The AI conversation today has only just caught up to what the substrate has been doing to the free-software caretakers. One example: In March 2024, a researcher in Germany, Andres Freund, noticed that logging into the Linux system he was using was taking half a second longer than usual. Because it is free software, he could trace the entire audit trail back to exactly where and when the project changed. What he found was a contributor calling themselves Jia Tan, who had spent two years patiently grooming the lonely maintainer of a tiny compression library — coordinated through pressure campaigns, possibly helped by language models. We do not know which language Jia Tan actually speaks, but they write very crisp English. Having finally won the maintainer's trust, they inserted a backdoor. Had it reached the stable distribution, it could have given attackers access to a very large fraction of the internet, bringing a significant part of it down. It did not, because one curious person noticed half a second.