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.

In an emergency, information is as vital as water. The official advice is clear: “leave early.” But how do you act on that advice when the power is out, the mobile network is congested to the point of failure, and the emergency broadcaster’s tower has been consumed by the very fire you’re trying to flee?

This isn’t a hypothetical. As Fiannuala Morgan chillingly documented in her article, “No power, no phone, no radio: why comms dropped out during the Central Victorian fires{target="_blank”}", this is the reality for communities across Australia. The wholesale replacement of resilient copper landlines with power-dependent NBN connections, coupled with the shutdown of the 3G network, has created a communications infrastructure that is dangerously brittle in the face of climate-fuelled disasters.