Jamie Zawinski

Jamie Zawinski (born 1968) helped build the early web: a founding engineer at Netscape, author of much of the original Navigator’s Unix code, a creator of XEmacs, and one of the people present at the birth of the Mozilla project. He famously cashed out of tech in 1999 to run the DNA Lounge nightclub in San Francisco, from which he has spent two decades as the industry’s most quotably disenchanted alumnus.

Exterminate all rational AI scrapers

His AI opposition is executable. In January 2025, annoyed that AI crawlers ignored robots.txt, he wired a honeypot into jwz.org — built on a “spicy autocomplete” text generator he wrote thirty years earlier — that feeds LLM scrapers endless grammatical garbage, plus “an enormous amount of JavaScript CPU, as a special treat.” By his October 2025 accounting the trap was serving 69 percent of all URLs on his site, a measure of how relentlessly the bots hammer the open web.

The rhetoric matches the code. He republished Anthony Moser’s essay “I Am An AI Hater” with the note that every paragraph was perfect, headlined Mozilla’s 2026 AI pivot as spending 1.4 billion dollars on “some AI bullshit” (verdict: “Mozilla is cooked”), and amplified Baldur Bjarnason’s argument that AI is a consent-disregarding political project under the title “‘AI’ is a dick move.” His objections run to ethics as much as engineering — scraping without consent, labor displacement, and what the technology is being used to dismantle.