2025-12-08 08:00:00
As I was drafting my last piece on Friday, “They have to be able to talk about us without us”, my thoughts of course went to one of the most famous slogans of the disability rights movement, “Nothing about us without us.” I wasn’t unaware that there were similarities in the phrasing of what I wrote. But I think the topic of communicating effectively to groups, as I wrote about the other day, and ensuring that disabled people are centered in disability advocacy, are such different subjects that I didn’t want to just quickly gloss over the topic in a sidebar of a larger piece. They're very distinct topics that really only share a few words in common.
One of the great joys of becoming friends with a number of really thoughtful and experienced disability rights activists over the last several years has been their incredible generosity in teaching me about so much of the culture and history of the movements that they’ve built their work upon, and one of the most powerful slogans has been that refrain of “nothing about us without us”.
Here I should start by acknowledging Alice Wong, who we recently lost, who founded the Disability Visibility Project, and a MacArthur Fellow, and a tireless and inventive advocate for everyone in the disabled community. She was one of the first people to bring me in to learning about this history and these movements, more than a decade ago. She was also a patient and thoughtful teacher, and over our many conversations over the years, she did more than anyone else in my life to truly personify the spirit of “nothing about us without us” by fighting to ensure that disabled people led the work to make the world accessible for all. If you have the chance, learn about her work, and support it.
But a key inflection point in my own understanding of “nothing about us without us” came, unsurprisingly, in the context of how disabled people have been interacting with technology. I used to host a podcast called Function, and we did an episode about how inaccessible so much of contemporary technology has become, and how that kind of ruins things for everyone. (The episode is still up on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.) We had on Emily Ladau of The Accessible Stall podcast, Alex Haagaard of The Disabled List, and Vilissa Thompson of Ramp Your Voice. It’s well worth a listen, and Emily, Alex and Vilissa really do an amazing job of pointing to really specific, really evocative examples of obvious places where today’s tech world could be so much more useful and powerful for everyone if its creators were making just a few simple changes.
What’s striking to me now, listening to that conversation six years later, is how little has changed from the perspective of the technology world, but also how much my own lived experience has come to reflect so much of what I learned in those conversations.
Each of them was the "us" in the conversation, using their own personal experience, and the experience of other disabled people that they were in community with, to offer specific and personal insights that the creators of these technologies did not have. And whether it was for reasons of crass commercial opportunism — here's some money you could be making! — or simply because it was the right thing to do morally, it's obvious that the people making these technologies could benefit by honoring the principle of centering these users of their products.
I’ve had this conversation on various social media channels in a number of ways over the years, but another key part of understanding the “us” in “nothing about us without us” when it comes to disability, is that the “us” is all of us, in time. It's very hard for many people who haven’t experienced it to understand that everyone should be accommodated and supported, because everyone is disabled; it’s only a question of when and for how long.
In contemporary society, we’re given all kinds of justifications for why we can’t support everyone’s needs, but so much of those are really grounded in simply trying to convince ourselves that a disabled person is someone else, an “other” who isn’t worthy or deserving of our support. I think deep down, everyone knows better. It’s just that people who don’t (yet) identify as disabled don’t really talk about it very much.
In reality, we'll all be disabled. Maybe you're in a moment of respite from it, or in that brief window before the truth of the inevitability of it has been revealed to you (sorry, spoiler warning!), but it's true for all of us — even when it's not visible. That means all of us have to default to supporting and uplifting and empowering the people who are disabled today. This was the key lesson that I didn’t really get personally until I started listening to those who were versed in the history and culture of disability advocacy, about how the patronizing solutions were often harmful, or competing for resources with the right answers.
I’ve had my glimpses of this myself. Back in 2021, I had Lyme disease. I didn’t get it as bad as some, but it did leave me physically and mentally unable to function as I had been used to, for several months. I had some frame of reference for physical weakness; I could roughly compare it to a bad illness like the flu, even if it wasn’t exactly the same. But a diminished mental capacity was unlike anything I had ever experienced before, and was profoundly unsettling, deeply challenging my sense of self. After the incident I’d described in 2022, I had a series of things to recover from physically and mentally that also presented a significant challenge, but were especially tough because so much of people’s willingness to accommodate others is based on any disability being visible. Anything that’s not immediately perceived at a superficial level, or legible to a stranger in a way that’s familiar to them, is generally dismissed or seen as invalid for support.
I point all of this out not to claim that I fully understand the experience of those who live with truly serious disabilities, or to act as if I know what it’s been like for those who have genuinely worked to advocate for disabled people. Instead, I think it can often be useful to show how porous the boundary is between people who don’t think of themselves as disabled and those who already know that they are. And of course this does not mean that people who aren't currently disabled can speak on behalf of those who are — that's the whole point of "nothing about us without us"! — but rather to point out that the time to begin building your empathy and solidarity is now, not when you suddenly have the realization that you're part of the community.
