It is a curious phenomenon in the sociology of the digital sphere: those who shout loudest about "community safety" and "inclusivity" are often the first to reach for the most authoritarian tool in the box—the preemptive ban.
Recently, David Gerard—a well-known commentator on the failures of blockchain and a self-appointed high priest of "Old School" tech skepticism—publicly stated regarding my analysis of Open Source governance:
"If I had an open source project, this post is evidence that I would probably want to preemptively ban github and gitlab user ms178 from any interaction with it."
Yes, this is me who he is talking about. And thankfully, no one has followed his advise yet.
Let us deconstruct this statement. It is not merely an insult; it is a confession. It reveals the epistemological crisis of a tech elite that has stopped building and started policing.
The Sysadmin’s Fallacy
David Gerard operates from the mindset of the System Administrator. The Sysadmin’s job is to maintain the status quo, to keep the servers running, and to block anything that looks like a threat to stability. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail; to a Sysadmin, every outlier looks like a "luser" to be firewalled.
But I am not a user asking for a password reset. I am a fully qualified lawyer (Assessor iuris) with a Master of Laws, and I am an enthusiast user actively contributing to various Open Source Software projects for many years.
While Gerard writes about technology, I actively modify the scheduler logic that runs on my system in my spare time. While he scoffs at "stochastic parrots" (AI), I used those very tools to identify performance inefficiencies in the sched_ext LAVD scheduler—optimizations that were validated by the maintainers themselves and made it into mainline. That improvement LAVD scheduler saves Meta and all other users some CPU cycles and thus time and money.
The irony is palpable. A commentator who likely hasn't compiled a Linux Kernel since the turn of the millennium arrogates to himself the right to judge the validity of my engineering workflow. He judges the method (AI assistance) because he cannot critique the result (upstream performance patches).
The Fear of the Hybrid
Why does a figure like Gerard call for a "preemptive ban" of me? Why is the mere existence of a lawyer who codes without having taken any programming classes such a "red flag" to the Mastodon intelligentsia?
Because I represent the Hybrid.
For decades, the "Code of Conduct" era of Open Source has relied on a separation of powers: The Techies write the code, and the Governance is handled by... well, Techies playing judges. They have created a Lex Mercatoria of vague feelings, where "vibes" matter more than Due Process.
When I entered the arena—not as a supplicant, but as an analyst pointing out the procedural deficits, the lack of hearings, and the arbitrary nature of their so called "justice"—I broke the fourth wall. I applied the rigorous standards of due process to their digital clubhouse.
Gerard’s call for a ban is not a safety measure. It is an act of intellectual protectionism. It is the fear that if actual legal standards are applied to Open Source governance, the arbitrary power of the maintainer-kings will collapse. My experience with the LLVM CoC committee makes me hope that day will come sooner rather than later. AI will be the tool to break their dominance and ignorance one day for sure.
AI, Innovation, and the "Wrong" Tools
Furthermore, the animus against my use of AI is revealing. To the "Old Guard," coding is a rite of passage. You must suffer through the man-pages. If you use an LLM to bridge the gap between high-level architectural understanding and C++ syntax, you are "cheating."
I reject this school of thought. As a liberal conservative, I believe in results. If my AI-assisted workflow generates a patch that improves my CPU performance, that value exists objectively. The "stochastic parrot" found a way to optimize performance that the humans missed. To ban the user for using the tool is to choose ideological purity over technical excellence.
Conclusion: The Future Belongs to the Interdisciplinary
David Gerard wants to ban me "preemptively." In the legal world, we call this Vorbeugehaft (preventive detention) in a criminal law context. It is a concept alien to free societies, usually reserved for totalitarian regimes that fear what a citizen might do.
He is welcome to his imaginary fiefdoms where he can ban dissidents before they speak. I will be over here, in the real world—suing government agencies for incompetence before various German courts, and optimizing the Linux Kernel, Mesa, LLVM and other projects for my hardware if time allows.
The future does not belong to the gatekeepers who ban. It belongs to the hybrids who build.