“A republic, if you can keep it.”
–Benjamin Franklin’s response to Elizabeth Willing Powel’s question: “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”
There’s been a lot going on, in tech, and in the world.
After the Firefox terms of use fiasco lo those months ago, I wanted to write a coda - but to do that, I needed a resolution, and I was stuck in denouement.
What did it mean that Mozilla thought that it was okay to push such an over-broad rights grant in the first place? While I think redemption is both valuable and desirable, we need to understand what we are forgiving people for, lest they repeat themselves.
If we don’t understand what we did wrong, we aren’t learning a principle, but rather a fear of punishment.
Even with dark visions of malevolent motivations pervading, the reality seemed more mundane - the browser was installed, it was still open source, and it wasn’t surreptitiously exfiltrating data to Mozilla. Could I (and other Firefox users) be bothered?
Aside from a few principled folks (perhaps with more pride than sense) who jumped to LibreWolf, clearly not.
Even with the terms of use mess, the reasons a principled Firefox user convinces themselves (and ideally others) to use the browser remains the same.
As if on cue, the US government and big tech teamed up to remind us all about it.
If you hadn’t heard, the DOJ wants to make it illegal for Google to pay browsers for search placement deals (like the one in Firefox).
Mozilla’s CFO Eric Muhlheim recently testified in U.S. v. Google LLC highlighting some of the potential impacts the ruling might have.
Muhlheim noted that Firefox makes up about 90 percent of Mozilla’s revenue, and that 85% of Firefox’s revenue comes from Google. Losing that revenue all at once would mean Mozilla would have to make “significant cuts across the company,” and that could lead to a “downward spiral” of product quality due to scaled back product investments. That kind of spiral could - he said - “put Firefox out of business”.
Moving to another search vendor isn’t a panacea, as Muhlheim confirmed that if Google were unable to bid on the contract, Mozilla would likely not be able to negotiate as high a share of revenue.
Mozilla showed the court an internal presentation from December 2024 where the company warned that losing Google’s payments posed a “significant threat to viability for Mozilla with limited ability to mitigate.”
Scary times.
The US Government also wants Google to sell Chrome. Yahoo (remember those guys?) wants to buy it.
Unfortunately, we probably need to pay attention to what is happening to Chrome now that Firefox is in crisis. Does anyone really believe that wresting control from Google to Yahoo is going to make Chrome good? You think Perplexity would be a good steward of the Chromium codebase? Perplexity?
(If you didn’t visit the link, it is about Perplexity’s CEO talking about how their browser is going to track everything you do online so that they can sell hyper personalized ads.)
Clearly these are not the companies that are going to save us.
While Mozilla seemingly believes that Firefox is its legacy, let it be known that they have released major new user facing features recently - vertical tabs and tab groups - and are even using them as examples of fan service in hyping up their community on Mozilla Connect. Bravo, Mozilla – more of this, please.
If you aren’t using it, you are missing out.
While I think Firefox is a high quality product (the best), its appeal is greater than that.
Earlier, I referred to the principled Firefox user, and you might have no idea what I’m talking about. I’m thinking of the “Take Back the Web” ethos, where open web enthusiasts cared about monopoly and open standards - ActiveX and Flash were scourges not just because they were proprietary. An open source reskin of the bigco browser isn’t the open web.
I was a Mac user then, and people actually used products like DataViz’ MacLinkPlus, and open standards were really at top of mind for Mac users. Not being able to use Silverlight on Mac OS was kind of esoteric, but it was also really annoying. So was trying to play back DRMed Windows Media files. Try being a Mac user in Korea – you might have needed to resort to an (very slow) emulator!
The fact that Mozilla spends a lot of money (and employs a lot of people) to produce an open standards, open source web browser, is kind of a big deal - and kind of a unicorn. If you think that comes easy, I’d love for you to explain to me why Ladybird isn’t further along. Explaining to me that Brave exists simply shows me that you are suffering from disease of category error.
Beyond that, Mozilla’s unusual structure and non-profit status matters quite a bit as well - as long as Mozillians can ensure that the company does right by its userbase.