There’s a righteous rage that underlies the cry of “nothing about us without us”, stemming from so many attempts to address the needs of disabled people having come from those outside the community, arriving with plans that ranged from inept to evil. We’re in a moment when the authoritarians in charge in so much of the world are pushing openly-eugenicist agendas that will target disabled people first amongst the many vulnerable populations that they’ll attempt to attack. Challenging economic times like the one we’re in affect disabled people significantly harder as the job market disproportionately shrinks in opportunities for the disabled first.
So it’s going to take all of us standing in solidarity to ensure that the necessary advocacy and support are in place for what promises to be an extraordinarily difficult moment. But I take some solace and inspiration from the fact that there are so many disabled people who have provided us with the clear guidance and leadership we need to navigate this moment. And there is simple guidance we can follow when doing so to ensure that we’re centering the right leaders, by listening to those who said, “nothing about us without us.”
2025-12-05 08:00:00
It’s absolutely vital to be able to communicate effectively and efficiently to large groups of people. I’ve been lucky enough to get to refine and test my skills in communicating at scale for a few decades now, and the power of talking to communities is the one area where I’d most like to pass on what I’ve learned, because it’s this set of skills that can have the biggest effect on deciding whether good ideas and good work can have their greatest impact.
My own work crosses many disparate areas. Over the years, I’ve gotten to cycle between domains as distinct as building technology platforms and products for developers and creators, enabling activism and policy advocacy in service of humanist ideals, and more visible external-facing work such as public speaking or writing in various venues like magazines or on this site. (And then sometimes I dabble in my other hobbies and fun stuff like scholarship or research into areas like pop culture and media.)
What’s amazing is, in every single one of these wildly different areas, the exact same demands apply when trying to communicate to broad groups of people. This is true despite the broadly divergent cultural norms across all of these different disciplines. It can be a profoundly challenging, even intimidating, job to make sure a message is being communicated accurately, and in high fidelity, to everyone that you need to reach.
That vital task of communicating to a large group gets even more daunting when you inevitably realize that, even if you were to find the perfect wording or phrasing for your message, you’d still never be able to deliver your story to every single person in your target audience by yourself anyway. There will always be another person whom you’re trying to reach that you just haven’t found yet. So, is it hopeless? Is it simply impossible to effectively tell a story at scale if you don’t have massive resources?
It doesn’t have to be. We can start with one key insight about what it takes to get your most important stories out into the world. It’s a perspective that seems incredibly simple at first, but can lead to a pretty profound set of insights.
They have to be able to talk about us without us. What this phrase means, in its simplest form, is that you have to tell a story so clear, so concise, so memorable and evocative that people can repeat it for you even after you’ve left the room. And the people who hear it need to be able to do this the first time they hear the story. Whether it’s the idea behind a new product, the core promise of a political campaign, or the basic takeaway from a persuasive essay (guess what the point of this one is!) — not only do you have to explain your idea and make your case, you have to be teaching your listener how to do the same thing for themselves.
This is a tall order, to be sure. In pop music, the equivalent is writing a hit where people feel like they can sing along to the chorus by the time they get to the end of the song for the first time. Not everybody has it in them to write a hook that good, but if you do, that thing is going to become a classic. And when someone else has done it, you know it because it gets stuck in your head. Sometimes you end up humming it to yourself even if you didn’t want to. Your best ideas — your most vital ideas — need to rest on a messaging platform that solid.
Delivering this kind of story actually requires substance. If you’re trying to fake it, or to force a narrative out of fluff or fakery, that will very immediately become obvious. When you set out to craft a story that travels in your absence, it has to have a body if it’s going to have legs. Bullshit is slippery and smells terrible, and the first thing people want to do when you leave the room is run away from it, not carry it with them.
There’s another challenge to making a story that can travel in your absence: your ego has to let that happen. If you make a story that is effective and compelling enough that others can tell it, then, well…. those other people are going to tell it. Not you. They’ll do it in their own words, and in their own voices, and make it theirs. They may use a similar story, but in their own phrasing, so it will resonate better with their people. This is a gift! They are doing you a kindness, and extending you great generosity. Respond with gratitude, and be wary of anyone who balks at not getting to be the voice or the face of a message themselves. Everyone gets a turn telling the story.
Maybe the simple fact that others will be hearing a good story for the first time will draw them to it, regardless of who the messenger is. Sometimes people get attached to the idea that they have to be the one to deliver the one true message. But a core precept of “talk about us without us” is that there’s a larger mission and goal that everyone is bought into, and this demands that everyone stay aligned to their values rather than to their own personal ambitions around who tells the story.
The truth of whomever will be most effective is the factor used to decide who will be the person to tell the story in any context. And this is a forgiving environment, because even if someone doesn’t get to be the voice one day, they’ll get another shot, since repetition and consistency are also key parts of this strategy, thanks to the disciplined approach that it brings to communication.
At nearly every organization where I’ve been in charge of onboarding team members in the last decade or so, one of the first messages we’ve presented to our new colleagues is, “We are disciplined communicators!” It’s a message that they hopefully get to hear as a joyous declaration, and as an assertion of our shared values. I always try to explicitly instill this value into teams I work with because, first, it’s good to communicate values explicitly, but also because this is a concept that is very seldom directly stated.
