đ Iâm JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, youâre in the right place.
While youâre here, a few things Iâve built: Kerouac, a writing app | Post Through It, a solo microblogging tool | Distributism.ai, my MCP platform | Laterware, all the AI news you need | Studio Self, a product, brand, and GTM lab.
You can buy my book Permissionless here.
When did our entire intellectual culture become centered around rearranging and reconfiguring our beliefs, our books, our content, and our ideas to fit a laundry list of accepted, popular, and orthodox concepts we already agree with?
We celebrate every book that comes out, as long as it confirms what weâre already prepared to defend, with all the same citations in mildly different forms, by the same authors who circle-jerk their way through the same podcast appearances, trotting out the same throat-clearing and mic-dropping slogans.
We share quotes that are all but identical as if theyâre announcing the second coming of Christ. We call it all Very Important Work. The Newsletters, debate shows, and YouTubers all echo a cohesive and wonderfully on-brand message.
This isnât a new problem, but itâs getting worse.
Agreement is cheap. Challenge is expensive.
You know whatâs free?
Cognitively, spiritually, even philosophically, free?
Reading something already confirms your existing worldview, highlights every piece of information in precisely the right format to re-confirm your existing identity, and takes no effort or discomfort, no revision for any mental model. You finish whatever book, whatever blog post, feeling a good deal smarter than you were when you started (because look! There was content, and now it has been consumed!) but nothing has actually happened.
Youâre the same person.
You had no reason to change.
Challenging yourself is incredibly uncomfortable - nobody expects training for and running a marathon to leave you feeling as refreshed and relaxed as a hot bath with a glass of Prosecco. Challenging yourself mentally is no different. You have to hold competing thoughts in your head and let them duke and duel it out, and moderate them for all your lifeâs worth. Most folks arenât willing to do that.
Which makes the market for comforting, conforming ideas far more lucrative than the market for ideas with a fighting spirit.
Publishers and Podcast hosts already know this - of course they do. The data tells them everything they need to know about what their readers want. The twelve viral thinkers who all occupy the top slots on every list, from Spotify to the New York Times, know it too. You donât build your audience by making your audience feel like theyâve got some bloody hard work to do; you build an audience by making people feel like theyâre already a murder of geniuses, and by flattering their existing positions. All you really have to do is give them more interesting language for the arguments theyâre accustomed to, maybe find a few statistics they can trot out at their next dinner party, maybe give them some soundbites they can quote until they believe theyâve thought of them themselves.
The result is an intellectual ecosystem that looks productive and produces f**k all.
The citation shell game
Itâs a problem of both ideology and methodology. The vast majority of the nonfiction genre is just previously published and lauded authors taking an obscure finding from behavioral economics, spinning up a narrative wrapper, finding tangentially related papers for the endnotes, and slapping on a one-word title. And the findings, the book, and the data might not be wrong! It might even be 100%, unarguably on the money! Itâs just that itâs the same insights every field has been circulating for fifteen years in a monetizable package sold via an Airport Bookstore.
The citations give it a rigorous cover, which gives the readers the sensation that theyâve encountered and weighed up the evidence, but the narratives are always stronger than the p-hacked data they contain, and every contentious point is hedged, qualified, contested and pruned, and the resulting product is too clean to give anyone an experience that actually changes their lives.
The same twelve people
Every intellectual community has its rotation. The same names show up in the same places and in the same conversations, reinforcing each otherâs frameworks and cross-promoting each otherâs books.
It looks like a bunch of high-minded conversations.
It looks like whatever festival of dangerous ideas.
Itâs more like a mutual admiration society that has figured out how to get paid.
The rotation doesnât have to be conspiratorial, or the product of a shadowy network of robed freemasons.
Itâs just network effects doing what network effects always do. The people who get booked are the ones whoâve been booked before, the people who get cited are the ones whoâve already been cited, and the ideas that get amplified are the ones that fit the community's existing vocabulary.
This produces an intellectual monoculture. The community develops shared assumptions, shared methods, shared standards of what counts as a serious argument â and then those assumptions, methods, and standards become invisible because nobody inside the rotation is pushing back on them.
The people who do push back tend not to get invited back.
I should know. Iâm one of âem.
What this costs us
The obvious cost is that we stop learning things. If every book is a confirmation of something we already believe, and every podcast is a conversation between people who fundamentally agree, then the actual movement of ideas slows down. We get better at defending existing positions and worse at changing our minds.
We lose the ability to distinguish between knowing something and having a sophisticated vocabulary for talking about it. Smart people in intellectual monocultures become very good at sounding certain. They learn the moves â the citations, the hedges, the casual references to the right thinkers. They develop fluency in their community's dialect.
And fluency starts to feel like understanding, because it works in every conversation theyâre part of.
This is how communities of genuinely intelligent people end up systematically wrong about things for a long time.
The way out is uncomfortable
The obvious answer is to read people you disagree with. Thatâs true but insufficient, because most people who think theyâre doing this are actually reading the version of the opposing view that their community has already refuted. The strawman tour. The more useful practice is to look for the strongest version of a challenge to your existing framework, find the smartest person who holds it, and take seriously the possibility that they might be right and you might be wrong.
Most intellectual communities are not set up to reward this. Theyâre set up to reward the defense of shared positions. Changing your mind on something important is more likely to cost you status than gain it.
So the circle jerk continues. The same twelve thinkers, the same citation layer, the same books that make us feel smarter than we were.
And every now and then, someone will write a piece pointing this out â and it will be widely shared among people who already agree with it.
Including, possibly, this one.
I just subscribed since you had me at hello!