Mozilla Foundation Brings Mozilla Festival 2025 to Barcelona with a Call to “Unlearn” Technology and Build Better Futures
- The festival returns November 7-9, featuring 240+ interactive sessions, art installations, youth-led sessions and a film festival. See the latest programming here.
- Confirmed speakers include Dr. Ruha Benjamin, Paolo Benanti (AI Envoy to the Pope), Audrey Tang (Taiwan's first Digital Minister 2016-2024), Sougwen Chung (artist), Ben Collins (The Onion), Nelly Mensah (VP of Digital Innovation at LVMH), Alex Hanna (DAIR Institute), Divya Siddarth (co-founder of Collective Intelligence Project) and other influential voices reimagining the future of technology
- Press and media accreditation is open now–register here.
BARCELONA, SEPTEMBER 10, 2025– Fifteen years after its first gathering in Barcelona, Mozilla Foundation is bringing back Mozilla Festival to the city with greater urgency and possibility. From November 7–9, 2025, more than 2,000 artists, technologists, policymakers, and activists from around the globe will gather at Poble Espanyol to explore how we can “unlearn” harmful digital defaults and co-create a better technology future - powered by people, open by design, fueled by imagination.
Unlike traditional tech conferences that spotlight industry trends, Mozilla Festival goes deeper—confronting the hardest questions about our digital lives:
- Who benefits from today’s technologies, and who is excluded?
- How can we design digital systems that center wellbeing, equity, and creativity over profit?
- What must we unlearn about power, privacy, and progress to build something better together?
Mozilla Festival 2025 is a global space for collective imagination and action. A place where communities come together to challenge harmful defaults and prototype the futures we want and deserve.
Rooted in Imagination and Possibility
With community co-creation at its heart, this year’s Mozilla Festival shares more than just its location with the inaugural 2010 gathering in Barcelona. The same spirit of imagination and collective action endures but with a vastly expanded scope of offerings to a broader mix of participants spanning artists, technologists, policymakers, and activists. Mozilla Festival 2025 will be bigger, bolder, and more community-powered than ever–featuring over 240 sessions and experiences.
“Mozilla Festival has always been about community and coming together to build the digital world we deserve,” said Nabiha Syed, Executive Director of Mozilla Foundation. “As we return to Barcelona 15 years after our very first gathering, we do so with urgency and defiant optimism. The theme of ‘Unlearn’ asks us to break free from harmful defaults and dare to “unlearn” to imagine better — and then to build it. At Mozilla Festival, we are not just critiquing what’s broken; we are prototyping the future.”
Inspiring Conversations on the Main Stage
The Main Stage will push beyond safe talking points, hosting bold debates and radical re-imaginings of technology’s role in society. Across three days in Barcelona, visionaries, artists, activists, and technologists will push us to unlearn harmful digital defaults—and imagine a better, people-powered future.
Nabiha Syed will be joined by Princeton scholar and author, Dr. Ruha Benjamin, to open the Festival with a conversation that redefines unlearning as a radical act of possibility. From the biases baked into our digital worlds to the myths that shape our laws and institutions, this conversation will explore how power operates through the stories we inherit—and how breaking free from them can unlock new ways of thinking, building, and being.
Other featured speakers include Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s former Digital Minister; futurist Jason Silva, and creator Sougwen Chungs. Their work exemplifies how people everywhere are rethinking technology’s role in society—placing people at the heart of its design so that it ultimately serves those who use it.
A Festival of Culture, Creativity, and Experimentation
At Mozilla Festival, art is not a sideshow but a catalyst for change. This year’s cultural programming highlights how creativity drives social and technological imagination.
Film Festival: Brave Futures x Barcelona Pop-Up, presented with Open Television (OTV), spotlighting cutting-edge themes in the intersection of technology, creativity, and social change.
Tech x Art Installations: Be immersed in the intersection of art and technology at creative exhibitions:
- The Care Commons - Wall and River of Possibilities: A living experiment where participants add needs, offers, and dreams to a shared wall, sparking collaboration and collective imagination.
- Poetics of Soil - Fly Agaric: An exploration of the relationship between soil and other living species, deepening our understanding of life.
- Digital Bharat: A multimedia exhibition through photos, videos, and an original video game, celebrating the care and data labour of India’s door-to-door health activists.
- Algorithmic Perfumery: A custom AI guided scent creation perfumery, for participants to learn and experiment.
- AI Fashion Show: Explore how AI intersects with cultural expression, design, and power.
Youth at the Center: Reimagining the Internet Together
Mozilla Festival 2025 will feature a groundbreaking slate of youth-led activations and intergenerational collaborations designed to confront today’s most urgent questions about digital life from child safety online to the future of AI. By putting creativity and lived experience at the forefront, these youth-led sessions showcase how Gen Z and Gen Alpha are not just users of technology, but co-authors of its future.
- Youth Safety and Wellbeing x AI: A panel exploring the promises and risks of AI-powered chatbots in young people’s lives, and how to design systems grounded in safety, trust, and care.
- Designing with Youth, Not for Them: A session challenging one-size-fits-all approaches to youth tech, highlighting how young people are co-creating healthier digital spaces and AI tools that reflect their realities.
- Unlearning Isolation Through Tech that Connects: An interactive forum reimagining digital tools and social robots to center empathy, presence, and human connection.
Mozilla Festival 2025 Programming - See the latest here.
Join us in Barcelona this November to be part of the conversations, creations, and collaborations that will shape a more human, open, and just digital world.
This year there will be 220+ Interactive Community Sessions, including hands-on workshops and dialogues across six “Unlearning” tracks, from dismantling harmful tech systems to surfacing climate-conscious alternatives.
Mozilla Festival 2025 is a rallying call to think differently, to confront uncomfortable truths, and to build alternatives. While other conferences chase the next market opportunity, Mozilla Festival is asking what kind of digital future we want—and how we can build it together.
For more information and badges, visit: www.mozillafestival.org and apply for press badges here