Tethics & Chill [online]: Possibilities for the Open Web w/ Mozilla Foundation's Nabiha Syed

​Tech academia and the .org arm of the internet elite often strike builders as imaginatively barren:

​Problems diagnosed with naïve idealism about markets.

​Harms named without viable solutions.

​Critiques of parasocial determinism that offer little in the way of desirable alternatives to replace the value-creation models they dismiss.

​Deconstruction without orienting toward what’s possible and profitable is the tech equivalent of ego death without integration.

​Sure, we can root out what's no longer supportive. But in a vacuum of imagination, what new options can emerge?

​Building alternatives people want requires creative energy that cannot grow in a no-man’s land of oppositional frustration and idealism unmoored from capital incentives or user preferences.

​Nabiha Syed has had to live this tension directly. After the unraveling of Mozilla Foundation’s legacy nonprofit model and with Firefox’s market share dissolving into single digits amid the consolidation of the browser wars, the Foundation hit an identity breaking point — and reconstructed around it.

​Under her leadership, Mozilla chose Unlearning as a creative discipline. The success of the 2025 Mozilla Festival challenged participants to realistically reimagine the default assumptions, systems, and power dynamics embedded in today’s tech. And the Foundation has begun directing resources toward a new set of bets: open data for language optionality, novel governance for AI trust and equitable outcomes, and human-centered frameworks that render ad tech extraneous.

​Join us as we explore Unlearning as a root-cause discipline to clear out dead assumptions and open space for what can capture markets next:

• ​What new business models might exist?

• ​What new design defaults are possible?

• ​What policy frameworks can prescribe new pathways instead of proscribing possibilities?

​Stay tethical,

​Anastasia