In the Wimmera Mallee town of St Arnaud in 2023, around 300 residents joined a tractor rally through the streets to protest renewable energy infrastructure. At a community meeting about the proposed VNI West transmission project, government representatives were heckled until Victoria Police advised the meeting be adjourned. More than 80 landholders signed a declaration refusing survey access to the company responsible for building the transmission line. Many of them had first learned their properties were in the proposed corridor through a QR code in a local newspaper.

A follow-up to Monocultures Are Dumb by Design

Let me be direct about where I stand.

I work in technology. I have spent over two decades building open-source infrastructure, mesh networks, and digital tools designed to put capability into communities’ hands rather than extract it from them. I believe in technology that serves people. I have seen it do exactly that.

And in the contest between family farmers and the Monsanto playbook, I have no difficulty choosing a side.

My father farmed in Carinthia, Austria, and I grew up working alongside him. He was not a man of many words. When he did speak, it was measured, the kind of thing worth sitting with rather than answering. I was not particularly good at sitting with things. Two generations of men on a farm: we had the stubbornness in common, not the patience.

One thought stayed with me: that we were not owners of the land but custodians for a generation, obliged to hand it back better than we found it. Soil depleted by one generation becomes a liability for the next. Varieties lost cannot be recovered. Knowledge not passed on disappears. He never liked monocultures, and chipped away at alternatives steadily rather than making radical changes. My instinct would have been to reject the whole model outright, go further and faster at the time. His approach turned out to be the more long-term sustainable.

A few months ago, I wrote about the growing graveyard of “smart” home devices, expensive bits of plastic and silicon that turned into bricks the moment a corporate server in Virginia or San Francisco was switched off. It’s a personal annoyance when your $300 security hub stops talking to your lightbulbs. Scale that logic up to national defence and critical infrastructure, and the stakes shift from a darkened living room to a crippled nation.

Six months ago I pulled a local language model onto my laptop. Took about 12 minutes with Ollama. No account, no API key, no data leaving the machine. It felt like a small act of sovereignty, exactly the kind of local-first approach I’d been arguing for.

Then I started using it. And I noticed something.

The model’s cultural centre of gravity was somewhere around San Francisco, circa 2022. Ask it about food systems and it defaulted to commodity agriculture and supermarket supply chains. Ask it about community governance and it reached for American municipal frameworks. Ask it about traditional land management and it gave me a careful, earnest summary that read like it had been assembled from university anthropology papers, not from anyone who had actually grown anything, or sat with the country long enough to know it.

In 2020, journalists asked Australian police forces whether they were using Clearview AI, the American company that scraped three billion social media photos without consent to build a facial recognition database. The answer, from several state forces and the AFP, was no.

Then Clearview suffered a data breach. The stolen customer list included Australian law enforcement agencies. At that point, the denials stopped.

That sequence (quiet adoption, public denial, disclosure only under external pressure) is the pattern. Last week I wrote about the cultural conditions that make it possible: the institutional trust, the “she’ll be right” pragmatism, the absence of organised civil liberties infrastructure that might have generated friction. This post is the inventory. Here is what Australia has actually built, layer by layer, and what you can do about it.

If you have spent any time in the off-grid radio scene over the last few years, you know the frequency divisions. You either ran on the sub-GHz bands (915 MHz in Australia and the Americas, 868 MHz in Europe) for long-range, bush-penetrating reliability, or you accepted the high-congestion limits of local Wi-Fi. It was a trade-off we took for granted. If you wanted to send a message across 10 km of dense stringybark, you needed the long waves. If you wanted global hardware standardisation, you looked elsewhere.

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.

There is nothing quite like the mild panic of joining a meeting only to be greeted by a void where your face should be. On the latest Ubuntu 26.04 and the 24.04 LTS (Wayland), this has become a recurring theme for anyone unfortunate enough to rely on the Zoom Snap package.

You check your settings. The camera is detected. It works perfectly in Firefox. It works in Cheese. You’ve even checked the Snap permissions and everything looks “correct”. Yet, Zoom remains a stubborn black screen.

A few days ago I was listening to an episode of It Could Happen Here, Cooper Quintin and Colonel Panic from the EFF walking through the American surveillance state. Flock cameras on every corner. Cell site simulators at protests. Facial recognition with no accountability, built on databases scraped from your social media without asking. PenLink buying location data harvested from your phone’s apps and selling it to law enforcement, no warrant required, because it came from advertising networks instead of a phone carrier.

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.