It is ironic that this statement usually goes unsaid, because nearly everyone who pays attention to culture understands the vital importance of disciplined communications. Brands that are strictly consistent in their use of things like logos, type, colors, and imagery get such wildly-outsized cultural impact in exchange for relatively modest investment that it’s mind-boggling to me that more organizations don’t insist on following suit. Similarly, institutions that develop and strictly enforce a standard tone of voice and way of communicating (even if the tone itself is playful or casual) capture an incredibly valuable opportunity at minimal additional cost relative to how much everyone’s already spending on internal and external communications.
In an era where every channel is being flooded with AI-generated slop, and when most of the slop tools are woefully incapable of being consistent about anything, simply showing up with an obviously-human, obviously-consistent story is a phenomenal way of standing out. That discipline demonstrates all the best of humanity: a shared ethos, discerning taste, joyful expression, a sense of belonging, an appealing consistency. And best of all, it represents the chance to participate for yourself — because it’s a message that you now know how to repeat for yourself.
Providing messages that individuals can pick up and run with on their own is a profoundly human-centric and empowering thing to do in a moment of rising authoritarianism. When the fascists in power are shutting down prominent voices for leveling critiques that they would like to censor, and demanding control over an increasingly broad number of channels, there’s reassurance in people being empowered to tell their own stories together. Seeing stories bubble up from the grassroots in collaboration, rather than being forced down upon people from authoritarians at the top, has an emotional resonance that only strengthens the substance of whatever story you’re telling.
Okay, so it sounds great: Let’s tell stories that other people want to share! Now, uh… how do we do it? There are simple principles we can follow that help shape a message or story into one that is likely to be carried forward by a community on its own.
integrated development environment, it was crystal clear what expectations and norms we were setting, and what our values were. Within a few months, even our competitors were describing Glitch as a “friendly community” while they were trying to talk about how they were better than us about some feature or the other. That still feels like a huge victory — even the competition was talking about us without us! Make sure your message evokes the values you want people to share with each other, either directly or indirectly.Few things are more rewarding than when you find a meaningful narrative that resonates with the world. Stories have the power to change things, to make people feel empowered, to galvanize entire communities into taking action and recognizing their own power. There’s also a quiet reward in the craft and creativity of working on a story that travels, in finding notes that resonate with others, and in challenging yourself to get far enough out of your own head to get into someone else’s heart.
I still have so much to learn about being able to tell stories effectively. I still screw it up so much of the time, and I can look back on many times when I wish I had better words at hand for moments that sorely needed them. But many of the most meaningful and rewarding moments of my life have been when I’ve gotten to be in community with others, as we were not just sharing stories together, but telling a united story together. It unlocks a special kind of creativity that’s a lot bigger than what any one of us can do alone.
2025-12-02 08:00:00
In case you haven’t been following the world of software development closely, it’s good to know that vibe coding — using LLM tools to assist with writing code — can help enable many people to create apps or software that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to make. This has led to an extraordinarily rapid adoption curve amongst even experienced coders in many different disciplines within the world of coding. But there’s a very important threat posed by vibe coding that almost no one has been talking about, one that’s far more insidious and specific than just the risks and threats posted by AI or LLMs in general.
Here’s a quick summary:
It may be useful to start by explaining how people use LLMs to assist with writing software. My background is that I’ve helped build multiple companies focused on enabling millions of people to create with code. And I’m personally an example of one common scenario with vibe coding. Since I don’t code regularly anymore, I’ve become much slower and less efficient at even the web development tasks that I used to do professionally, which I used to be fairly competent at performing. In software development, there are usually a nearly-continuous stream of new technologies being released (like when you upgrade your phone, or your computer downloads an update to your web browser), and when those things change, developers have to update their skills and knowledge to stay current with the latest tools and techniques. If you’re not staying on top of things, your skillset can rapidly decay into irrelevance, and it can be hard to get back up to speed, even though you understand the fundamentals completely, and the underlying logic of how to write code hasn’t changed at all. It’s like knowing how to be an electrician but suddenly you have to do all your work in French, and you don’t speak French.
This is the kind of problem that LLMs are really good at helping with. Before I had this kind of coding assistant, I couldn’t do any meaningful projects within the limited amount of free time that I have available on nights and weekends to build things. Now, with the assistance of contemporary tools, I can get help with things like routine boilerplate code and obscure syntax, speeding up my work enough to focus on the fun, creative parts of coding that I love.
Even professional coders who are up to date on the latest technologies use these LLM tools to do things like creating scripts, which are essentially small bits of code used to automate or process common tasks. This kind of code is disposable, meaning it may only ever be run once, and it’s not exposed to the internet, so security or privacy concerns aren’t usually much of an issue. In that context, having the LLM create a utility for you can feel like being truly liberated from grunt work, something like having a robot vacuum around to sweep up the floor.
