Every few months, Australia’s business press discovers a new emergency. Right now it’s the capital gains tax. According to the usual commentators — founders, VCs, and their aligned media — Labor’s move to replace the 50% CGT discount with inflation-adjusted indexation is an act of vandalism against Australian ingenuity. Entrepreneurs will flee. Talent will dry up. The unicorns won’t come.

I’ve been working in and around Australian agtech and startups for the better part of two decades. I’ve watched the same arguments recycled through every policy debate: the R&D tax credit, the ESVCLP scheme, the startup visa. The answer is always the same — give us more upside, or we’ll take our toys elsewhere.

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.