I just deleted my book. 

A thread about choices, and doing the right thing.

Because we're all facing a lot of that right now. 

🧵

I write about tech + humans + philosophy. Farcaster OG. FID 3305 founder of /theindex 

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/

During COVID, I started working on a book called Permissionless. 

It was born out of frustration—the kind that gnaws at you when you see how broken the systems are, how unnecessary the gatekeepers have become, how much red tape gets in the way of solving real problems.

The book was about taking the DIY ethos and applying it as a manifesto for problem-solving, social change, cutting through bureaucracy, pushing past institutional overreach. A manifesto for people who saw the world as something they could rebuild, rather than something they had to accept.

I self-published it this year. I was happy with the launch. It found its audience. People bought it, shared it, sent me messages saying it resonated. 

Recently, a publisher reached out. They wanted to release the book. Expand its reach. Give it legitimacy.

So I sat down to read it again...

Elon Musk and his acolytes—his billionaire cronies, his reactionary fanboys, the cult that believes burning everything down is the same thing as building something better—have twisted ideas like mine into weapons.

They’ve taken concepts like regulatory bloat and institutional decay and rent-seeking and duplicitously turned them into blunt objects they’re currently using to destroy the world I love.

They don’t believe in permissionless the way folks like me meant it. They don’t want to create. They want to destroy. They want to gut expertise, dismantle institutions, break things just to watch them shatter, then call it innovation.

And I refuse to be useful to them in any way, shape or form.

There’s a version of Permissionless that exists in a better world—a world where breaking down barriers is about lifting people up, not tearing them down. A world where expertise isn’t the enemy, where knowledge isn’t discarded in favor of whoever yells the loudest.

But that’s not the world we live in.

And I can’t pretend otherwise.

I believe in the ideas in my book. But I also believe in responsibility. I believe in knowing when something you create could do harm in the wrong hands. I believe in looking at a movement and asking, Who benefits? 

Who suffers?

And if the answer makes my stomach turn, I don’t get to look away.

I wrote Permissionless because I wanted to see a world where people took action instead of waiting for permission. But I won’t let my work become an excuse for dismantling what little stability we have left.

So the book is gone.

I want to write a new version. A better version. It might take weeks. It might months. 

If you bought the book, please know - I love and appreciate you, and I do not regret writing and sharing it with you. And you’ll get the new version free, as soon as it’s ready.

Don’t get me wrong. I stand by the premise. But I don’t stand with the people who are currently warping concepts like Permissionless to their own ends. 

I refuse to be useful to people who could turn my work into something ugly.

And I realized I had to say no.

Not just say no—I had to delete the whole thing from my website. Remove it from Gumroad. Kill it completely. No matter how much money I was leaving on the table. No matter how many copies had already been sold.

Because the world had shifted under my feet.