This all sounds pretty good, right? It certainly helps explain why so many in the tech world tend to see AI much more positively than almost everyone else does; there’s a clear-cut example of people finding value from these tools in a way that feels empowering or even freeing.
But there are far darker sides to this use of AI. Let me put aside the threats and risks of AI that are true of all uses of the Big AI platforms, like the environmental impact, the training on content without consent, the psychological manipulation of users, the undermining of legal regulations, and other significant harms. These are all real, and profound, but I want to focus on what’s specific to using AI to help write code here, because there are negative externalities that are unique to this context that people haven’t discussed enough. (For more on the larger AI discussion, see "What would good AI look like?")
The first problem raised by vibe coding is an obvious one: the major tech investors focused on making AI good at writing code because they wanted to make coders less powerful and reduce their pay. If you go back a decade ago, nearly everyone in the world was saying “teach your kids to code” and being a software engineer was one of the highest paying, most powerful individual jobs in the history of labor. Pretty soon, coders were acting like it — using their power to improve workplace conditions for those around them at the major tech companies, and pushing their employers to be more socially responsible. Once workers began organizing in this way, the tech tycoons who founded the big tech companies, and the board members and venture capitalists who backed them, immediately began investing billions of dollars in building these technologies that would devalue the labor of millions of coders around the world.
It worked. More than half a million tech workers have been laid off in America since ChatGPT was released in November 2022.
That’s just in the private sector, and just the ones tracked by layoffs.fyi. Software engineering job listings have plummeted to a 5-year low. This is during a period of time that nobody even describes as a recession. The same venture capitalists who funded the AI boom keep insisting that these trends are about macroeconomic abstractions like interest rates, a stark contrast to their rhetoric the rest of the time, when they insist that they are alpha males who make their own decisions based on their strong convictions and brave stances against woke culture. It is, in fact, the case that they are just greedy people who invested a ton of money into trying to put a lot of good people out of work, and they succeeded in doing so.
There is no reason why AI tools like this couldn't be used in the way that they're often described, where they increase productivity and enable workers to do more and generate more value. But instead we have the wealthiest people in the world telling the wealthiest companies in the world, while they generate record profits, to lay off workers who could be creating cool things for customers, and then blaming it on everyone but themselves.
Then there’s the second problem raised by vibe coding: You can’t make anything truly radical with it. By definition, LLMs are trained on what has come before. In addition to being already-discovered territory, existing code is buggy and broken and sloppy and, as anyone who has ever written code knows, absolutely embarrassing to look at. Worse, many of the people who are using vibe coding tools are increasingly those who don’t understand the code that is being generated by these systems. This means the people generating all of this newly-vibed code won’t even know when the output is insecure, or will perform poorly, or includes exploits that let others take over their system, or when it is simply incoherent nonsense that looks like code but doesn’t do anything.
All of those factors combine to encourage people to think of vibe coding tools as a sort of “black box” that just spits out an app for you. Even the giant tech companies are starting to encourage this mindset, tacitly endorsing the idea that people don’t need to know what their systems are doing under the hood. But obviously, somebody needs to know whether a system is actually secure. Somebody needs to know if a system is actually doing the tasks it says that it’s doing. The Big AI companies that make the most popular LLMs on the market today routinely design their products to induce emotional dependency in users by giving them positive feedback and encouragement, even when that requires generating false responses. Put more simply: they make the bot lie to you to make you feel good so you use the AI more. That’s terrible in a million ways, but one of them is that it sure does generate some bad code.
And a vibe coding tool absolutely won’t make something truly new. The most radical, disruptive, interesting, surprising, weird, fun innovations in technology have happened because people with a strange compulsion to do something cool had enough knowledge to get their code out into the world. The World Wide Web itself was not a huge technological leap over what came before — it took off because of a huge leap in insight into human nature and human behavior, that happened to be captured in code. The actual bits and bytes? They were mostly just plain text, much of which was in formats that had already been around for many years prior to Tim Berners-Lee assembling it all into the first web browser. That kind of surprising innovation could probably never be vibe coded, even though all of the raw materials might be scooped up by an LLM, because even if the human writing the prompt had that counterintuitive stroke of genius, the system would still be hemmed in by the constraints of the works it had been trained on. The past is a prison when you’re inventing the future.
What’s more, if you were going to use a vibe coding tool to make a truly radical new technology, do you think today’s Big AI companies would let their systems create that app? The same companies that made a platform that just put hundreds of thousands of coders out of work? The same companies that make a platform that tells your kids to end their own lives? The same companies whose cronies in the White House are saying there should never be any laws reining them in? Those folks are going to help you make new tech that threatens to disrupt their power? I don’t think so.
I’m deeply torn about what the future of LLMs for coding should be. I’ve spent decades of my life trying to make it easier for everyone to make software. I’ve seen, firsthand, the power of using AI tools to help coders — especially those new to coding — build their confidence in being able to create something new. I love that potential, and in many ways, it’s the most positive and optimistic possibility around LLMs that I’ve seen. It’s the thing that makes me think that maybe there is a part of all the AI hype that is not pure bullshit. Especially if we can find a version of these tools that’s genuinely open source and free and has been trained on people’s code with their consent and cooperation, perhaps in collaboration with some educational institutions, I’d be delighted to see that shared with the world in a thoughtful way.
