Westenberg.
Joan Westenberg — Writer and cultural commentator
Field notes on history, economics, philosophy, and contemporary analysis.
joanwestenberg.com/rssCommunity is what you get when agents stop being interchangeable to each other.
Sharp cultural and tech commentary that doesn't pull punches. Joan Westenberg writes field notes on history, economics, philosophy, and contemporary analysis — the kind of essays that make you rethink assumptions you didn't know you had. Posts range from quick provocations to longer arguments, always with a point of view that cuts against the grain of Silicon Valley consensus.
Written by Joan Westenberg.
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A soft-landing manual for the second gilded age
By the summer of 1945, West Berlin had been reduced to rubble. Allied bombing, the Soviet ground assault and Hitler's insistence on Götterdämmerung had destroyed roughly a third of the city's buildings and left most of the rest damaged. There was no functioning government, no reliable electricity, no clean water in large sections of the city, and somewhere around 75 million cubic metres of debris where neighbourhoods used to be. The women who cleared that debris by hand, the...
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Everything is awesome (why I'm an optimist)
February is the month the internet decided we're all going to die.In the span of about two weeks, Matt Shumer's Something Big is Happening racked up over 80 million views on X with its breathless comparison of AI to the early days of COVID, telling his non-tech friends and family that we're in the "this seems overblown" phase of something much, much bigger than a pandemic. Before anyone had finished arguing about that, Citrini Research published THE 2028 GLOBAL INTELLIGE...
Agentic swarms are an org-chart delusion
The "agentic swarm" vision of productivity is comfortingly familiar. Which should be an immediate red flag...You take the existing corporate hierarchy, you replace the bottom layers with a swarm of AI agents, and you keep humans around as supervisors. It's an org chart with robots instead of interns. The VP of Engineering becomes the VP of Engineering Agents.Congratulations. You've reinvented middle management.This is what Clayton Christensen would have called a sustaining in...
Thoughts on Farcaster
For the past few weeks I've been asking myself why I'm still on Farcaster, whether I'll stay, whether I even want to.I've landed on some answers.Farcaster, for the uninitiated, was the most credible attempt anyone has made at building a decentralized, crypto-based social network that people actually wanted to use. Founded in 2020 by Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan, both ex-Coinbase, and backed by $180 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Paradigm, and Union Square Ventures, Farc...
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If you want tech commentary that reaches beyond the industry echo chamber — into history, philosophy, and systems thinking — this is your blog.