Even if you don’t use it (and you should!) you should care that there is a viable option for browsing the web across most of your devices that isn’t owned by one of the big tech companies.
Enshittification
Just the other day, I got this email from Plex:
Hi Plex User,
As of April 29, 2025, we’re changing how remote streaming works for personal media libraries, and it will no longer be a free feature on Plex. Going forward, you’ll need a Plex Pass, or our newest subscription offering, Remote Watch Pass, to stream personal media remotely.
As a server owner, if you elect to upgrade to a Plex Pass, anyone with access to your server can continue streaming your server content remotely as part of your subscription benefits. Not sure which option is best for you? Check out our plans below to learn more.
As always, thanks for your continued support.
Sincerely,
Your Friends at Plex
Like Firefox, I’ve been using Plex since before it existed. I ran XBMC (now Kodi) on my modded Xbox… and I eventually moved to using Plex for both local and remote media playback. While closed source, the alternatives were annoying enough (bugs) to prevent longer term use (Yes, I have asked friends to dogfood Jellyfin. No, it didn’t go well.).
What is really amazing about this situation is that as Plex points out, Plex is pay-walling previously free functionality. Just because you have a right now does not mean that you will have it tomorrow.
What happens now?
Are we thanking our lucky stars that Jellyfin exists at all (even if the quality isn’t as high as Plex currently)?
Enshittification doesn’t just happen to little tech companies like Plex.
If you have been reading my blog, you know that Google has been working to cripple Chromium to foreclose the usage of powerful ad blockers.
You might think the fact that Chromium is open source - and that Plex isn’t, will save you.
Unfortunately, the vision of a labor-less project that creates shareholder value is the very mirage that the AI industry is pitching – we search for gold, while they produce the picks and shovels.
The fact is, anyone can fork Chromium, or Firefox, or even Jellyfin - but in order to continue to drive the project in the direction you want it to go, it is going to cost – in terms of time, or money. AI hasn’t managed to replace human labor in these endeavors, and it doesn’t even seem like Mozilla or software companies are investing in that.
Instead, companies are shedding writing jobs – Duolingo has replaced up to 100 of its workers with AI systems.
Product quality, it seems was never a consideration - just a raw measurement of what the market will bear. It seems like the market will bear a lot.
Technological utopianism
The challenge with conversations about the tech industry has always been complicated by the technological utopianism (or at least aggressive myth-making) consistently pushed by tech industry executives.
It’s a nice, self-aggrandizing story – let us do whatever we want, and things are going to be better, because more technology is better.
So although AI’s hunger for electric power is threatening U.S. climate goals, serious sounding organizations imagine that AI itself will help us find ways to achieve our environmental goals.
This utopianism is attached to companies that manipulate your mood, as political actors do the same, and as they break the law in many ways.
Techno-utopianism exists at the same time that our biggest tech companies assist in genocide – you might be agnostic, but these are the same people who want to steal the collective fruits of human ingenuity and smoosh it into your iPad. Utopia!
The trouble of course, is that “markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent” – even if we recognize what is happening, there is no guarantee that things will turn out okay – you can end up penniless and be right at the same time.
Alienation
Just yesterday I read that Uber was instituting a partial return to office mandate while boasting that it is a “Gen-AI powered company”. They helpfully point out that “being in person more frequently is better for collaboration, innovation and company culture”, in order to help explain why returning to the office is important. The CEO called the move “a risk we decided to take”.
While productivity gains due to remote work did not lead to increased compensation, Uber and others valiantly protect shareholder value by decreasing employee benefits.
All while the industry as a whole goes all in on AI as a means to devalue both their workers’ labor (as in the case of Duolingo), and the creative output of humanity in search of… what? Profits, presumably.
Dare Obasanjo jokes that AI went from something that would reduce our labor and increase our productivity to something we’re competing with.
It is ironic that the people in power want to us to give up material benefits today in order to seek theoretical gains tomorrow. Somehow, it is never time for them to suffer risks to their livelihoods.