But I also have seen the majority of the working coders I know (and the non-working coders I know, including myself) rush to integrate the commercial coding assistants from the Big AI companies into their workflow without necessarily giving proper consideration to the long-term implications of that choice. What happens when we’ve developed our dependencies on that assistance? How will people introduce new technologies like new programming languages and frameworks if we all consider the LLMs to be the canonical way of writing our code, and the training models don’t know the new tech exists? How does our imagination shrink when we consider our options of what we create with code to be choosing between the outputs of the LLM rather than starting from the blank slate of our imagination? How will we build the next generation of coders skilled enough to catch the glaring errors that LLMs create in their code?
There’s never been this stark a contrast between the negatives and positives of a new technology being so tightly coupled before when it comes to enabling developers. Generally change comes to coders incrementally. Historically, there was always a (wonderful!) default skepticism to coding culture, where anything that reeked of marketing or hype was looked at with a huge amount of doubt until there was a significant amount of proof to back it up.
But in recent years, as with everything else, the culture wars have come for tech. There’s now a cohort in the coding world that has adopted a cult of personality around a handful of big tech tycoons despite the fact that these men are deeply corrosive to society. Or perhaps because they are. As a result, there’s a built-in constituency for any new AI tool, regardless of its negative externalities, which gives them a sense of momentum even where there may not be any.
It’s worth us examining what’s really going on, and articulating explicitly what we’re trying to enable. Who are we trying to empower? What does success look like? What do we want people to be able to build? What do we not want people to be able to make? What price is too high to pay? What convenience is not worth the cost?
I do, still, believe deeply in the power of technology to empower people. I believe firmly that you have to understand how to create technology if you want to understand how to control it. And I still believe that we have to democratize the power to create and control technology to as many people as possible so that technology can be something people can use as a tool, rather than something that happens _to_them.
We are now in a complex phase, though, where the promise of democratizing access to creating technology is suddenly fraught in a way that it has never been before. The answer can’t possibly be that technology remains inaccessible and difficult for those outside of a privileged class, and easy for those who are already comfortable in the existing power structure.
A lot is still very uncertain, but I come back to one key question that helps me frame the discussion of what’s next: What’s the most radical app that we could build? And which tools will enable me to build it? Even if all we can do is start having a more complicated conversation about what we’re doing when we’re vibe coding, we’ll be making progress towards a more empowered future.
2025-11-14 08:00:00
Today, Rodrigo Ghedrin wrote the very well-intentioned, but incorrectly-titled, “I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla”. As he correctly summarizes, sentiment on the Mozilla thread about a potential new AI pane in the Firefox browser is overwhelmingly negative. That’s not surprising; the Big AI companies have given people numerous legitimate reasons to hate and reject “AI” products, ranging from undermining labor to appropriating content without consent to having egregious environmental impacts to eroding trust in public discourse.
I spent much of the last week having the distinct honor of serving as MC at the Mozilla Festival in Barcelona, which gave me the extraordinary opportunity to talk to hundreds of the most engaged Mozilla community members in person, and to address thousands more from onstage or on the livestream during the event. No surprise, one of the biggest topics we talked about the entire time was AI, and the intense, complex, and passionate feelings so many have about these new tools. Virtually everyone shared some version of what I’d articulated as the majority view on AI, which is approximately that LLMs can be interesting as a technology, but that Big Tech, and especially Big AI, are decidedly awful and people are very motivated to stop them from committing their worst harms upon the vulnerable.
But.
Another reality that people were a little more quiet in acknowledging, and sometimes reluctant to engage with out loud, is the reality that hundreds of millions of people are using the major AI tools every day. When I would point this out, there was often an initial defensive reaction talking about how people are forced to use these tools at work, or how AI is being shoehorned into every tool and foisted upon users. This is all true! And also? Hundreds of millions of users are choosing to go to these websites, of their own volition, and engage with these tools.
Regular, non-expert internet users find it interesting, or even amusing, to generate images or videos using AI and to send that media to their friends. While sophisticated media aesthetics find those creations gauche or even offensive, a lot of other cultures find them perfectly acceptable. And it’s an inarguable reality that millions of people find AI-generated media images emotionally moving. Most people that see AI-generated content as tolerable folk art belong to demographics that are dismissed by those who shape the technology platforms that billions of people use every day.
Which brings us back to “nobody wants AI in Firefox”. (And its obligatory matching Hacker News thread, which proceeds exactly as you might expect.) In the communities that frequent places like Hacker News and Mozilla forums, where everyone is hyper-fluent in concerns like intellectual property rights and the abuses of Big Tech, it’s received wisdom that “everyone” resists the encroachment of AI into tools, and therefore the only possible reason that Mozilla (or any organization) might add support for any kind of AI features would be to chase a trend that’s in fashion amongst tech tycoons. I don’t doubt that this is a factor; anytime a significant percentage of decision makers are alumni of Silicon Valley, its culture is going to seep into an organization.
