Make me CEO of Mozilla

I have a proposal: Make me CEO of Mozilla instead of Anthony Enzor-DeMeo.

Hear me out. I have absolutely zero experience in an executive capacity and I'm already fucking up less than he is.

I know, I know. That sounds harsh. But at least if I was CEO I would start by acknowledging the problems Mozilla is facing: steady 4th place marketshare, a lack of revenue generating ideas, and insufficient awareness of how to leverage the existing goodwill that they have to galvanize a new path for the organization. Hey, at least the Department of Justice says they can keep sucking at the teat of the mainstream tech industry to stay alive for a while.

Maybe as a first step as new CEO to repair the relationship with the organization's base, I could shut down Mozilla.ai. Sorry, John Dickerson.

And look, I'm sympathetic to Anil Dash's position that regular consumers need a trustworthy platform to interact with LLMs. I just don't believe in negotiating with terrorists.

If the organization funding model makes it incapable of sustaining itself without doing things that are directly beneficial to "Big Tech", like embedding AI that can't be disabled without changing 7 settings in a debug menu, than how is it supposed to take any principled action to protect its userbase? You know, those "regular consumers" Anil is so worried about? Oh, that's right. Those people are using Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome. Whatever was installed on their machine.

The unfortunate reality is that Mozilla today exists as a convenient way for monopolists to shield their companies from legal scrutiny and unpleasant discussions.

What Mozilla leadership has continually demonstrated for the last several years is that they not only fail to understand the values of those who believe in and use the product, but they also have no intention of figuring out a non-parasitic financial basis for the organization to operate.

When the fundamental value your organization should defend is the existence of the Web as a commons and an egalitarian space but you are beholden to interests that do not value the web because they can't profit from it, it makes sense that you mention AI more times than the Web in your inaugural address.

So yeah, I don't know, make me CEO of Mozilla. I've at least got that part figured out. I would at least try admitting the dire threats the organization is facing and publicly call for help. But meekly repeating the bland hopes of venture capitalists and tech at large is getting Mozilla nowhere.

In the absence of that leadership, I'm continuing to donate to Servo. Hopefully one day that might be, or power, a browser that cares about the Web as a concept. In the interim, I'll keep hoping the tech industry stops assuming people want whatever "future" they envision shoved down our throats.