What is more insidious is the fact that their purported claims and goals are largely non-falsifiable, rendering them meaningless. What does it mean to for something to be better “for collaboration, innovation and company culture”? Probably whatever they want it to mean. They can never fail their goals, they can only be failed by our collective inaction. Heads I win, tails you lose.
It would be hilarious if it weren’t so maddening.
The parallels to the US are impossible to ignore.
Tech oligarch Elon Musk’s DOGE embarked on a search of the US government for “waste, fraud and abuse”, promising savings of $1 trillion. Given that goal, they have failed, dubiously claiming savings of $150 billion, 85 percent less than their objective - and what’s worse, government is worse. Tax cheats (like Trump) are celebrating in advance – 11% of the IRS staff is gone.
We were promised efficiency and savings. Instead - like with the tech industry’s use of AI - we see job loss and worse outcomes.
Clearly, we are failing AI. We need to work harder for it, let it index more of our knowledge and one day… it’ll fix the climate crisis.
Ignore the next two paragraphs if you don’t care about US politics.
Unfortunately, it’s gonna get worse. Republicans are set to cut healthcare for the poorest Americans, and are likely going to call it a victory over waste, fraud and abuse. That won’t be anywhere near the truth - instead, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office found that between 2.3 million to 8.6 million Americans would lose Medicaid coverage under the Republican proposals.
Complaining about it won’t matter, though. The rich will have gotten their tax cut, all while low-and middle-income Americans will see their disposable income fall by 5.5% under Mr. Trump’s tariffs, compared with 1.9% for the highest-earning families.
Somehow, the material benefits for the poor and middle class need to wait for the economy to catch up, but the rich get their tax savings now. Duolingo is worse, and writers are losing their jobs, but keep paying us money – the AI will fix it soon, we promise! 🤞
While the story of how our usage of technology has affected humanity continues to be written, it seems to me that one of the themes of our current era needs to be one of alienation.
Somehow, the technology that we saw as being as revolutionary to democracy and self-expression as the printing press - self publishing on the web - has driven us apart.
You would think that being able to communicate with each other effortlessly would mean that we’d have better access to information, that we would know more. Instead, we saw the rise of “fake news”. Mozilla co-founder Mitchell Baker opined on the algorithms that amplify content a few years ago (this post was moved – not cool) – it seemed obvious to me at the time that we ought to understand how the algorithms worked because of how they affected us all.
Instead, since then we have seen platforms sell out their users to AI companies, all while the platforms are increasingly taking humans out of social media – over 40% of posts on Facebook are likely AI generated.
Of course we feel alienated - the apps where we spend most of our non-working hours aren’t built to be a public square – they are for making money on. We might still call it social media, but it isn’t really social after all - instead, it is a revolving cadre of influencers, bots, paid actors, and advertisers. People are spending hours of their time in a virtual Skinner box, while the platforms and advertisers collude to realize the best way to monetize your attention.
The chatbots aren’t any better - apparently, talking to ChatGPT can lead down a rabbit hole to religious delusions of grandeur.
Technology companies have alienated humanity from a core social experience – speaking to one another. Facebook (presumably temporarily) recently backed off from plans to introduce AI generated social media personas to their platforms – apparently, having the company grab a bigger piece of the adverting pie isn’t in the offing yet. Mark Zuckerberg mused that the bots could be a solution to the loneliness epidemic - doubly ironic, since his own platform is one driving that loneliness.
I have previously written that ad-tech doesn’t care about democracy - that is just as true for the big tech companies that produce the biggest browsers - not surprising, given that Google was just found guilty of an ad-tech monopoly.
Agency
Perhaps one of the most insidious developments of the world we live in today is the pervasiveness of fake news.
Once Russia invaded Ukraine, I began watching 1420 by Daniil Orain street interviews of Russians. I wanted to understand how they felt about the invasion, how they saw what their government was doing. Beyond their evident self-censorship, one thing I noticed a lot of was a reference to a so-called “information war”.
This was Russian propaganda to manipulate the news cycle and to flood the information space of Russian media, in order to misinform their own citizens.