What people are ignoring, though, is that using AI tools is an incredibly mainstream experience now. Regular people do it all the time. And doing so in normal browsers, in a normal context, is less safe. We can look at an analogy from the early days of the browser wars, a generation ago.
Twenty years ago, millions and millions of people used Internet Explorer to get around the web, because it was the default browser that came with their computer. It was buggy and wildly insecure, and users would often find their screen littered with intrusive pop-up advertisements that had been spawned by various sites that they had visited across the web. We could have said, “well, those are simply fools with no taste using bad technology who get what they deserve”
Instead, countless enthusiasts and advocates across the web decided that everyone deserved to have an experience that was better and safer. And as it turned out, while getting those improvements, people could even get access to a cool new feature that nobody had seen before: tabs! Firefox wasn’t the first browser to invent all these little details, but it was the first to put them all together into one convenient little package. Even if the expert users weren’t personally visiting the sites riddled with pop-up ads themselves, they were glad to have spared their non-expert friends from the miseries they were enduring on the broken internet.
I don’t know why today’s Firefox users, even if they’re the most rabid anti-AI zealots in the world, don’t say, “well, even if I hate AI, I want to make sure Firefox is good at protecting the privacy of AI users so I can recommend it to my friends and family who use AI”. I have to assume it’s because they’re in denial about the fact that their friends and family are using these platforms. (Judging by the tenor of their comments on the topic, I’d have to guess their friends don’t want to engage with them on the topic at all.)
We see with tools like ChatGPT’s Atlas that there are now aggressively anti-web browsers coming to market, and even a sophisticated user might not be able to realize how nefarious some of the tactics of these new apps can be. I think those who are critical can certainly see that those enabling those harms are bad actors. And those critics are also aware that hundreds of millions of people are using ChatGPT. So, then… what browser do they think those users should use?
Judging by what I see in the comments on the posts about Firefox’s potential AI feature integrations, the apparent path that critics are recommending as an alternative browser is “I’ll yell at you until you stop using ChatGPT”. Consider this post my official notice: that strategy hasn’t worked. And it is not going to work. The only thing that will work is to offer a better alternative to these users. That will involve defining what an acceptably “good” alternative AI looks like, and then building and shipping it to these users, and convincing them to use it. I’m hoping such an effort succeeds. But I can guarantee that scolding people and trying to convince them that they’re not finding utility in the current platforms, or trying to make them feel guilty about the fact that they are finding utility in the current platforms, will not work.
And none of this is exculpatory for my friends at Mozilla. As I’ve said to the good people there, and will share again here, I don’t think the framing of the way this feature has been presented has done either the Firefox team or the community any favors. These big, emotional blow-ups are demoralizing, and take away time and energy and attention that could be better spent getting people excited and motivated to grow for the future.
My personal wishlist would be pretty simple:
So, that’s the answer. I think some people want AI in Firefox, Mozilla. And some people don’t. And some people don’t know what “AI” means. And some people forgot Firefox even exists. It’s that last category I’m most concerned about, frankly. Let’s go get ‘em.
2025-11-05 08:00:00
Today marked a completely new moment for New York City, and for America. There will be countless attempts at analysis and reflection and what-does-it-all-mean in the days to come, along with an unimaginable number of hateful attacks. But what's worth reflecting on right now is the fact that we've entered a new era, and that, even at the very start, there are some extraordinary things that we can observe.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: You have to start with the principle. You must have a politics that believes in something. You can't win unless you know what you're fighting for. Something specific, that people can see and believe. Something that people will know when it's been achieved. It can't just be a vague platitude, and it can't just be "root for our team" or "the other guy is bad". Zohran and his team understood this profoundly well, and made a campaign focused on substance -- grounded in humanist principles, and tied to extremely clear, understandable and specific policy deliverables.
The thing that first put Zohran on the map in city-wide politics was his hunger strike in solidarity with taxi drivers. This was a heart-wrenchingly important issue for our South Asian communities in particular because, even after so many painful deaths, it still felt like nobody in power cared. By putting his physical self into the same risk as the drivers who were fighting for their lives and livelihoods, Zohran showed who he was at a profound level — and proved himself ready for the moment of what it will take to fend off an authoritarian takeover. No surprise, then, that when the violent and out-of-control Border Czar Tom Homan abducted Mahmoud Khalil, Zohran had no qualms about confronting Homan in person to demand Khalil be freed. Standing in front of Homan, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with those who refused to back down in the face of the most basic of human rights violations, New York's leaders were able to secure the freedom of a man wrongly taken from his pregnant wife.
This is one of the refrains that comes up most when I'm talking to people about communications, in almost any context from organizing to business to building a community. A message has to be simple enough, memorable enough, and clear enough that even someone who's just heard it for the first time first time can repeat it — in high fidelity — to the next person they talk to. The Mamdani campaign nailed this from the start, focusing not just on "affordability" in the abstract, but specific promises around free buses, universal childcare, and frozen rent in particular. The proof of how effective and pervasive those messages have been is that detractors can recite them, verbatim, from memory.
