What happens when we loosen rigid systems so communities and tech evolve naturally?
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I grew up in Lebanon to two lineages: journalism and farming.
The convergence of engineering and tending to land was so deeply intertwined in my father. Building a nest for birds, or a new water system, or laying the foundation for a building, or taking care of our olive grove, all of these things were not that different for him. All of it was in the realm of circular: everything had an impact on something else, and our role was to build in mutuality.
Most of life growing up was planned around maysam al zaytoun, olive season, as if it were our single reference point to measuring the passing of days, the end of summer, and the coming of fall. Growing up, mawssam el zaytoun was my favorite time of the year.
Early in October, the picking began. It was, and still is, my fondest image of Chikhane, my father’s village: the olive trees, most of the Abi Assys spread across the grove, and some back at the house separating the olives from the leaves and twigs and organizing them: some for oil, some for soap, and some for eating.
For my mother who hails from Marjeyoun, a town in the south of Lebanon, memory and land were her strongest imaginative technology. For most of life Marjeyoun existed as a metaphor. Until 2000, we could not visit it so we settled for experiencing it through my mother’s stories, my grandfather’s newspaper, and as a gushing river of wounds flowing from my mother to us. A place we longed for, but had no memories of. My mother’s stories were rich and so alive with walnut trees and figs; land as the bedrock for the tenacity of my grandparent’s journalism.
Olive grove, Chikhane, Lebanon
Sunset, Gharzouz, Lebanon
Cut to 2026.
I am sitting at the overwhelming intersection of wanting to dream up a different world because the way that trees and land regenerates have instilled in me the deepest belief that another world is possible. I am in Lebanon visiting my family and I extend my trip to take care of family matters. The US threatens to attack Iran, Lebanon immediately holds its breath, and I experience paralysis.
What does it mean to work on a festival about the future of technology, when stifled by the impact of how it is progressing?
I took a walk on mornings in Lebanon, and in the thick of my paralysis, I would find release looking at wildflowers which are prevalent across the country. They are flowers we grew up picking for our mothers, our friends and lovers. After everything the country has endured since 2019, it was a hopeful reminder that blooming was possible in the middle of so much destruction. That these flowers held the revolutionary desire to want to be so alive as resistance to deathly conditions. Wilding, takes the impetus nestled in wildflowers into the workings of the systems we are in.
Wilding is not meant to be passive. It is not meant to only sit comfortably at our desks as a mechanism through which to frame work. The theme is an invitation into an expansive space of possibility: what does it mean to have arrived at such binding and controlling technologies, when all this time we could have been living, breathing, ecosystems together—online and offline.
Wilding is not only what we resist. It is, more importantly, what we build. A wilded technology is one designed like a grove rather than a fortress: interoperable where today’s systems wall us in, plural where they flatten us into a single profile, regenerative where they extract until there is nothing left. It does not ask permission from a single owner to grow. It seeds, it spreads, it adapts to the conditions of the people who tend it. The same impulse that pushes a wildflower through cracked concrete can push our tools toward openness, if we design for it on purpose.
The question the festival poses is simple: what would it mean to build technology that widens the conditions for life instead of narrowing them?
People are building every day in their little pockets of the world: communities building their own datasets and systems in their own languages; activists designing their own digital safety infrastructure; journalists building open-source tools that run on public records, not a corporation's cloud; Indigenous communities creating and owning their own communication networks; technologists designing anti-surveillance tools, and refusing to let their work fuel wars.
All of these are wildflowers. All of these are wildflowers, creating the conditions for more life. And that is what we hope the festival will become: a garden of intelligences, of power, of possibilities.
"The global information system is under the control of a select few. However, information is wild and it can develop and be processed on many forms of infrastructure. In my life, the theme gives me more opportunities to advocate for women’s and girls autonomy as they innovate around solutions for knowledge sharing."
"The wildflower is embodied in every effort of carving out a nook of agency in otherwise suppressive spaces. As a social media researcher and creative technologist, every time I interface with technology, it’s to try and wild whatever source material I can get my hands on, or to study how others find innovative ways to wild them themselves."
"A wildflower I see in the technology world is community-led civic technology. Unlike large platforms designed for scale and profit, civic tech projects often emerge organically from communities trying to solve local problems. They are resilient, adaptive, and deeply rooted in people's lived realities."
This collection of books, articles and local organizations is a starting point for anyone who wants to dig deeper into Wilding and arrive at Mozilla Festival ready to imagine what a wilder, more open Internet could become.
Soul Fire Farm is an Afro-Indigenous centered community farm and training center dedicated to uprooting racism and seeding sovereignty in the food system.
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Herban Cura is a healing justice herbalism and ecology school that creates learning opportunities to restore relationships to land, ancestry, and cultural lifeways.
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The People’s Medicine School was created to facilitate mutually beneficial healing relationships between people and plants.
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Regla Soul Cuba’s purpose is to provide sustainable solutions for disparities as experienced by the Afro-descendant people in local neighborhoods. They seek to confront how day-to-day lives in their community are disproportionately impacted by issues of food apartheid, ecological racism, and the disconnection from healing pathways of the land.
Truelove Seeds is a farm-based seed company offering culturally important and open pollinated vegetable, herb, and flower seeds.
A global initiative to recover heirloom seeds and their stories and put them back into peoples’ hands.
The Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact (AIPP) is a regional organization founded in 1992 by indigenous peoples’ movements. AIPP is committed to the cause of promoting and defending indigenous peoples’ rights and human rights and articulating issues of relevance to indigenous peoples.
The Garden’s Edge's work highlights and supports the Edge Effect, not only in natural ecosystems but also on a cultural level, creating rich experiences by bringing different cultures together to learn from one another.
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