Who gets to scale? What we’re up to at MozFest

Hey everyone,

As I head to Barcelona for Mozilla Festival 2025, the biggest since pre-Covid days, I've been reflecting on the idea of scale. Maybe it’s the few thousand people convening. Maybe it’s the $2 billion a day spent on data center development. Maybe it’s the AI everywhere all at once, from places like schools to militaries to systems with extreme power imbalances, like workplaces and economies. These are places where we want, but have come not to expect, caution with new tech. It’s disheartening how often the hole of political leadership is being filled by broken products and half-baked ideas about humanity.

But I don’t think the fight over "inevitability" is lost. For every proposed data center, there’s a town hall full of community members shouting it down. For every VC urging startups to follow their power law, there are people advocating for new models of innovation that are actually geared toward collective progress. For every AI war contract, there are thousands of people taking to the streets in protest, brave leaders calling it out, and tech workers mobilizing to cut ties with genocidal governments. You show me a Tony Blair, and I can point to a Zohran Mamdani.

And for every scale-obsessed tech bro convening, there is a MozFest. I hope to see you there!

We’ll be talking scale from lots of angles. Check out details below!

Alix

Events & Opportunities

Meet us at MozFest!

Jake, Marin, and I are in Barcelona for Mozilla Festival 2025 this weekend! I’m hosting five conversations here, three of which touch on the question of scale:

• The first session will explore how data centers are transforming landscapes, economies, and ecosystems around the world. I’ll be chatting with journalists, researchers, and advocates about the hidden costs and how to move from investigation to action.
• The second session will focus on the economies of scale, imagining a reality in which scale doesn’t have to be the end goal: how we can build alternate economic structures that center community and trust, rather than greed and exploitation.
• The third session will be about AI’s role in war: how the so-called “defense” industry wields AI and automation as weapons of global control and destruction.

I’ll also be hosting a few conversations with Mozilla on philanthropy, leadership, and where Mozilla’s heading in 2026.

Are you in Barcelona? If so, I’d love to see you. If not, the sessions will be live streamed – just check out the session pages for the link. We’ll also share our insights from the festival on our podcast feed soon.

Podcast Highlights

🎙️On the feed right now:

​The Toxic Relationship Between AI & Journalism w/ Nic Dawes​ Nic Dawes on his work running The City, a local independent news outlet in New York, and how AI is seeking to undercut good journalism - both creatively and economically.

Nabiha Syed on her first year at Mozilla Foundation - on the feed & on YouTube​ Alix caught up with Nabiha in New York to talk about Mozilla’s big strategy shifts, making the internet better in the age of AI, and the vision for this year’s Mozfest.

⏪ What you may have missed: thinking locally & therapy bots

• ​Local Laws for Global Technologies w/ Hillary Ronen: When she joined San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, Hillary knew little about tech’s harms and learned on the job. Now she’s tackling how local policy can challenge concentrated tech power.
• ​You Seem Lonely. Have a Robot w/ Stevie Chancellor: As loneliness grows and mental healthcare remains scarce, many are turning to chatbots for comfort. Alix talks with Stevie, a researcher studying whether these so-called “therapy bots” actually work.

⏩ Up next: Sam Gregory from WITNESS on thirty years of media transformation and leading a global organization pushing back against imitation and context collapse.

Highlights from the New Protagonist Network

Environmental impacts of generative AI:

• ​Amy Margolies published a blog on the environmental impacts of genAI in low and middle-income countries in the context of food systems.

Data brokers:

• ​Eliza McCullough wrote about the emerging worker data broker economy for Lux Magazine. The piece is focused on the company Argyle, which sells real-time worker income data to lenders and insurers.

AI, transparency, freedom of information:

• ​Louise Crowe published an article about the need to adapt transparency rules as governments increasingly roll out AI systems, with insights from freedom of information requests.
• ​Anna Dent’s October Digital Welfare State newsletter focused on FOI requests for automated systems in social protection.

Online harms:

• ​Adele Zeynep Walton spoke to GLAMOUR about her campaigning journey for safer online spaces. Adele is also currently involved in a UK-based campaign against pro-suicide forums. Shares and signatures appreciated.
• ​Glitch published a position paper on non-criminal redress for intimate-image abuse. The paper takes an anti-carceral approach to individual tech harms, and sought to hear directly from Black women and Black gender-expansive people on what they think and feel justice looks like.

Issues with generative AI:

• ​Bhargav Srinivasa Desikan co-authored a paper on age and gender distortion of LLMs, published in Nature.
• ​Tarunima Prabhakar spoke to Medianama about why generative AI models don’t understand issues of caste.

AI and automation in military systems:

• ​Sarra Hannachi published an article on "Information Warfare as a Driver of AI Bias in Military Decision Support Systems.”

Digital Public Infrastructure:

• ​Mila Samdub published an article on the political economy of DPI in India.

Resisting AI:

• ​Dan McQuillan was on the Burning Platforms podcast, making the case for the need to resist AI across the board.

Human rights and the regulation of AI:

• ​tèmítópé lasade-anderson spoke on an oral evidence session held by the UK Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights​, about the threats AI poses to human rights.

Digital Democracy:

• ​Maria Milosh launched a public research notebook on digital deliberation, participation, and democracy.

Find out more about the New Protagonist Network and apply to join.