 'cause it, it almost was. Yeah. And that's so different than saying I didn't get a childhood 'cause I got plunged into the demon scape Oh yeah. Of like gobbling up my attention all the time. And you want me to believe it could be good. Like based on what? Yeah, and I really like sitting there.

Nabiha: I was like, thank you for that honesty. Right? We're not starting from the same place. So like the tech nerds that like also felt that glimmer of possibility and the sense of agency that comes from like, I can just look at the source code and hack my own thing. That's a really different mindset from a person who's never seen that, never grown up with that only understood products that were slick and smooth and not like rem mixable in that way.

Nabiha: How do you bridge. To that, and how do you bridge in a productive way that's not just like burn it all down, which is a viable option. There are [00:37:00] many people at Moz Fest who are burn it down people, and I love that energy 'cause Lord, we need it. But how do you get that harness, even that energy into the act of building anew?

Nabiha: Because it is creative destruction. Even if you're gonna burn it down, something must come in instead. I had someone say to me at a Mozilla gathering, oh, you don't really look like an open source person. And I was like,

Alix: whoa, what does that mean exactly?

Nabiha: I was like, tell me more.

Alix: Yeah.

Nabiha: And they're like, you just don't.

Nabiha: And I was like, mm-hmm. And what did you mean by that?

Alix: Yeah, yeah. Let's get more specific here. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, my

Nabiha: favorite. Like, what? What do we mean by that? And they're like, just the like, I dunno. And I'm like.

Alix: Okay. Walk it back button,

Nabiha: like back just moonwalk out of this situation. Yeah, totally. Um, you know, but people have latent presumptions about who is included.

Nabiha: Totally. Yeah. And who is not. And like that was a very honest word, fumble Totally. Of something that was not an unfair observation of like, would I have fit in seamlessly at like MozFest 2.0? Maybe, maybe not. Right? And so that's gonna be work to do too, which [00:38:00] is our people are the people who want to roll up their sleeves.

Nabiha: And get in it. And if you believe that like we deserve a better tech future and you're willing to roll up your sleeves and do the work for it, you're ours. Like you're our people. Come on in. But you know, you can say that, but you have to live that and show people that for a while before they trust you, which is fair.

Alix: Totally. I also think it points to this bigger question of like in the no code movement.

Nabiha: Yeah. Like

Alix: basically this desire. Because it, it also connects to corporate control of spaces because it's like, no code for you, code for us that we we're controlling. We manage that backend, we lease it to you. But there's also something really wonderful about that because essentially it expands access.

Alix: And I think a lot about this tension between access and agency.

Nabiha: Oh my God and I, I think of them as like a, it's basically an in the funnel, right? Which is like, I want you to play around in no code. Playground if it helps you build the muscle of confidence Totally. That this is a thing that you can do.

Nabiha: Yeah. And then I wanna be like, [00:39:00] welcome. Yeah, totally. Like, come on in, come change the

Alix: mainframe.

Nabiha: Yeah. Yeah. Of like, you learned how to do in the same way that it's like you learn about civics in like seventh grade and you're like, yay. And then you go and vote later. Like, I can totally appreciate the wisdom of you gotta start somewhere and you have to start in a way that meets people where they are and make them comfortable.

Nabiha: But it's not enough. Right. Like it's not a replacement for it is an on-ramp into, and that's a very different conceptualization and that's something that I look for a lot of, like are we working towards building people's sense of agency and participation? Versus just assuming it as static. Like you have it or you don't have it, you get it or you don't.

Nabiha: It's about building and capacity, building a muscle. Yeah.

Alix: Cool. Okay, well last question, like thinking about this year, thinking about, I mean, you've mentioned a few times this much longer arc of like where Mozilla is headed. Do you wanna talk a little bit, let's say 10 years from now, Mozilla. We're on Mars.

Alix: Mozilla, everybody's using Firefox. Just kidding. Um, not

Nabiha: kidding,

Alix: not [00:40:00] kidding. Uh, what, what has Mozilla done? What, what role does it play in society if everything goes the way that you're kind of imagining it

Nabiha: for the foundation? There's one thing I want us to be associated with in like 10 years time, and I want people to think of us with this concept of product community fit versus product market fit.

Nabiha: The idea of product market fit, I think has incentivized a whole lot. Of behavior that leads to these shortcuts of like, well just like isolate your market, segment it in this way, like use these sticky patterns to keep them locked in. It's not necessarily, or inherently an agency building approach, it creates a whole set of downstream incentives in a way that like can be good, but not necessarily if we were to not use market thinking and say, okay, what's your product community fit Like, are who are you serving?

