JA Westenberg

I write about tech + humans + philosophy

WESTENBERG: https://joanwestenberg.com/
SELF: https://www.thisisstudioself.com/

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daojoan_at_mastodon.social@momostr.pink

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Last Notes

2026-04-16 23:41:12 UTC

Whenever someone says “the future is Thing” you can be sure of 2 things:
1. The future is absolutely not Thing
2. They are over invested in Thing

2026-04-16 22:29:02 UTC

I have developed a foolproof system for inbox zero. it’s called “a separate email address I never check” and I feel fucking great about it buy my course.

2026-04-16 11:14:02 UTC

Grief doesn’t get smaller. you just eventually build more stuff around it.

2026-04-16 01:57:02 UTC

some people never recover from being the smartest person in their high school and you can clock them immediately

2026-04-15 19:54:14 UTC

Allbirds - the shoe company - are pivoting to AI.
And history will identify this as the high watermark of the first AI era.
The bubble is going to pop.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/410/473/114/642/003/original/c5cf47e8a3ca7908.jpeg

2026-04-14 22:17:11 UTC

Thank you for being a valued Streaming Service+ subscriber. Your monthly plan is increasing from $9.99 to $24.99. This price adjustment reflects our continued investment in canceling your favourite shows after one season, removing titles from the library without warning, and building a worse user interface. Note: Your tier now includes ads. To remove them, upgrade to our new Ultra Premium Platinum plan ($39.99/mo). Btw your password can no longer be shared with the people you live with.

2026-04-07 04:34:37 UTC

Bad writing is not new. Clunky sentences are not new. Overused metaphors are not new. "His eyes darkened with desire" was appearing in romance novels decades before anyone had heard of a large language model. Following genre conventions does not make you a fraud.
New video about AI detection, witch hunts, Alexandre Dumas, and why I will never participate in crowdsourced career destruction based on broken tools and vibes...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTeLgfLqMrY

2026-04-03 21:33:02 UTC

every generation thinks they're the smartest group of people to ever live. Yet here we are, inventing apps to remind us to drink water and stand up sometimes

2026-04-03 06:27:00 UTC

The passive income movement was a fantasy about not having to give a shit. This is a terrible foundation for pretty much anything.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-passive-income-trap-ate-a-generation-of-entrepreneurs/

2026-04-03 01:02:01 UTC

staring into the void. the void has a newsletter. the void wants me to subscribe for $8/month to access the full void. the first three paragraphs of the void are free. i have read the free void. i need more void

2026-04-03 00:02:58 UTC

most life hacks are secretly just: eat well, write things down, and don't plan your entire existence around your lowest dopamine days.

2026-04-01 10:12:02 UTC

“we’re disrupting X” means we found a cheaper way to do X that externalises all the costs onto someone who can’t afford a lawyer

2026-03-31 10:12:02 UTC

the australian tradition of calling your best mate a cunt and your worst enemy mate has no american equivalent and this explains a lot of the miscommunication

2026-03-29 10:15:02 UTC

I've been writing a weekly essay for a while now. Tech, culture, the stuff that keeps me up at night.
People seem to like it.
It's free to subscribe:
https://www.joanwestenberg.com

2026-03-28 21:28:01 UTC

Descartes: I think therefore I am
Modern brain: I think therefore I'm anxious, should probably stop thinking, wait now I'm thinking about not thinking fuck

2026-03-28 10:18:02 UTC

We have spent 100x more compute training AI to generate waifu art than to solve protein folding. I am not saying this is the Great Filter, but if aliens find our radioactive remains, they’re going to be very confused by the hard drives...

