Mozilla hosts MozFest in Barcelona to reclaim a more human internet
The Mozilla Foundation’s annual festival this week asks how to make the internet more human, or “rewild” it, as AI-generated content spreads across online platforms.
Many people now feel that the internet has changed for the worse. Social feeds are crowded with influencers pushing products, and on professional networks it is often hard to tell whether a post was written by a person or generated by an AI tool chasing clicks and likes. Recent studies suggest that at least half of the content posted online is AI-generated. The Mozilla Foundation, the accessibility-focused nonprofit behind the Firefox browser, is using this year’s MozFest in Barcelona to ask how people can reclaim the web as a space for genuine human connection and creativity.
The Mozilla Festival is an annual global gathering of developers, policymakers and technology builders focused on shaping a more human future for technology. This year’s theme asks how to make the internet more human, or, in the festival’s words, how to “rewild” it. Fast Company spoke with Nabiha Syed, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, about the festival’s themes and her view that the internet’s future is not predetermined.
Syed described the current moment as one in which the internet sometimes feels like a monoculture. In her account, a small number of powerful companies make decisions about what people consume, which platforms they use and which products shape the market. She argued that monocultures in nature work until an ecosystem collapses, and that much of the open-source philosophy at the core of Mozilla is about building structures that allow things to be varied, unpredictable and able to cross-pollinate. Last year’s MozFest theme was “unlearning,” a call to pause and question whether the approaches that brought the internet to its current state will take it where people want to go next. “Wilding” extends that idea by asking what it would look like to let things bloom and to give more people a say in how the internet unfolds.
Syed contrasted that vision with the early web. She recalled learning to code so she could customize her MySpace page, and turning to GeoCities to build her own site when the tools on offer were not enough. She described a sense of freedom, interoperability and contestability, and said that even early blogs felt like real conversations rather than exchanges shaped by bots. Creators could build with the architecture as they wanted it. By comparison, she said, younger users may be inventive on platforms such as Instagram, but they are still working within designs that someone else has set.
The consequence she highlighted is what she called an “imagination deficit.” If people believe innovation can only come from what platforms provide, and that their role is to play inside the sandbox they are given, their sense of what is possible narrows. Online life risks becoming an endless scroll in which everything looks the same, with new services framed as variations on existing ones. Syed argued that this shift affects broader concerns such as cognitive liberty as well as people’s ability to play and experiment online. The early internet, she said, allowed people to make new things and let others stumble upon them, without being mediated by algorithmic systems or pushed toward commercial ends.
Where, then, can people find spaces free from commercial pressure? Syed pointed to two kinds. The first is what is often called “dark social,” including group chats and closed messaging spaces such as Signal, where people gather around a clear shared purpose and are not performing for a wide audience. The second is the idea of a Dark Forest Operating System, a concept associated with Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler, which involves recreating slightly larger groups. Syed said the mentality behind it resembles early bulletin-board culture and Usenet, and that such spaces exist for those who know where to look.
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