This is another point that just ties to the core humility of earning every vote. From that very first famous video on Fordham Road, where Zohran went to meet voters in the Bronx in a district that had swung very hard away from the Democrats, he literally took the campaign to the people and met them where they were, and listened. Since then, he's been at every event in the city from bar crawls to bar mitzvahs, showing not just a superheroic stamina that shames opponents twice his age, but an enthusiasm for both the city and its people that simply can't be faked. The same thing happened online. No matter what platform you use, or which influencers or outlets you get your information or entertainment from, Zohran was there, smiling and on-message, welcoming you in. Nothing was beneath him, and nothing was inauthentic, because he believes in his story.
They spent billions. Bloomberg dipped into his pocket and personally spent over $10 million. People who live thousands of miles away invested millions of their ill-gotten fortunes, and spent countless hours spewing bile on top of it. And none of it amounted to anything. Because, despite all the corruption, and despite how much our democratic institutions have been weakened, ultimately New York City's voting system has held, and the power of the people has prevailed. Maybe now the tycoons will get the message that it's cheaper just to... do things that people want?
Having been a veteran of both Obama campaigns and Obama administrations, I remember well both the optimism of those moments, and the certain sense of trepidation that so many Americans wouldn't see Obama as the first Black president, but as the end of white presidents — and would provoke a backlash accordingly. As turned out to be the case. When those forces decided to burn down the country in response to his presidency, it made a lot of us wary about hoping again. But hearing Zohran's speech say "There are many who thought this day would never come" brought back memories of Obama's similar words after that extraordinary victory in Iowa. When Zohran said "hope is alive", it spoke to both Obama's famous "hope" slogan, and to Jesse Jackson's groundbreaking "Keep Hope Alive" speech from a campaign that inspired and innovated before Zohran was even born. I'm lucky enough to have sat down with these men and heard them in depth, behind closed doors, in nuanced conversation. But I know that the rhetoric of what they've said in soaring speeches on stage is what moved so many. It's the bigger words that make movements. And though many people who got their hopes up in those eras, or who felt let down by some of the cynicism or failures or flaws since then might be afraid to be optimistic again, I think this movement is full of people who are aware of both the strengths and shortcomings of what has come before. It won't be perfect, but it's a chance to keep doing better.
So much of what people hear in politics is negative and threatening. Zohran's opponents spoke almost exclusively about how people should be scared and angry. But the undeniable energy of the Mamdani campaign has been joy — an effusive, exuberant, contagious joy. Even when times are hard, maybe especially when times are hard, people are drawn to that joy. And they've been missing leaders who offer them a positive vision. They don't want to hear horrifying visions of "American carnage", especially when they know those are lies designed to manipulate. A better world is possible.
No one wants to be condescended to. Perhaps one of the most joyful parts of Zohran's instantly-legendary victory speech on election night was its eloquence. His speech was at well above a 10th-grade level. It was complex, erudite, punctuated by deep and fluent references. He proved that politicians don't have to condescend to voters with baby talk! And a big part of re-establishing our democratic norms is going to be speaking to the electorate as if we are all adults, assuming a level of literacy in culture and history, as well as as basic civics. I keep saying that I'm hoping we get an "easter egg breakdown" version of this speech, similar to the ones that people on YouTube do for a Marvel movie or a Star Wars trailer. There's such a dense level of references and context that people will be able to extract meaning from it for years to come — a welcome contrast to a political environment that has usually had deeply hateful dog whistles as the only thing buried within its content.
Coming on stage for a political victory to Ja Rule's New York (I had bet that there would be some Jadakiss involvement in whatever walk-on music he picked), and walking off to Dhoom Machale, while saying with his full chest that he's a Muslim, a New Yorker, and a young Democratic Socialist — these are the moves of a person who knows that those who are motivated by hate will never back down if you try to hide or be evasive about who you are. A coward dies a thousand deaths, and a politician who hides their identity loses a thousand elections before a single vote is cast. We see Vivek Ramaswamy tap-dancing around his faith every day, and the white supremacists that he's cozied up to will never let him win. But fourteen years ago, the racist and hateful media falsely called President Obama's private birthday party a "hip-hop BBQ". And as I said years later, you should just have the damn hip-hop BBQ — they're going to accuse you of it anyway. Lean into who you are, own it, and let the haters stay mad.
This is perhaps one of the most profound lessons of Zohran's campaign, and one of the most personal, because I got to see these people have these impacts firsthand. When Lindsey Boylan stood up in 2020 to tell her story of how Andrew Cuomo had harassed her and created a brutally hostile environment for her work, she not only had everything to lose, but there was no way to know whether there would ever be any accountability. But by speaking her truth, she made it possible for other women to speak up, and she made it possible for Zohran Mamdani to be an advocate for accountability as a candidate for mayor. Similarly, when Heems spoke to the Village Voice about Ali Najmi running for city council, I read it as my friend simply using his platform to help his friend campaign for office. What I didn't know at the time was that he would be galvanizing a young Zohran Mamdani to canvass for a campaign for the first time in his life, introducing him to the idea that this was a city where he could have political impact. This week, 104,000 people knocked on doors as part of their succesful effort to make Zohran mayor.