2026-03-28 00:58:02 UTC

The housing market is basically a game of musical chairs where the music stopped in 1978, but we all agreed to just keep walking in circles pretending to dance because sitting down requires changing zoning laws

2026-03-25 00:47:27 UTC

Every bank is like “we’re more than just a bank” and all anyone wants is for them to shut the fuck up and be a bank

2026-03-24 10:16:02 UTC

Journalism: Monetizing your cortisol.
Politics: Monetizing your tribalism.
Crypto: Monetizing your FOMO.
Rationalism: Monetizing the feeling that you’re the only special person in the room who knows what the word "Monetizing" actually implies

2026-03-24 06:12:19 UTC

On any given day, I have roughly 5 or so fucks to give.
Before anyone takes that as a confession of total selfishness, I want to be precise about what I mean...
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/tread-carefully-because-you-tread-on-my-fucks/

2026-03-23 10:13:05 UTC

'Deep work’ is just ‘doing your job’ for people who’ve been on Slack so long they forgot what that felt like

2026-03-21 01:04:02 UTC

just got told to "read theory" by a guy who has never held a job or finished anything in his life. i will take this under advisement. thank you comrade

2026-03-20 21:33:03 UTC

its wild that "treat people with basic dignity" became a radical political position. i remember when it was just called "not being a dick." we used to have that

2026-03-20 10:17:03 UTC

my political position is that i would like things to be noticeably less insane than they currently are. this is considered "not having principles" by people who think everything should be on fire

2026-03-19 10:11:04 UTC

everyone wants to be the last sane man in the asylum but buddy we’re all patients here. i’m simply the patient with the best tweets about it

2026-03-19 00:58:38 UTC

Four hundred years ago, the people Andreessen imagines were blissfully unselfconscious were reading Augustine and Montaigne and arguing about Stoic philosophy. They were writing diaries and letters that examined their own motives with considerable care. They were not, in fact, just moving forward without asking where they were going.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/marc-andreessen-is-wrong-about-introspection/

2026-03-18 07:07:23 UTC

Marc Andreessen was right about web browsers.
But he has since been wrong about a great many things.
And he is entirely wrong about introspection.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/marc-andreessen-is-wrong-about-introspection/

2026-03-17 21:29:03 UTC

my hot take is that things are bad AND you should calm down. i have been banned from 23 rpol subreddits for this view

2026-03-17 10:13:03 UTC

Calling X “the everything app” when it can’t handle light / dark mode toggles outside the system settings is a special, special kind of delusion

2026-03-16 12:43:04 UTC

raise two million. burn it. pivot. raise eight million. burn it. pivot. add AI. raise twenty million. burn it. rebrand. run out. acquihire. linkedin post. 200 likes. raise two million. burn it. pivot. raise eight million. burn it. pivot. add AI. raise twenty million. burn it. rebrand. run out. acquihire. linkedin post. 300 likes. raise two million. burn it. pivot -

2026-03-16 11:10:05 UTC

sam altman has never once said anything that wasn’t already on a motivational poster in a dentist’s waiting room

2026-03-15 21:28:02 UTC

Conservatives built an economy that requires two incomes to do what one did and then blamed women for going to work

2026-03-15 05:59:02 UTC

you dont HAVE to have an 18 step morning routine. you could simply. wake up. and exist for a while. this is legal

2026-03-15 01:02:02 UTC

I am so tired of being right about things I didn’t want to be right about

2026-03-14 23:08:00 UTC

It was the fuck around of times, it was the find out of times

2026-03-14 21:30:06 UTC

Peter Thiel has spent $500 million trying to live forever and I’m just going to say it if he does, I don’t want to

2026-03-14 11:24:32 UTC

Me as a kid: I can’t wait for video games to look like movies
Me as an adult: why the fuck does every movie look like a video game

2026-03-14 04:19:02 UTC

every open plan office was designed by someone with a corner office

2026-03-13 21:34:04 UTC

the housing market isn't actually broken. it is working exactly as designed by the people who own the houses.

2026-03-13 10:16:04 UTC

All we did was give stupid people faster access to other stupid people and now we act surprised when the stupidity compounds

2026-03-13 04:58:52 UTC

Between the gamblers and the disappeared, there is almost no space left for the old model: the person who plants a tree knowing they'll never sit in its shade.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/everythings-casino/

2026-03-13 01:01:04 UTC

It is genuinely not that complicated. Some people have too much. Most people have too little. One of these groups funds think tanks.

