Every major open source project today ships with a CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md in the repository. The idea was sold that this existed to “protect minorities” and “create safe spaces.” In practice, what I watched happen over the last decade was something else: an instrument to cancel, persecute, and ban anyone who thought differently from whoever was in control. And the people leading those hunts, as a rule, were not the ones maintaining the projects’ code.

This is my thesis, and I know it’s unpopular. It took me ten years of patience to be able to write this piece. I stayed quiet watching this theater repeat itself year after year, waiting for the right moment to document everything I witnessed up close, and today I get to watch, with real pleasure, my own predictions come true one by one.