A few days ago I got a tweet directed to me:

If I find another copy of the Blue Cover version of Hackers could I get you to autograph it again? The one I currently have was signed by you and Richard Stallman at LinuxWorld in 1999, and I'm afraid I'm going to have to burn or shred it.

This requires some decoding: Thirty-five years ago I wrote a book called Hackers. The last section centered on a hugely odd young man who considered himself the lone survivor of an unsung subculture of information sharing at MIT. He was, he said, like Ishi, the last of the Yahi people, the sole member of his indigenous tribe. Stallman, aka RMS (his email handle), later achieved fame in the digital realm as the champion of free software. Last week Stallman (who has in the past written for WIRED) penned some comments related to the Jeffrey Epstein case that implied sex with young women was not “sexual assault.” A deep dive into his archive revealed some questionable comments about pedophilia. Now Stallman is a pariah, even to former fanboys who find themselves flinging books into the flames to immolate his signature.

Yesterday RMS resigned from MIT and the Free Software Foundation he founded. For those who have followed his free-software movement, Stallman leaving MIT is like the big dome on Massachusetts Avenue itself getting an eviction notice. But after decades of tone-deaf comportment and complaints now emerging from women about his behavior, Stallman’s time was up.

The moment goes beyond Stallman, a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient and author of key pieces of the open source software that basically runs our world these days. MIT itself is melting down because of Epstein, the now deceased serial rapist who insinuated himself into the Media Lab with his money and what its leaders considered his charm. The lab’s director, Joi Ito (who was a contributing writer to WIRED), resigned under pressure, and now people are calling for the ouster of MIT’s president, who apparently OK'd the payments. But the Stallman affair touches on something else: a simmering resentment about the treatment of women by the scruffy brainiacs who built our digital world, as well as the Brahmins of academia and business who benefited from the hackers’ effort. With the Epstein revelations that resentment has boiled over.

Stallman put himself in the path of that outrage by contributing to a CSAIL mail thread defending the late artificial intelligence guru Marvin Minsky. (The acronym stands for the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.) In a deposition, one of Epstein’s victims says he instructed her to have sex with Minsky. Stallman reacted in a way that anyone who knew him would not be surprised to see. Instead of considering the pain of a young person treated in such a manner, he nitpicked about whether such a case would be a proper instance of “sexual assault,” since the young woman, he reasoned, would have seemed to be presenting herself to Minsky willingly. (It is far from resolved whether Minsky had sex with the woman.) In the email thread there is another classic Stallman-ism: He wanted to read the actual deposition, but it was only available in a Google Doc. Stallman boycotts all commercial software, and had to ask someone to send it to him.

Stallman showed a similar blindness more than 10 years ago with idiotic comments on pedophilia, opining that 14-year-old girls have free will and therefore may not be victims of older men who have sex with them. More recently he recanted, saying that people took pains to explain to him that girls actually suffer harm from those interactions, and that his mind was changed. He did not respond to requests for comment by the time of this article's publication.