2026-03-12 04:29:23 UTC

PASSION RULES EVERYTHING AROUND ME.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/214/317/866/240/024/original/af2842c665b15c76.png

2026-03-11 10:14:03 UTC

posting “I’m taking a break from social media” on social media and then checking how many likes it gets is a very specific kind of modern illness

2026-03-11 05:14:56 UTC

The entire machinery of online discourse around building and creating has been so thoroughly captured by entrepreneurial "logic" that we've lost the language to describe what it feels like to simply make a thing that helps someone, give it away, and move on with your life...
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-noble-path/

2026-03-10 21:33:03 UTC

"democracy is a cope" - guy who has never tried the alternative and also has not showered

2026-03-10 21:26:03 UTC

my doctor asked if I was getting enough sleep and I laughed for so long she made a note

2026-03-10 10:14:03 UTC

cold brew is just coffee that had time to think about what it did

2026-03-10 01:02:04 UTC

the word "ecosystem" should be banned from business communication until people demonstrate they understand what an ecosystem is

2026-03-09 23:16:03 UTC

"we're a family here" is something no actual family has ever had to say

2026-03-09 01:00:13 UTC

I don't want to work smarter or harder and I have zero fucking interest in either The Hustle or The Grind. I want to work the exact amount I need to afford a normal life, which used to be possible, and now apparently requires a podcast??

2026-03-08 23:57:09 UTC

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an indie hacker in possession of a widget must be in want of a business model...
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-noble-path/

2026-03-07 04:16:03 UTC

If you genuinely believed you were 18 months from building a superintelligence that could cure cancer, you probably wouldn't pivot the entire company to horny chatbots. But I'm just a person with priorities. Maybe the path to solving death really does go through AI girlfriends. I don't have an MBA.

2026-03-07 01:04:02 UTC

"Am I the only one who" mate there are 8 billion people on this planet. You are not the only one who puts sauce on the side. You are not the only one who doesn't like small talk. You are not a rare breed. You are a person with a mild preference and a Wi-Fi connection.

2026-03-06 23:32:03 UTC

The tech industry has produced more men who describe themselves as “funny” than any other industry in human history and I think we need to investigate this.

2026-03-06 10:15:02 UTC

Nobody on LinkedIn has ever had a bad day. Every setback is a "growth opportunity." Every firing is a "new chapter." Every complete professional disaster is framed as "excited to announce." These people would describe the Titanic as "a bold pivot to submarine operations."

2026-03-06 04:15:02 UTC

"Facts don't care about your feelings" has apparently mutated into "if I'm hurting your feelings I must be stating a fact" which is a logical fallacy because it's entirely possible to be a fucking arsehole and be wrong at the same time. The correlation is probably positive.

2026-03-06 03:57:02 UTC

Every AI founder I talk to is on an accelerating treadmill, burdened by a nagging suspicion that the entire industry is moving too fast in a direction that doesn't quite make sense, with no idea about how to get off...
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/everyone-in-ai-is-building-the-wrong-thing-for-the-same-reason/

2026-03-05 06:03:02 UTC

The modern internet argument cycle: someone posts an opinion. Someone else screenshots it. A third person quote-tweets the screenshot with "this is wild." A fourth person writes a thread about the thread. Nobody has changed their mind. Everyone has lost 40 minutes. The sun sets on another day of human progress.

2026-03-04 10:17:02 UTC

The most unhinged thing about modern life is that we've normalised paying $200 a month for the gym and $300 a month for wellness "supplements" but if someone charges $5 for a newsletter they wrote with their actual brain people act like they've been mugged at knifepoint

2026-03-04 06:04:02 UTC

"I don't have time to read" says the absolute character who spent 4 hours last night watching a stranger rank every fast food burger on YouTube

2026-03-04 04:25:02 UTC

If you prioritise "sign up" over "login" on your landing page to the point that existing users have to search for the button, you are holding your existing users in contempt. And you're an arsehole to boot.

2026-03-04 00:57:03 UTC

There are three types of knowledge workers. The ones who do the work. The ones who schedule meetings about the work. And the ones who create Notion templates to track the meetings about the work. The third group has the most LinkedIn followers.

