JA Westenberg

I write about tech + humans + philosophy

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Last Notes

2026-07-20 06:43:18 CEST

The reason humans don’t want to generate personalized AI movies is the same reason humans don’t talk about their dreams:
Nobody else gives a shit
https://youtu.be/ZXJGYrlfi6A?si=H8m1uJQZ3kesYPpJ

2026-06-03 10:13:34 CEST

The 7 golden rules of not being a dick on the internet
1. No quote dunking. If you disagree with someone, reply to them directly. Broadcasting their post to your audience with a snide caption turns a disagreement into a pile-on. Which is the entire point, I know. But we're better than that, right?
...right?

2026-05-26 02:07:36 CEST

The danger of modern work is that you can spend the whole day improving the system and never touch a single task

2026-05-20 05:51:07 CEST

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…

2026-05-11 04:08:28 CEST

The procurement officer who picks IBM and gets a mediocre outcome keeps their job. The one who picks the startup and gets a better outcome looks like a fool if it fails.
It’s a pseudo-market. And once you see it, you’ll see it everywhere.
https://www.selfonomics.com/p/on-pseudo-markets

2026-04-24 04:48:54 CEST

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.

2026-04-19 15:19:49 CEST

In a decade someone’s going to write a book about the 2026/2027 tech crash and they’re going to point to the Allbirds AI pivot and the TBPN acquisition and say there were signs.

2026-04-19 14:35:40 CEST

On balance, and given the choice, I’d go back to a pre-internet world in a heartbeat.

2026-04-18 13:16:02 CEST

Joe Rogan is precisely as intelligent as the last man who spoke to him. This is his entire trick. This is the whole show.

2026-04-15 00:17:11 CEST

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 03:32:48 CEST

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/

2026-04-09 03:10:26 CEST

Day 3 of challenging myself to do a video every day for 30 days...
I've been running a solo business since 2020. No employees. No office beyond the one filled with cat hair and comic books. Just me, a computer, a set of AI tools, and a network of clients I genuinely give a shit about. Here's how // why.
https://youtu.be/3yPrVu-QC2Q

2026-04-03 23:33:02 CEST

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 08:27:00 CEST

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/

2026-04-02 22:34:45 CEST

“I question everything” said the person who has never once questioned whether the thing they just read on Substack might be wrong...

2026-03-26 11:14:02 CET

If you can’t make your point without using the words "leverage," "paradigm," or "ecosystem," you are hiding a weak argument behind expensive vocabulary

2026-03-25 01:47:27 CET

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 07:12:19 CET

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/

2026-03-10 06:59:03 CET

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

2026-03-10 02:02:04 CET

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

2026-03-10 00:16:03 CET

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

2026-03-09 21:34:46 CET

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

2026-03-09 02:00:13 CET

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 11:15:02 CET

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 11:19:02 CET

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 07:03:02 CET

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 05:17:02 CET

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 01:56:03 CET

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"

2026-03-05 00:14:02 CET

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 22:26:03 CET

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 22:20:09 CET

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 11:17:02 CET

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 07:04:02 CET

"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 05:25:02 CET

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 22:34:02 CET

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 07:04:02 CET

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

2026-03-03 00:14:02 CET

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 22:31:02 CET

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 11:11:02 CET

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 06:11:20 CET

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 02:02:02 CET

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 01:45:08 CET

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 22:32:03 CET

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 11:12:02 CET

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 07:03:02 CET

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 05:11:06 CET

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 02:04:02 CET

"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 22:31:02 CET

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 11:11:02 CET

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

2026-02-26 06:59:02 CET

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 05:18:02 CET

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 01:58:02 CET

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.

2026-02-26 00:11:03 CET

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 22:31:04 CET

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 11:11:02 CET

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 06:58:02 CET

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

2026-02-25 02:41:03 CET

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 01:56:02 CET

"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.

