Westenberg.
Field Notes on Now.
$ ls ./posts/
The Great Tech Heist - How "Disruption" Became a Euphemism for Theft
I've lost count of how many times I've been cornered at conferences by men in meticulously over-casual $300 t-shirts, evangelizing their startups with religious fervor. "
On Bunkers and Billionaire Exit Strategies
The billionaire with the bunker in New Zealand isn't actually preparing for the apocalypse. Not really. He's telling us a story. It's a story
The Future is More Stuff
Let me tell you about my smartphone. Not the one I have now - the one I had in 2015. It took decent photos, browsed the web reasonably well, and
Stop Conflating Genius With Asshole
Somewhere between Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, we started believing that in order to be brilliant, you had to be unbearable. That cruelty itself was a kind of clarity. That
The Zeigarnik Engine: Turning Open Loops into Momentum
I’ve spent the past year with thirty tabs open in my brain. Some of them are essays. Some are plans. Some are wounds. All of them humming. I used
Why Are All the Smart People So Bad at History?
You know the type. MIT-trained, Substack-fluent, AI-curious. They can quote Hume, dabble in Bayesianism, and confidently wield phrases like "regression discontinuity" and "effective optimization landscape" in
Why Smart People Follow Cheap Gurus
Smart people love new ideas. They collect them like rare coins. They turn them over in their minds, admire their shine, categorize them, and rank them. They build entire identities
Why Hitler Slept Through D-Day
On the morning of June 6th, 1944, Hitler was sound asleep. The Allies were landing. Tens of thousands of soldiers were pouring onto the beaches. The tide was turning, the
Content Saturation Has Inverted Cultural Memory
This one’s for paid subscribers—a huge thanks to everyone making this work possible. If you’d like to join, you can sign up here! Subscribe 🍕 We used to
Avoiding Stupidity Beats Chasing Brilliance
We're addicted to genius. We obsess over the wunderkind solving quantum equations at nine, the dropout who IPOs from his garage, the hedge fund oracle who posts a
How Small Networks Build Stronger Ideas
Popularity kills good ideas. The moment a thought gets traction, it gets watered down. The rough edges get sanded off. The disclaimers creep in. The speculative becomes declarative, the subversive
Notes from the Exit: Why I Left the Attention Economy
I didn’t leave the attention economy because I hated it. I left because I understood it, because once you see the system for what it is—a parasitic loop