2026-03-03 21:34:02 UTC

All you need to know about the tech industry is that the people building tools to "connect humanity" haven't spoken to their neighbours in 6 years

2026-03-03 06:04:02 UTC

My kid asked what I do for work and I said "I write on the internet" and he said "so nothing" and this is the most accurate job description I've ever received

2026-03-02 23:14:02 UTC

The podcast industrial complex has reached the point where two guys can sit in a room and say nothing for 3 hours and call it "long form content" and somehow that's a career now. I'm not even mad. I'm impressed. I've been trying to get paid for saying nothing for years.

2026-03-02 21:31:02 UTC

Every "build in public" AI-guy is just a dude who automated his to-do list and is now mass spamming people about it like he split the atom. You used a Pi wrapper to move a Trello card, mate. Sit down.

2026-03-02 10:11:02 UTC

I genuinely think the worst thing the internet did to reading was convince people that finishing books is a competitive sport. You don't need to read 52 books a year. You just need to read. Books you like. At your own pace. And think about them for longer than a TikTok video.

2026-03-02 06:00:07 UTC

"You need to build your personal brand" no thank you, I have a personality. That's the same thing but free and I don't have to write a Notion doc about it.

2026-03-02 01:02:02 UTC

Not one single "free thinker" who told me to "question everything" in 2020 has questioned a single thing since 2024. Turns out questioning everything meant questioning the specific things that made you feel smart at parties.

2026-02-27 21:32:03 UTC

The word “community,” a timeline:
1950: The people who live near you and help when your house floods
1990: A group of people with shared interests who meet regularly
2010: An email list you can’t unsubscribe from
2015: Anyone who follows a brand on Instagram
2020: A Discord server with 40,000 strangers and one moderator
2024: A Slack workspace your company forces you to call a community because it’s cheaper than actual culture

2026-02-27 06:03:02 UTC

Love how "elitist" now just means "has the audacity to know things." Went to university? Elitist. Read a book? Elitist. Can point to a country on a map? Elitist. Meanwhile a man with a gold toilet is a man of the people.

2026-02-27 01:04:02 UTC

"The free market will sort it out" the free market sorted out child labour by saying yes please and we had to pass a law. That's how the free market sorts things out.

2026-02-26 21:31:02 UTC

Stop saying "the economy is doing well" when what you mean is "stocks are up and everyone I know personally in my friday night poker game / sex crime club is fine." Those are different sentences.

2026-02-26 10:11:02 UTC

The Venn diagram of "taxation is theft" guys and "why are the roads so shit" guys is a circle

2026-02-26 04:18:02 UTC

You don't have a "different opinion." You have a factual inaccuracy that you've emotionally bonded with and now you think correcting it is a hate crime.

2026-02-26 00:58:02 UTC

Doomers don’t want to save the world. They want the world to end so they can be right. That’s the whole bit. That’s the entire psychology. They’d rather be vindicated in the rubble than proven wrong in a future that works.

2026-02-25 21:31:04 UTC

If you ever want to understand America just know that they have a channel called The History Channel and it shows Pawn Stars

2026-02-25 05:58:02 UTC

weird that "family values" never seems to include feeding families

2026-02-25 00:56:02 UTC

"I did my own research" did you. did you really. in your pyjamas. on your phone. at 2am. on a website called truthpatriot dot eagle. you did your own research.

2026-02-24 21:33:02 UTC

Becoming increasingly convinced that LinkedIn is just Willy Wonka's factory except the chocolate river is bullshit and every Oompa Loompa has a podcast

2026-02-24 10:16:02 UTC

my favourite genre of internet is a man confidently explaining a woman's own field of expertise to her and then linking a Joe Rogan clip as a source

2026-02-24 05:58:01 UTC

why does every crypto dude in 2026 look like they were generated by an AI prompted to create "a man who definitely has opinions about age of consent laws"

2026-02-24 01:02:02 UTC

so the plan is to defund schools, defund libraries, defund the arts, and then complain that people are stupid. just want to make sure I'm following the strategy