This one's so personal for me — we both have mothers named Mira who come from the same small state in India, and so many people I love carry Zohran in their hearts like family. But stepping outside of my deep emotional connection, there are a rich vein of lessons that apply to a much broader context, and I hope people will reflect on how much there is to learn from this moment. As proud and excited as I am for Zohran, I'm just as excited to find out which of those young people who was out there knocking doors next to me these last few months is going to be my mayor in a few years.
2025-10-24 08:00:00
I've been following tech news for decades, and one of the worst trends in the broader cultural conversation about technology — one that's markedly accelerated over the last decade — is the shift from talking about people who create tech to focusing on those who merely finance it.
It's time we change the story. When you see a story that claims to be about "technology", ask yourself:
These questions aren't being asked nearly enough. The result is a hell of a lot of "tech" stories that have approximately nothing to do with technology.
The shift to centering money movers over makers has had incredibly negative effects on innovation, accountability, and even just the basic accuracy of how stories are told about technology.
We see this play out in a number of ways. First, a huge percentage of all stories about new technologies focus solely on startups, even though a small fraction of all tech workers are employed by startups, and the vast majority of new technology innovations come from academia, the public sector, and research and development organizations within other institutions outside of the startup world. As I wrote nine years ago, there is no technology industry — every organization uses technology, so technological innovation can come from anywhere. But we seldom see that broad base of ideas and insight covered accurately, if they're covered at all, because they're not of interest to the investors who are hogging the spotlight.
There's also the fact that a disproportionately large number of "technology" stories are really just announcements about funding events for companies in the technology sector, which has very little to do with the merits or substance of the tech that they create, taking time and space away from other innovations that could be covered, but also distracting from talking about how the tech actually works. This erodes the ability for people who care about technology to share knowledge, which is key for driving broader innovations.
One of the great joys of being in various technology communities is how you can "find your people" — those who geek out about the same minute technical details as you. There's a profound spirit of generosity in so many tech communities, where people will go out of their way to help you troubleshoot or fix bugs or will contribute code, just to share in that spirit of creativity together. There's a magical and rewarding feeling the first time you get some code to successfully run, or the first time you get a bit of hardware to successfully boot, and people who love technology delight in helping others achieve that. I've seen this remain true for people at every stage of their career, with even some of the most expert coders in the world voluntarily spending their time helping beginning coders with questions just because they had a shared interest.
The most common reason that people create technology is because they had an idea about something cool they wanted to see in the world. That's the underlying ethos which connects tech creators together, and which motivates them to share their work as free or open source projects, or to write up their weekend hacks just for the love nerding out. Sometimes there's enough interest that they might turn that side project into a business, but in most cases the fundamental motivation is the creative spirit. And then, sure, if that creative project needs capital to grow into its full potential, then there's a place for investors to join the conversation.
That creative spirit used to be more obvious when more of the cultural story about tech featured actual makers; it's what brought me and most of my peers into this space in the first place. And all of that gets crowded out when people think the only path into creating something begins with appeasing a tiny handful of gatekeepers who control the pursestrings.
There's been a larger cost to this focus on venture capitalists and financiers over coders, engineers, and inventors: It's gone to their heads. Part of the reason is that some of the investors, long ago, used to make products. A handful of them even made successful ones, and some of those successful ones were even good. But after riding on the coattails of those successes for a long time, and spending years in the bubble of praise and sycophancy that comes with being a person that people want to get money from, the egos start to grow. The story becomes about their goals, their agendas, their portfolios.
When we see something like a wildly-distorted view of artificial intelligence get enough cultural traction to become considered “conventional wisdom” despite the fact that it’s a wildly unpopular view held by a tiny, extremist minority within the larger tech sphere — that is the result of focusing on investors instead of inventors. Who cares what the money-movers think? We want to hear what motivated the makers!
We’re also losing the chance for people to see themselves reflected in the stories we tell about technology. It’s obvious that the cabal of check-writers is a closed cohort. But that’s a stark contrast to the warm and welcoming spirit that still suffuses the communities of actual creators. There's a striking lack of historical perspective in how we talk about tech today. Let community voices lead instead of a tiny group of tycoons, and you'd get much more interesting, accurate stories. We couldn’t imagine a film being released without talking about who the director was, or the actors, and they even give out awards for the writers. But when a new app comes out, media talks to the CEO of the tech company — that’s like talking to the head of the studio about the new movie.
We have so much richer stories to tell. At its best, technology empowers people, in a profound and extraordinary way. I’ve seen people change their lives, even change entire communities, by getting just the barest bit of access to the right tech at the right time. There’s something so much more compelling and fascinating about finding out how things actually work, and thinking about how they might work better. The way to get there is by talking to the people who are actually making that future.