JA Westenberg

@joanwestenberg.eth

1027 Following

26398 Followers

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@joanwestenberg.eth

The courts chose the wrong side again and again. And now, when the stakes are existential, they expect the public to rally to their defense. They expect a system built on legitimacy to suddenly start functioning again after decades of neglect. The courts made their bed. Now, they lie in the muck. https://www.theindex.media/the-courts-made-their-bed-2/

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Solana is down 48% since Trump’s inauguration. Idk maybe trans people like me aren’t the fucking problem, dipshits.

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@joanwestenberg.eth

What venture capitalists celebrate as "disruption" is, with damning frequency, nothing more than a moderately sophisticated way to extract rent from existing systems that functioned perfectly well before tech entrepreneurs arrived to "save" them. https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-great-tech-heist-how-disruption-became-a-euphemism-for-theft/

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Authoritarians never mention what happens after the "strong leader" consolidates power. The corruption that inevitably follows. The silencing of dissent. The capture of institutions by cronies. The erosion of rights for anyone outside the favored group. But these are the consequences of a populace who have stopped caring enough to participate. https://www.theindex.media/the-parchment-barrier/

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A cult with good branding is called a startup

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The people voting for Trumpism aren't doing it because they crave reasonable Democrats. They’re doing it because they want blood. They want revenge. They want someone to punish the people they've been told to hate, and they don't care if it comes at their own expense. https://www.theindex.media/this-is-the-dumbest-time-to-buy-into-maga/

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We don't need to automate the best parts of being human. Some things are meant to be slow. Some things are meant to be clumsy. That's the point. https://www.joanwestenberg.com/dont-let-tech-drain-the-life-out-of-living/

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If you were literally on fire, Zuckerberg, Musk, and Bezos wouldn’t piss on you to put out the flames. They’d bottle it and charge you surge pricing.

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I have absolutely no faith in crypto as a force for good. The decentralisation and crypto anarchism ideas that drew me to the space are dead. Crypto capitulated completely to the US government. The grift is everywhere. The extraction has reached new levels. It’s just a centralized, PVP casino.

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Every app wants to be a mall, every mall wants to be a casino, and every casino wants to be a cult.

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A gut feeling is not the same as expertise. A hunch is not the same as research. Reading a headline is not the same as understanding a concept. But in our rush to make sure everyone has a voice, we’ve confused noise for nuance, volume for value. https://www.joanwestenberg.com/have-you-earned-your-opinion/

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Unless a miracle occurs, Trump’s tariffs will keep driving up consumer prices and drag the U.S. into a 1970s-style stagflation crisis: high inflation, slow growth, and rising unemployment. https://www.theindex.media/donald-trump-is-in-over-his-head-2/

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Trump's nostalgia was a powerful political tool on the campaign trail, but it can only be a disastrous failure when applied to economics. He envisions a return to an America where factories hum like they did in the 1950s, but the world has changed, and no amount of tariffs can reverse time. https://www.theindex.media/donald-trump-is-in-over-his-head-2/

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Putting your heart into anything—your work, your politics, your activism, your art, your writing, your life—makes you vulnerable to the smug assholes in the back row who’ve never risked a goddamn thing. https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-case-for-embracing-cringe/

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Climate collapse? Not inevitable. Oligarchy? Not inevitable. War? Not inevitable. These things don’t happen because they must. They happen because people in power convince themselves (and us) that they must. And when we believe them, when we accept the pattern, we let it play out. https://www.joanwestenberg.com/pattern-recognition-vs-pattern-lock-in/

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Fuck it man, idk. Just put on some Grateful Dead. Put on some Aretha. Print some kind of zine. Paint a sign. Start a band. Write a manifesto. Bootleg a t-shirt. Hand out stickers. Throw a party. Keep it weird.

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There’s no reason insulin costs $300 a vial except that someone realized they could kill diabetics for profit. That’s the entire business model.

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We see something happen once, twice, three times, and suddenly we stop questioning it. We start believing it’s the natural order. We mistake habit for destiny. We accept that this is just how the world works. But history isn’t a loop. It’s a series of choices. https://www.joanwestenberg.com/pattern-recognition-vs-pattern-lock-in/

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Tools of authoritarianism are never single-use. Every suppression emboldens the next. Every time American citizens accept that sacrificing freedom is the cost of safety, they move further into a future where safety is an illusion, reserved only for those who never dared to speak. https://www.theindex.media/first-they-came-for-the-student-activists/

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