I took to mocking the concept – after all, it is only an information “war” if one side actually believes the fake news – and clearly, the Russian on the street had a pretty good inkling that it was nonsense. So how is it a war? Given time, I realize how apt the expression actually is - the woman on the street was describing an actual war playing out in the information space - the propaganda was successfully crowding out good information for enough of the population to make it controversial - a “war”.
The point of the blatantly false propaganda wasn’t to convince you to believe it, it was both to devalue the idea of truth, and to demonstrate the inefficacy of trying to stand up for it. We can’t even agree on the truth, how can I convince you of my opinion?
The social platforms have been reducing user agency since their introduction. When Facebook was first introduced, it was a completely closed ecosystem, and you had to have a login to even access it. You had to make friends with people before you could privately message them. You had to visit people’s profiles to view posts on their “wall”. Today, on platforms like TikTok, you have two options: skip or pause. Comments are not emphasized - the platform is purpose built for consumption. Ads appear directly in the feed, in full screen.
People have been predicting the Disneyfication of the internet at least since eternal September.
I used to read a lot of Slashdot, and back then, people used to think that the answer to Disneyfication was open source, freedom of speech - there was a strong, pervasive, small l libertarian ethos. We couldn’t really lose the old internet as long as we had the source code.
Back then, political economy and tech seemed obviously intertwined - we were dealing with the aftermath of Microsoft illegally bundling Internet Explorer in Windows, killing Netscape (and leading to the birth of Mozilla), leading to the very “open web” mantra I referenced earlier.
It made sense in the abstract that open source and an open society would inevitably lead to flourishing of human ideas, and that we’d never lose what makes the web special. After all, governments had stepped in after the market damage had occurred to try to rectify things. Things could be improved, and after all, we still had choices.
Since then, tech has learned about lobbying, and Google is making movies and TV shows to try to convince you that tech isn’t evil.
That is the hidden tax attached to all of the profit-driven companies - there is no problem that can’t be assuaged by buying something. What is worse is that since the only action that can be monetized is… monetization, that is seemingly all that companies (and their proxies) want from you.
Truly, voting with our dollars is a literal fact.
How else should we think about it when our attention economy online is powered by our eyeballs – but the things we are watching and interacting with are remixed versions of the things we made for ourselves (and each other) for millennia? We went from the information superhighway to a big-tech advertising Skinner box – and it isn’t even stuff that we made for each other, it’s just stuff that is made to keep us busy so they can show us the next thing we need to buy.
Tools
Steve Jobs used to say that computers are a bicycle for the mind – a tool that lets us get farther than we could on our own.
John M. Culkin Jr. said that “we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us”, and I would argue that the tools that we have built have led to us feeling like we have less agency. That feeling comes from actually having less of it.
One of the tools that works invisibly in the background on my kitchen PC is BlockTube. While it has a bunch of features, I use it for just one - the ability to block a specific channel from YouTube recommendations. Tiny feature, but it really helps make YouTube a lot less annoying when you can block what you want to block.
Why doesn’t YouTube have this feature? On my TV, the native YouTube apps only allow me to “influence” YouTube’s algorithm by letting it know that I am not interested in a video, or to not recommend a channel. But there’s no way to simply block a channel. Clearly this is a very basic feature - don’t show me content from this creator.
Why isn’t this a feature built into YouTube?
My guess is that that YouTube knows that recommending a video or channel to you is likely to influence you to watch it. YouTube wants you to watch more videos, and it knows that other people who like the kinds of videos that you like like the video it is recommending to you. You might not want to watch the video, but YouTube doesn’t care - YouTube knows that if they keep recommending the video to you, you will likely watch it eventually, and then you’ll probably watch more. Taking away your agency is good for YouTube, so you don’t get the feature.
Firefox users have been warning our Chromium cousins for years that the sky is falling – erm Google is killing uBlock Origin - I even had a friend reach out while writing this post asking whether one of the Chromium browsers was a real alternative.
