They Live and the secret history of the Mozilla logo

October 28, 2016 7:49 AM

jwz tells the story of the Mozilla logo:

I'm going to draw a line through 1930s agitprop, Ronald Reagan, methane-breathing zombie space aliens, the Mozilla logo, Barack Obama and the International Commiunist Conspiracy. It's a long walk, so please stick with me.

posted by jenkinsEar (21 comments total)

What a nice writeup! It seems sort of crazy to me you have to explain this stuff; I mean didn't everyone live through it all and understand it back in 1998? Now I feel old.
posted by Nelson at 8:15 AM on October 28, 2016 [7 favorites]

about:mozilla
posted by k5.user at 8:35 AM on October 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

1998? Heck, I remember piling into the theater with my college band to watch They Live! and groking it at once -- man, we cheered and laughed and went around shouting "Obey!" for weeks...
posted by touchstone033 at 8:36 AM on October 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

I like to think that the Crash Worship bonding sealed the deal.



*90s INTENSIFIES*
posted by louche mustachio at 8:51 AM on October 28, 2016 [10 favorites]

I'm going to declare the Make America Obey Again costume the winner of this year's Halloween.
posted by Major Matt Mason Dixon at 8:53 AM on October 28, 2016 [7 favorites]

It was the browser that your parents used.

*weeps*

(Also, I used lynx.)
posted by soren_lorensen at 9:03 AM on October 28, 2016 [13 favorites]

Lynx: The browser that your weird anti-social uncle used.

(I also used lynx.)
posted by clawsoon at 9:07 AM on October 28, 2016 [18 favorites]

They just gave away their source code to the whole world?

This is like what the encyclopedia britannica describes as THE GOOD OLD DAYS. (Cue All in the Family theme song.)
posted by bukvich at 9:11 AM on October 28, 2016

This was a nice little article. Thanks for posting. And smash the state.
posted by latkes at 9:11 AM on October 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

They Live doesn't get enough credit for its depiction of what the 80s was like... watching it next to Stranger Things is an interesting contrast.
posted by lefty lucky cat at 9:21 AM on October 28, 2016 [8 favorites]

In this upcoming presidential election, please vote against the methane-breathing zombie space alien.

I can't believe he wants us to vote for a Reptilian!
posted by briank at 9:49 AM on October 28, 2016

So this IS all a simulation, I get it now.
posted by Oyéah at 10:28 AM on October 28, 2016

I kept thinking, "but that's not Futurism! that's a deeply misinformed view of what Futurism was, it's a retconned application of the word that..." and then I got to the punchline.

Apparently, software people don't take art history classes. Who knew?
posted by mwhybark at 11:01 AM on October 28, 2016 [6 favorites]

Beyond the newsgroup discussions, which were endless, you can relive the glory days of Mozilla with bugs like 194337 - Repulsive picture remniscent of Nazi Germany propaganda. 190078 (Steps to Reproduce: 1. start mozilla 2. run to the toilet - FAST), 32218 (308 comments), and 114061 ("this makes Mozilla communist by definition").

I still have my red star hack shirt tucked away somewhere, and I miss the original artwork.
posted by zachlipton at 12:10 PM on October 28, 2016 [6 favorites]

There's an artist you may have heard of, Shepard Fairey. He did the Obama "Hope" poster in 2008. But long before that, in the early 90s he had this semi-anonymous graffiti campaign, "Andre the Giant Has a Posse". It was everywhere. Stickers, stencils, wheat-paste posters, I saw them in every city I ever visited. It was a global propaganda campaign whose goals and meaning, if any, were completely obscure. I loved the mindfuckery of it, a campaign with no purpose, for which he had somehow managed to mobilize a worldwide army of helpers, primarly by intentionally giving up control of it and allowing it to take on its own life.

In the mid 90s, his Andre the Giant has a Posse campaign morphed into OBEY GIANT.

MetaFilter's own Mike Mongo fills in some gaps, and you can get a bit more from Wikipedia. Long story short: "posses" were a thing in hip-hop, which was adopted by skaters. Fairey and co were mocking the whole posse thing among skaters, and used a random Andre the Giant ad image as a tutorial in making stickers.

Then the Posse became Obey/Disobey in 1994/95, except everyone forgot the Disobey counter-message when OBEY GIANT became a brand. (It's really hard to find records of the original Disobey message, with search results muddied with spoof images and parallel "campaigns".)

Back to your regularly scheduled reminiscences.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:46 PM on October 28, 2016 [5 favorites]

I kept our School of Music's website lynx-friendly up until I left in 1997. It led to some very good habits – when I worked on the accessibility of a gov't-run website in 2010, I was speechless that they weren't using alt attributes on images. "How will people using text browsers know what they're looking at?!"

I also still call Firefox "Mozilla". Not on purpose, it just comes out sometimes.

Neat to learn more about the 'zilla.
posted by fraula at 1:06 PM on October 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

I remember putting in about:jwz in IE, though it might've been Netscape, back in the day, and I've always been interested in anything related to the fellow ever since.

I think the line that came up was 'You come into the world naked, screaming, and covered in blood; if you live your life right, it doesn't have to end there.'
posted by LD Feral at 2:39 PM on October 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

though it is technically a sci-fi / horror movie, it is also the best documentary about the Reagan Administration you're likely to see.

The Thatcher-era British equivalent would be Hellraiser then.
posted by acb at 4:10 PM on October 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

In this upcoming presidential election, please vote against the methane-breathing zombie space alien.

So... third party then?
posted by technodelic at 4:58 PM on October 28, 2016

JWZ fired an answer to that particular "they both suck" position down in the comments below his article:

If you choose to draw the "herp derp they're all the same" false equivalence between Hawkish Grandma and Unhinged Angry Rapist Cheeto, you deserve the world you'll have to live in. I just hope the rest of us don't have to live in that world too.

posted by Harvey Kilobit at 8:27 PM on October 28, 2016 [8 favorites]

I've always wondered what was up with the ATM messages there!
posted by RichAndCreamy at 4:25 PM on October 31, 2016