I’ve spent 30 years watching tech cycles come and go, from the first dial-up modems in rural Austria to the mesh networks I’m currently stringing across the Australian bush. Each time a “next big thing” arrives, we see the same pattern: a frantic rush to centralise, followed by a slow, painful enclosure of what should have been a common resource.

The current noise around AI in open source feels different. It feels heavier. There’s a justified fear that AI-generated code is hollowing out our commons. Maintainers are being buried under a drift of unvetted, mediocre pull requests, while a handful of platform monopolies strip-mine decades of community work to feed their proprietary black boxes.

I’m tired. Not the kind of tired that a good night’s sleep or a weekend off the grid can fix. It’s a deeper, more pervasive exhaustion—the fatigue of living in a culture of relentless, performative positivity. In the tech world, we’re told to “crush it,” to “move fast,” and to embrace every new “game-changer” with uncritical enthusiasm. If you’re not a believer, you’re a “naysayer” or, worse, a “blocker” of progress.