I get it. It is easier to wait until the disaster happens, rather than worrying about trying to get ahead of it. I got that Plex email a couple of days ago, and I haven’t gotten around to doing anything about it.
The problem is that ignoring the risk doesn’t make it go away. Not taking advantage of the options we have today might mean that they are foreclosed to us tomorrow.
We’ve known forever that tariffs on the internet aren’t a good idea. What happens when big tech decides that it is time to pay up for access to the store?
Choices
It is a mistake to believe without evidence that things will work out in the end. That is a just-so story, and things already seem pretty dystopian – does it feel like tech is getting better?
Letting inertia guide us towards the future doesn’t seem all that wise when the people who control the platforms we access and the browsers we use are actively guiding us toward profitable outcomes for themselves, all while stealing all our data so that they can sell it back to us.
Pause or skip.
There was an interesting interview with President Trump on the occasion of his first 100 days in the presidency. It included this segment:
TERRY MORAN: – with the economy, the number one issue for so many people, for just about everybody. It – it’s one of the main reasons that you’re back in this office. And now we have this trade war with China that – that Moody’s and other analysts say is gonna cost American families thousands of more dollars per year. And there is a lot of concern out there. People are worried, even some people who voted for you, sayin’, “I didn’t sign up for this.” So how do you answer those concerns?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, they did sign up for it, actually. And this is what I campaigned on. I said that– we’ve been abused by other countries at levels that nobody’s ever seen before. We were losing $3 to 5 billion a day on trade. We were losing– a trillion and a half to $2 trillion a year. Not sustainable.
Trump said something almost painfully obvious. He has been saying what he wanted to do all along.
Big tech has been telling us that they want to kill ad blockers, and they have shown us that all they care about is their own profit.
So why would we disbelieve them?
Seeing that clip of the interview gave me some hope for the future.
Our choices still matter – while it might feel like we are on rails, we can choose to download Jellyfin and use it, we can choose Firefox.
What worries me is that we might lose those choices.
See, you are smart. You know that big tech is bad, and they aren’t looking out for you. But it’s not that big a deal, see? It’s all just an information war, and you are savvy to it. So you don’t need to change your browser or act differently in any way. After all, you aren’t fooled.
Unfortunately, we live in a society.
It isn’t enough for you to be savvy – enough people have to make different choices for things to actually change. We can’t be warring over information.
My friends at Mozilla insist that they are the vanguard protecting us from the greatest abuses of big tech. I tend to agree with them - the Mozilla employees that tend to interact with community members are clearly passionate about their jobs and are believers in the mission. Seemingly though, they aren’t always the ones calling the shots.
This means that community members need to exist in large enough numbers to give privacy enthusiasts, nerds, and free software anarchists a seat at the table. That isn’t going to happen with Google in charge, let alone Yahoo or Perplexity.
Our choices have consequences, even when they are annoying to make - or simply inconvenient.
You may have heard of the Columbia campus protests - it is a local story for me, but it has definitely gone international. Without getting into the specifics of the protests, we can observe a marked difference in the way that free expression has been treated since the US election. Before the election, protesters protested the actions of the US government. After the election, the US government retaliated against protesters. That retaliation isn’t just limited to protest, either - you can be imprisoned for speech alone.
It is with bitterness that I see some of my fellow Americans cry out for the Democrats to do more, to #resist. The fact is, the Democrats are shut out of power. The powers they have are limited. The powers that they may have had, my fellow Americans handed to Republicans. In many ways, it is too late for them to do much.
So while Mozilla isn’t perfect, what I said at the top hasn’t changed - for over 20 years, Mozilla has been a vanguard of open source, fighting for user agency on the web, and mostly standing by the Mozilla Manifesto. Mozilla has been supporting people over profit since their inception.
Could we do more for user agency if there were more Firefox users? If Firefox were sustainable with less (or no) funding from big tech?
I don’t endorse all of their choices - but I believe that we’d really miss Mozilla if they were gone (and you are not thinking clearly if you think Firefox can continue without Mozilla).
Don’t alienate yourself from your tools. Take back your agency. Take back the web.
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