Nabiha: Is it enough to just serve a hundred people? Great. Do that. Is it enough to just have like a, something that gets built and is maintained by one volunteer as a careful steward over time? Guess what? That's enough. Like to really [00:41:00] normalize the idea that there are many different ways of serving your community.

Nabiha: It starts with asking them with what they want and then creating the feedback loops of constantly nurturing that and that knowing that like hyperscale growth isn't the only form of winning. That there's all these other lenses that are equally sufficient and valuable and good enough. I would've felt like that's a core principle idea that I think leads to very different downstream incentives for people and will allow and unleash a very different kind of engaging and building, some of which will be wildly successful.

Nabiha: And everyone will use and have market dominance. Great, okay, whatever. And others won't. And that's fine because you can have success at any scale. And I think that community heartbeat of the work. Really matters. The other thing I want us to be associated with is a sense of joy. Like if it's not fun, what are we even doing here?

Nabiha: Okay. Human beings are complicated and also we're not like, we like to gather with one another. We like to make stuff, eat berries, vibe with each [00:42:00] other. It's about joy. It's about fun, and so much of the language around technology is around like domination and control. And I just want to unleash something that I had the privilege of feeling when I got on the internet for the first time, which is like joy, surprise, serendipity.

Nabiha: And if people associate Mozilla with that first as a place to go, and then use that as a jumping off point to build in a way that serves them. I'd love it.

Alix: Success. I love this idea of displacing scale as the proxy for success because it feels like scale is that path to concentrated domination, which is what is so soul sucking about what we're experiencing right now,

Nabiha: and it creates these incentives for people.

Nabiha: I mean, you see this from folks who like go through Y Combinator for example, and talk about their experiences of like. You're sold. There's one way of being and there's one way of being successful, and those are all the incentives. And then your financial incentives draw you that way. So even if you started off somewhere very different, the incentive structure that you're operating with drew you into a [00:43:00] real different life.

Nabiha: And that's just not what it has to be like. It's like, you know what else is a really successful business? Your local dry cleaner, okay? They're not trying to be like world domination dry cleaner, they're just trying to serve. I don't know. You

Alix: haven't met my local dry cleaner.

Nabiha: Trying to serve a community meaningfully with something of value to be rooted in a place.

Nabiha: I want people to feel that that is. Good and enough. And I will say that I think some of the most enlightening moments of like engaging with our fellows past and present or other partners, particularly folks who are working in non Anglocentric areas, they already know that like yeah, they're like, you guys have a scale obsession.

Nabiha: Like we are cool with. That being good enough. And I think there's so much opportunity there to be like, what is the wisdom of creation that you have? And then how do we make sure that like capital flows, amplification flows to actually normalize that versus like we, we have this dominance because so much capital [00:44:00] is tied up in this perspective, which is why we have a lot of work to do.

Alix: I think you can also scale structures that enable pluralism. Um, and I think that's a exciting thing. Okay. This is really lovely. Thank you for sort of this whistle stop tour of, uh, your last year and hopefully your next five. Yeah. Um, this is great. Thank you

Nabiha: for having me.

Alix: Yeah.

Alix: Alright, thanks to Nabiha for coming on the show, especially in the run up to Moz Fest, which is gonna be next week in Barcelona. We will be there in full force and we're gonna be recording from Barcelona with a couple of exciting things. Um, the first is I'm gonna be moderating a couple of really great conversations that we will have available on our YouTube channel.

Alix: And we are also gonna be organizing interviews with some of the really amazing people that Mozilla is convening there. So after MozFest, if you couldn't make it, um, you'll have a chance. To hear in sit down interviews, some of the most interesting people that attend and our take on the whole experience.

Alix: Um, in a couple of episodes we'll produce after the [00:45:00] event, so pay attention to socials 'cause we will be sharing information for stuff we're live streaming. And if you're in Barcelona, it'd be great to see you, IRL. Um, so do check out the program. You can see where I'll be. Also next week on the pod, we have Nic Dawes back for a much longer conversation, mostly focused on AI and journalism.

Alix: So he's someone who's run. National dailies in two countries. Um, just recently left his job at the City, which is a local paper in New York, and also spent some time in the leadership role at Human Rights Watch. So it has this like really interesting different vantage point of how technology's reshaping our world.

Alix: We dive deep on how it's reshaping journalism and. I think super interesting analysis about the economic and political effects of AI on media and journalism. So stay tuned for that in our normal feed next week. But hopefully we'll see you in Barcelona and thanks as ever to producers, Sarah Myles and Georgia Iacovou.