JA Westenberg

I write about tech + humans + philosophy

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Daojoan@mastodon-social.mostr.pub

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Last Notes

2026-06-01 04:41:00 UTC

Most "productivity" is just moving the bottleneck somewhere you can't see it yet.

2026-05-20 03:51:07 UTC

There’s functionally no engineering reason to put a robot on two legs. Every other form factor is cheaper, more stable, more efficient, and easier to maintain.
There is, however, a very good marketing reason: everyone’s watched Terminator, fear goes viral, and anxiety drives attention.
A warehouse robot is infrastructure.
A humanoid robot is an engagement strategy…

2026-04-24 02:48:54 UTC

My hottest of hot takes: the only people who should run companies that make things are people who deeply give a fuck about those things. Only people who love games and love playing games should run companies that make games. Doesn’t matter if it’s cheeseburgers or software.

2026-04-20 21:23:25 UTC

Everyone transitioning these days
I blame Biden
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/439/135/051/368/194/original/d301b29426194f63.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.

2026-04-12 01:32:48 UTC

If you predict a catastrophe and you're wrong, nobody circles back to check.
If you predict things will work out and they don't, that follows you around forever.
That asymmetry alone explains what I call Competitive Pessimism.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/optimism-is-not-a-personality-flaw/

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

2026-03-24 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/

2026-03-24 01:02:04 UTC

I have 75% confidence that I am 90% sure that 40% of the things I believe are 100% wrong

2026-03-23 21:32:02 UTC

I have immense respect for the revolutionary vanguard, provided the revolution happens after 11 AM and does not require anyone to understand how a supply chain actually works. If the proletariat rises up, please text me; do not call.

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

2026-03-23 01:03:02 UTC

AI doomers and AI accelerationists have more in common with each other than with normal people who simply do not think about AI that much. The disagreement is coming from inside the church

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 21:49:50 UTC

The future is already evenly distributed. It’s just not here yet.

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 21:27:04 UTC

people keep trying to convince me that the entire economic system needs to be burned down and rebuilt from scratch according to a book written in 1867. what's your plan for Thursday though. specifically Thursday. the day after the revolution. what happens on Thursday

2026-03-10 05:59:03 UTC

"authentic leadership" is a course you take so you can be fake in a more convincing way

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 20:34:46 UTC

Me: Today is a fresh, new day.
My brain: ok but we hate those

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??

2026-03-06 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."

2026-03-05 10:19:02 UTC

The guy who says "I just speak my mind" has never once considered that his mind might benefit from an editor. Or a fact-checker. Or a moment of silence. Just one. A single moment of not speaking his mind. As a treat.

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.

2026-03-05 04:17:02 UTC

The confidence of a man who has watched one documentary on the YouTubes and now opens every conversation with "well actually" is a force of nature that science cannot explain and god cannot contain

2026-03-05 00:56:03 UTC

If your whole personality is your diet I need you to know that nobody at this dinner table cares nobody gives a shit and the silence after you explained seed oils was not "people processing new information" it was "people deciding whether to invite you next time"

2026-03-04 23:14:02 UTC

I've been a professional writer for over a decade and it still amazes me how many folks are CONVINCED they can just do this shit. Nobody walks up to a surgeon and says "I reckon I could have a crack at that." But writing? Everyone's got a world-changing essay in them apparently. It's in there. Somewhere. Behind the spleen.

2026-03-04 21:26:03 UTC

Every group chat has one person who responds to everything with a single emoji and contributes nothing else and honestly they might be the most well-adjusted person in the thread (it's not me)

2026-03-04 21:20:09 UTC

Equilibrium is not the same as a good outcome. The economy found equilibrium after the Industrial Revolution too, and for several decades that equilibrium included child labour in textile mills and life expectancy in Manchester hovering around 25. What matters is how much unnecessary suffering we allow between here and there, and whether the new normal we settle into is one worth living in.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/a-soft-landing-manual-for-the-second-gilded-age/

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.

