David Gerard was a second-wave anti-Scientologist, as i recall: he got involved when Helena Kobrin attempted to rmgroup alt.religion.scientology. At the time, he was living in Australia. My mental classification for him at the time was "gadfly critic": he rarely had much to say that was worth saying, and seem mainly to be involved for the fun of it rather than out of any real concern for Scientology's social impacts. I think his present dislike of Scientology is almost entirely founded in their "attack on the Internet" rather than any deeper concern for the need to defend against manipulative cults. He is also clearly a shock counterculturist (as his involvement in the operation of several well-known shock websites attests), and being anti-Scientology is viewed as "edgy" by some people, so that probably also added to the appeal.
One of the things I noticed when I was involved in the anti-Scientology movement was the tendency of anti-Scientologists to become cultish themselves. This isn't surprising since so many of them are ex-Scientologists, which means they've already demonstrated a susceptibility for cult behavior. Gerard, however, has no documented history of cult involvement, other than Wikipedia. I doubt he would become involved in a cult at the lower levels, but his clear predilection for being a behind-the-scenes manipulator makes him a prime candidate for high-level membership of a cult that he helped start.
Ironically it's David that put me on to Jo Freeman's essay about structurelessness, which is so clearly applicable to Wikipedia, yet David has on several occasions moved to block changes that would remediate these problems. David knows that Wikipedia has governance problems and clearly has some sense of how to cure them; but he also knows that the cure would deprive him of the emotional fix he gets from the current state of affairs. And there is no way he's going to put his personal predilection for drama ahead of Wikipedia's long-term interests, about which he has very little, if any, concern.
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