If a PI finds themself "... beset by people demanding that you confront your privilege, perhaps what's changed isn't those people, but rather the amount of privilege you have."
You can easily find yourself on the wrong side of history.
At this point my best option is to quote myself, so... no point being embarrassed about it I guess! Here we go:
The potential for forks is the reason there are no true dictators in free software projects. This may seem like a surprising claim, considering how common it is to hear someone called the "dictator" (sometimes softened to "benevolent dictator") in a given open source project. But this kind of dictatorship is special, quite different from our conventional understanding of the word. Imagine a ruler whose subjects could copy her entire territory at any time and move to the copy to rule as they see fit. Would not such a ruler govern very differently from one whose subjects were bound to stay under her rule no matter what she did?
Someone who is a BDFL of an organization, or of some other set of physical / financial / organizational resources that can be owned and controlled is in a very different situation from that, of course. I just think that distinction is important: FOSS project BDFLs are not the same as other BDFLs.