2026-03-03 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 05:11:20 UTC

Humans are spectacular at remembering disasters, passed down in every format from the written word to the oral tradition. We are (for obvious reasons) terrible at remembering the disasters that didn't happen...
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/everything-is-awesome-why-im-an-optimist/

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.

2026-03-02 00:45:08 UTC

Every tech CEO right now: "We need to move fast and break things"
The thing they're breaking: their own terms of service
The thing they're moving fast toward: a government contract

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 10:12:02 UTC

You're not "playing devil's advocate." The devil has enough advocates. He has a whole political party. He doesn't need you in a group chat at 11pm.

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 04:11:06 UTC

JD Vance wrote an entire memoir about how poverty destroyed his family and then joined the party whose entire platform is making poverty worse. Incredible arc.

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 05:59:02 UTC

The entire internet grifter economy is just a guy who read one book telling you to buy his course about the book he read

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 23:11:03 UTC

I would never invest in something as volatile as Bitcoin. I invest in housing, a market that has never catastrophically crashed and ruined millions of lives.

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 10:11:02 UTC

the Venn diagram of guys who say "facts don't care about your feelings" and guys who had a full meltdown over a Black Little Mermaid is a circle

2026-02-25 05:58:02 UTC

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

2026-02-25 01:41:03 UTC

The most dangerous part of AI doom isn’t the forecast.
It’s the posture it produces: the talent exits, governance gets outsourced, and “cash out before the crash” becomes a moral philosophy.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/everything-is-awesome-why-im-an-optimist/

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 23:17:02 UTC

reminder that "move fast and break things" was supposed to be a software philosophy not a healthcare policy

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 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 01:09:17 UTC

The “swarm of agents” model assumes work naturally splits into roles: marketing, sales, support, development = basically mirroring human job titles.
But those titles and siloes are a byproduct of org scaling, not a universal truth about work.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/agentic-swarms-are-an-org-chart-delusion/

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.

2026-02-23 00:09:03 UTC

I found a journal entry from 2015 where I wrote, in all earnestness, that my life would be complete if I could just work from home and not have a boss. I now work from home and have no boss.
I do not necessarily feel complete...
https://youtu.be/dsYjBCINRvc

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/

2026-02-11 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

2026-02-03 06:02:02 UTC

The most useful productivity system is subtraction.

2026-01-23 01:10:37 UTC

Oops! Something went wrong. Would you like to reboot the millennium and try again?

2026-01-20 22:13:31 UTC

they called it trickle-down economics because 'financial waterboarding' didn't poll well with focus groups

2026-01-12 06:59:11 UTC

Amy Poehler winning the first Golden Globe for podcasting is so on brand for an industry that looked at the most democratised medium in history and said “but what if we still gave awards to famous people.”

2026-01-10 22:24:48 UTC

Started mentally adding a wet fart sound after everything Elon Musk says. Highly recommend. Improves the user experience by 1000%

2026-01-06 23:57:59 UTC

All we have are Mussolini cosplayers who can’t make the trains run on time, Rockefeller LARPers who can’t build a refinery, and Nikola Tesla tribute acts who’ve never shipped hardware. History will remember this as the age of the cover band. We are ruled by guys who watched a YouTube documentary about Napoleon and said “I could do that” but meant the hat.