2026-02-23 15:13:05 UTC

Every AI company knows they're building the wrong thing.
And they can't stop.
Because the competitive structure specifically punishes anyone who slows down long enough to build the right thing.
The race is real. The destination is fake.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/everyone-in-ai-is-building-the-wrong-thing-for-the-same-reason/

2026-02-23 09:15:16 UTC

Ethical consumption decision tree:
Step 1: Research the company
Step 2: Find something horrifying
Step 3: Switch to competitor
Step 4: Return to Step 1

2026-02-23 00:57:02 UTC

"Why is everything so political now" mate, your grandparents died in a war about politics. It was always political. You were just comfortable.

2026-02-22 23:13:02 UTC

The real cancel culture is Netflix who can’t let a single good show get past season one without canceling it

2026-02-22 10:13:02 UTC

The worst thing about online learning is that everything has become a video. Every code tutorial. Every design tutorial. Nobody actually writes out a guide anymore. It's just "hey guys welcome to my tutorial" and watching 10 minutes of content that isn't remotely relevant...

2026-02-22 06:02:02 UTC

Unlike you Tesla owning rabble, I drive a volkswagen, a family values car with an unblemished and unproblematic history

2026-02-19 09:13:41 UTC

We haven't seen the first great AI collapse. We haven't seen a foundation model company make the BlackBerry mistake or the Nokia mistake, or the Roman mistake, or the Ottoman mistake or reach their Bunker-in-Berlin mistake. But we will, and we'll see it multiple times, because these mistakes = features of power concentration.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-empire-always-falls/

2026-02-19 06:41:13 UTC

Open source has an open slop problem.
And I think the solution is one that would've been perfectly obvious to a thirteenth-century Florentine weaver...
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-case-for-gatekeeping-or-why-medieval-guilds-had-it-figured-out/

2026-02-18 02:22:10 UTC

Open source culture developed an allergy to gatekeeping that made sense when the risk was excluding talented people. It makes less sense when the risk is thousands of LLM-generated PRs that change variable names to slightly worse variable names.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-case-for-gatekeeping-or-why-medieval-guilds-had-it-figured-out/

2026-02-15 04:09:39 UTC

When someone tells you that AGI is inevitable and the permanent economic displacement of most humans is a foregone conclusion, what they're really telling you is that they believe the current leaders of the AI industry will execute flawlessly, indefinitely, against challenges they can't yet foresee, in an environment that's changing faster than perhaps any in history.
This seems unlikely.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-empire-always-falls/

2026-02-15 00:58:02 UTC

every single morning routine post on linkedin is written by a guy who clearly hasnt had a genuine emotion since 2019. “i wake up at 4am and journal about gratitude” motherfucker you are running from something and it is catching up

2026-02-14 23:19:01 UTC

the single most dangerous person in any company is the guy who just discovered openclaw. he will reorganize the entire workflow into 340 nested cron jobs and then quit two weeks later leaving behind a system that no human being can navigate or comprehend. call him spartacus.

2026-02-13 08:23:04 UTC

there are two camps in self-help: marcus aurelius says accept everything. tony robbins says optimize everything. i'd like to propose a third option: tag it Won't Fix and move on.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/members-only-wont-fix-self-help/

2026-02-11 04:23:19 UTC

The reason Bluesky, Threads, and Mastodon don't feel like Old Twitter is simple sociology: Community is path-dependent. It’s a specific web of 10,000 micro-transactions of reciprocity that happened over a decade.
You can move the people, but you can't move the history.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/communities-are-not-fungible/

2026-02-09 21:34:33 UTC

yc now wants your claude code transcripts, which is the first time a startup accelerator has explicitly asked you to show your homework to prove you didn’t do your homework
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/042/817/351/031/816/original/7ace3e6df28de85e.jpeg

2026-02-08 11:00:55 UTC

underrated feature of enterprise saas that can't be vibecoded away: plausible liability.
companies buy someone to blame when the software goes wrong. that's the product.
no exec is signing off on being the one responsible when the system goes down. you can't build that in house.