mission
A long time ago, I was an intern at the Mozilla Corporation. Does anyone recognize that name anymore? At the time we were the shining hope of the new internet, cracking open Microsoft’s grip on computing one browser tab at a time. We even got badges that let us into the Google cafeterias for free meals, like guerrillas with the quiet backing of another rising power. (Perhaps more importantly, they were also funneling millions of dollars into our coffers through a search sponsorship deal.)
We were a ragtag group befitting our insurgent status — purple-haired hackers from San Francisco mashed up with hardcore Christian evangelicals from New Zealand, high school volunteers side by side with vets of the dotcom bust. And we were winning. When I was an intern in 2007, Mozilla’s firefox browser had been continuously taking share from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for half a decade. At all-hands meetings they’d say: you could all be making more money somewhere else, but you’re here because you believe in the mission. I ate it up. In retrospect, I think the money part was true for about half of the people in the room, and the other half were hypertalented but delinquent misfits who might not have made it through the door anywhere else. Still, I think the rest was right: we all really believed in what we were doing.
I did a brief stint as a Google intern the next summer. As chance would have it, that was the summer that Google released Chrome, their own homegrown browser, built by engineers that they’d hired away from Mozilla years earlier. It was sleek and fast and very non-Microsoft. I remember being confused though. Weren’t we all in this together? Why was Google doing this?
When I returned to Mozilla full-time the next year, our CEO John had the party line down pat. Google still supports us. We are still the champions of the open web. They’re still sending us millions of dollars a year, our usage is still growing and theirs is tiny. They just need a hedge in case we go under, and any other company in their place would do the same thing.
A year later, John stepped down to join a venture capital firm. He still believed in us, he said, it was just an opportunity that he couldn’t turn down.
You might not know all of the details of what happened next, but you already know how the story ends. Mozilla bled off both users and contributors, slowly at first and then very quickly, as Chrome gained faster and faster. That Silicon Valley maxim “growth papers over a multitude of sins” runs in reverse too: when you stop growing, everything else comes to the surface all at once. An internal culture war between the evangelical and progressive factions boiled over into a fractious CEO succession, while many of the best developers fled for greener pastures. You’re probably reading this in a tab in Chrome, and you haven’t thought about Firefox in years.
One weird footnote is that a bunch of my coworkers wound up at Facebook, which represented pretty much the opposite of what I thought we'd been building at Mozilla — a walled garden instead of the open web, a hyperefficient data collector where Mozilla had been privacy-conscious to a fault. (To be clear, I landed at Google Adwords, so I’m not claiming any moral high ground here.)
I saw John on a panel a few years later. What happened? I asked him. It’s one thing to fail, but did we even believe any of it at all? As I asked the question I felt my ears start to burn. I’m sure his answer was reasonable and well-polished, but I was too embarrassed for myself to even hear it. What kind of question was that? I knew the answer before I even asked. Yes, we had a mission and a set of beliefs, but they were conditional, as everything always was in business. When conditions changed, so did we. Isn’t that what I had done myself?
When is it time to change? Or alternatively, when are you obliged to go down with the ship?
I first started thinking about this when I was leading Christian groups in high school. As a small group leader your job is to guide your peers through a Bible study or a discussion of the sermon or some other boring spiritual topic. Basically everyone at youth group was some level of committed Christian (there were far better ways to spend your Friday night if you weren’t), but also everyone there was a teenager, with the attendant teenage desires to goof off, flirt, gossip, and maintain a reasonable ironic distance from any serious subject. Leaders were chosen for a combination of their religious devotion and natural charisma, so they were subjected to the strongest tug in both directions. At one retreat a few years before I became a leader, about half of them got busted for a game of strip poker.
The job of a small group leader is to manage the tension between these two poles. Sometimes there’s a shared moment where the worship music is especially moving or the sermon particularly inspiring, and everyone is automatically bought in, or on the other hand sometimes the joker in your group does something really distracting and funny and there’s no chance of keeping anyone focused. But most of the time the group sentiment is in the middle where you might be able to sway it, if you try.
The ultimate goal is to guide your group members into a deeper commitment of faith and bring their lives more fully in line with your (nominally) shared mission. You want occasional attendees to become regulars, regulars to become true believers, true believers to begin evangelizing to others. Belief induces action, and action reinforces belief.
Going through this experience gave me a kind of fingertip-feel for group belief. I’d say about 10% of the kids in my church had a highly literal and independent relationship with their faith. An action is sinful or not, righteous or not, acceptable before God or not, based on the principles in the Bible and a few logical inferences made directly from them. These kids were very earnest and frequently kind of annoying. They’d narc on you for not properly respecting your elders or start weird debates about whether women should cover their heads in church. But they were also always the first ones to really engage with me, regardless of the social consequences. In internet slang, they were the religious autists.
The other 90% were normies. They believed in what we were doing, but only sort of. they’d engage, but only when it felt like everyone else would too. They were easy to get along with, but they’d never be the first ones to take a social risk. So my job was to bridge the gap between the two groups, to use a spark from the annoying true believers to ignite some kind of common feeling in the indifferent cool kids. I was good at it.
So maybe the real question on my mind was: what is a leader's obligation to their group, when that leader starts to lose faith themselves? Sometimes I didn't feel like being earnestly engaged either, like there was some girl I wanted to flirt with or some unsanctioned outing I wanted to join. I wonder now if it was my obligations to my group members that bound me, more than any commitment to my actual religious beliefs. Having talked someone else into going out on a limb for their faith, I couldn't just leave them there to be laughed at by the rest of the group.
Ironically, the advice that I think about most from those years has nothing to do with Christianity at all, about as far from it as you could get. It's the "campsite rule" coined by a gay sex advice columnist that I used to read: you can leave people behind, but you have to leave them better than you found them.
Despite losing my faith, I maintain a deep affection for the true believers. You have to have some people who can really believe in an idea and its implications, and not just read the social currents. You can’t get anything good going without them. I still love big causes too. I joke that I prefer startups over megacorps because you get the company kool-aid as one of the perks.
On the other hand, I have to wonder if there’s some deep wisdom in the sociable indifference of the normies. I do think it's good to be part of something bigger than yourself, but I’ve seen so many things that I believed in rise and fall by now. I don't want my friends to sacrifice too much of themselves for these things. There’s a quote from CS Lewis that I still love: “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”
I regret that I don’t much believe in the immortality of the human soul these days. Where would it go, when body and mind are gone? But more than ever I believe in the primacy of people above mission. Missions seem so much more fleeting to me now. If yours isn't working for you anymore, it’s okay to let it die.
Thanks to sympatheticopposition for feedback on this post.
The dual nature of Christ can be seen as a representation of the dichotomy between the ideal (the Mission) and the human frailty of leaders that embody it (sometimes only temporarily, as you point out).
But perhaps if we really want to live we have to either be such a leader or follow one. We have to have a mission, even if it is foolish, misguided or temporary.
You are a really beautiful writer.