2026-01-05 05:26:50 UTC

“all models are wrong but some are useful” i say about the model that just confirmed all my existing prejudices. extremely useful. love this model. Can I interest you in my course about this model

2026-01-04 21:04:31 UTC

I'm not going to talk about politics anymore. I'm just going to focus on the economy, the cost of living, rental prices, climate change and - GODDAMMIT

2026-01-04 03:28:38 UTC

“think for yourself” always seems to end with “and arrive at my exact conclusions or you’re a sheep.” very liberating framework

2026-01-03 11:06:53 UTC

sorry but if your reaction to “the US bombed venezuela” isnt immediate horror youre a fucking psychopath and i hope you step on legos forever

2025-12-30 02:58:24 UTC

The Digital Nomad Life: the freedom to choose which collapsing empire to be the least poor in

2025-12-29 12:38:17 UTC

I don’t want to be an alarmist but I fear tomorrow is another day

2025-12-28 02:49:07 UTC

“Do your own research” is the mating call of someone about to share the worst fucking YouTube video in history

2025-12-26 10:55:02 UTC

The Greek Stoics wanted you to accept death. The LinkedIn Stoics want you to accept your open-plan office.

2025-12-23 03:21:23 UTC

The people most obsessed with longevity are invariably the ones you’d least want to live forever.

2025-12-22 23:46:05 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…n2xw they don’t want it I’m too trans

2025-12-22 23:30:50 UTC

Bari Weiss built her brand on being “cancelled” from the NYT. She now runs a media company, appears on every major podcast, and speaks at sold-out events. If this is cancellation, I would like to be cancelled. Please cancel me. I am once again asking to be cancelled.

2025-12-21 20:12:18 UTC

After years of fucking around, compromising and second guessing, I have settled on 3 principles when it comes to my blog:
1. No analytics beyond whatever is baked into Ghost
2. No sponsorships and no advertising, not now, not ever
3. I will never charge more than $2.50 a month for membership and I will never raise my prices

2025-12-21 13:03:55 UTC

Looking at you Thomas
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/757/693/693/860/346/original/03eb7d3c2621a277.jpeg

2025-12-21 09:16:56 UTC

The most successful grift of the modern era was convincing the smartest people in the world that 'changing the world' means optimizing the click-through rate on ads for mattresses that ship in a box

2025-12-20 04:19:02 UTC

Grounded intellectual work, when it happens, if it ever happens again, is uncomfortable. It tells you things you don't want to hear, makes arguments that threaten positions you hold, points out problems you'd rather not see.
The public intellectuals of the past, at their best, did this.
Our current crop // slop does the opposite.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/comfort-food-for-the-thinking-class-the-great-intellectual-stagnation/

2025-12-16 22:38:37 UTC

Would you accept "Oopsie!" from your accountant? Your doctor?
Why do we accept it from companies holding our data and our money?
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/uh-oh-the-infantilization-of-failure/

2025-12-16 11:34:11 UTC

I fail to see the necessity of announcing one's departure from a social media platform. If you wish to leave, leave. We shall endeavor to survive the loss of your opinions.

2025-12-16 00:44:27 UTC

We’ve achieved peak skepticism (trust in institutions at all-time lows, fact-check everything) and peak gullibility (MLM schemes, crypto scams, wellness grifts at all-time highs) in the same generation. This shouldn’t be possible but here we are.

2025-12-13 22:28:23 UTC

The worship of "more" is the path of least resistance for a civilization that has forgotten how to sit still.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/growth-is-a-poor-mans-god/

2025-12-13 21:22:51 UTC

Conservative: "Companies say 'Happy Holidays' because they hate Jesus."
Economics 101: "Companies say 'Happy Holidays' because they want to sell cheap plastic garbage to 100% of the population instead of 65%."
The 'War on Christmas' is just the Free Market you claim to worship working exactly as intended.
You are fighting the Invisible Hand. And losing.

2025-12-12 21:52:38 UTC

The Culture War is a toxoplasma. It bypasses your rational defenses by hacking your tribal loyalty circuits. If you find yourself genuinely furious about a minor controversy involving a sub-group you didn't know existed last week, you aren't "informed." You are being optimized for engagement.

2025-12-11 10:42:08 UTC

I don't have a particular hill I'm prepared to die on, but there are a handful of slight inclines on which I'd be okay with experiencing mild discomfort.

2025-12-09 22:07:40 UTC

Both sides of every culture war issue agree on exactly one thing: that moderates are the real problem