2026-02-25 00:17:02 CET

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

2026-02-24 22:33:02 CET

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 06:58:01 CET

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 02:09:17 CET

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/

2026-02-24 02:02:02 CET

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

2026-02-24 00:15:02 CET

the discourse has entered the "no but THIS time the emperor definitely has clothes trust me bro" phase and I'm exhausted

2026-02-23 16:13:05 CET

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 10:15:16 CET

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 06:58:02 CET

"Thoughts and prayers" are just "read receipts" for human suffering

2026-02-23 01:57:02 CET

"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 01:09:03 CET

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

2026-02-23 00:13:02 CET

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

2026-02-22 11:13:02 CET

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 11:00:00 CET

Stop making slides. Write a pitch .md instead.
Plain markdown. In your repo. Next to your code.
If you can't explain your idea in writing, you don't understand it well enough to build it.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-pitch-deck-is-dead-write-a-pitch-md-instead/

2026-02-22 07:02:02 CET

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

2026-02-19 10:13:41 CET

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 07:41:13 CET

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 03:22:10 CET

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 05:09:39 CET

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 01:58:02 CET

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

2026-02-11 05:23:19 CET

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/

2026-02-08 07:02:03 CET

my favorite genre of guy is "did his own research" guy and his research is 8 hours of a man with a whiteboard in a garage explaining that every problem in the world is caused by one specific group of people and here's how to buy gold

2026-02-04 05:42:51 CET

My working theory on why nobody's impressed by AI: Google and Siri spent a decade training the entire population that "AI assistant" means a thing that can't set a timer properly and confidently misunderstands your mom's name. Now the real thing shows up and everyone's pattern-matching to ten years of disappointment...

2026-02-03 07:02:02 CET

The most useful productivity system is subtraction.

2026-02-03 06:18:32 CET

Every enterprise app feels like typing on a mushy membrane keyboard. You click a button and get a gentle animation, a swooshy transition, a soft bounce, and zero clear feedback that anything actually happened. The entire B2B software industry optimized for how tools feel during a fifteen-minute sales demo instead of how they perform across an eight-hour workday, and the result is professional software with the tactile precision of poking a marshmallow.

2026-02-03 05:51:22 CET

If you have multiple interests, you don’t pick one.
Pick one ~season.
90 days. One output. One audience.
Then rotate.

2026-01-27 23:50:28 CET

WHY DO WE EXIST.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/969/505/090/527/624/original/4541c425ef1c5c6f.png

2026-01-27 01:36:42 CET

Wisdom is knowing what you don’t know.
Wisdom is what tells you not to install Clawdbot on your personal device and give it access to your banking details, even though you could become the next Tony Stark.
Wisdom is not the same thing as intelligence.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/why-intelligence-is-a-terrible-proxy-for-wisdom/

2026-01-25 10:57:33 CET

No not like that
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/955/137/018/326/202/original/acae8df35a8ff20e.png

2026-01-20 23:13:31 CET

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

2026-01-20 09:15:35 CET

I get it.
I do.
But I am here to tell you, with all the gentleness I can muster, that if you couldn’t fix your life before Claude Code existed, Claude Code is not going to fix it now.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/claude-code-wont-fix-your-life/

2026-01-15 01:28:02 CET

Stop trying to exorcise your demons.
Start opening tickets for them.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/how-to-debug-your-life/

2026-01-12 23:27:23 CET

Move a reading app to your phone's dock. Put it exactly where the app you reach for reflexively currently lives, Kindle, apple Books, Libby, whatever you prefer. The goal is to intercept an existing behavior at the last possible moment and redirect it. You're accepting that the reaching will happen and arranging for it to land somewhere useful rather than trying to stop it all together...
https://youtu.be/BxLvuD79fH4

2026-01-12 07:59:11 CET

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 10:03:22 CET

Free speech is when you let people say controversial things.
Free speech is not when the world’s richest man builds a CSAM generator, hooks it up to the world’s largest public photo database, and gives 4chan a subscription service.
I’ve written thousands of words defending people’s right to be wrong on the internet.
I don’t need thousands of words for this. I have eight: what the fuck is wrong with these assholes.

2026-01-03 12:06:53 CET

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

2026-01-01 23:58:51 CET

I keep watching people who used to write 10,000-word explorations of complex topics now produce dozens of disconnected fragments per day, each optimized for immediate engagement.
It's like watching someone who composed symphonies decide to only make ringtones.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-case-for-blogging-in-the-ruins/

2025-12-13 23:28:23 CET

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 22:22:51 CET

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.

2025-12-05 23:11:01 CET

You can’t logic your way out of a mood disorder, but you can absolutely logic yourself deeper into one.

2025-12-01 04:24:14 CET

"Follow Your Passion" is terrible career advice. It assumes happiness is a fossil in your soul waiting to be dug up. "Love What You Do" is 10x better. It recognizes passion is built, not found, in the reality of your work.
https://youtu.be/WY9W4R_A7yM

2025-11-28 06:02:43 CET

Dungeons & Dragons alignment charts are Myers-Briggs for cool people.
They are also more accurate + more useful than Myers-Briggs.