Stop thinking about your audience as a vague concept, a collection of faceless people. Believe that your audience is a real person with feelings, experiences and a story. Believe that they're human. That they matter. It will change your perspective. Because if you want people to care? You have to know what will make them care. https://joanwestenberg.medium.com/how-to-make-something-people-give-a-shit-about-e859a2e8daca

Mozilla and Automattic really duking it out for who can lose decades of community good will the fastest

Dune part two is the weirdest Wonka movie in the whole franchise. Stylistically it just doesn’t work. Idk what they were thinking.

Stephen King could never match the cold fear of an SEO writer adding me on LinkedIn

If your response to any criticism of capitalism is "COMMUNISM SUCKS," congratulations you have failed the most basic level of intelligent discourse

The role of human curators is not just to select and present content but to imbue the digital landscape with a sense of reliability and authenticity that only human insight can provide. In an age where technology can easily mislead or overwhelm, trusting in human curation becomes not a preference but a necessity for preserving the quality of the information that shapes our understanding of the world. https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/curation-is-the-last-best-hope-of-intelligent-discourse

It's 2030. Twitter, now named Xtube Premium Pro Plus, is run by 5 employees in a bunker on Elon Musk's compound. The gaming / video / live streaming / podcast / NFT platform boasts dozens upon dozens of users every month. The bunker doors open. It's Musk. He is wearing a panther fur coat. "I've got it," he rasps."We should be a microblogging platform." 4/5 employees cheer. Not Harold. He has seen too much.

I'm way better at blogging than TS elliot. Dude never even had a WordPress.

The "patriarchy", a male-dominated social order with entrenched hierarchies giving power and authority to men over women, is pitched by masculinity influencers and pop social scientists as humanity's natural state. But the historical and anthropological evidence suggests patriarchy is actually a relatively modern invention, emerging only within the last few thousand years. https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/the-patriarchy-is-a-modern-invention-not-the-natural-order

I'm an indie transgender tech journalist - I write a weekly essay on tech + economics + humans! It's called Joan's Index, and after leaving Substack (because Nazis) it's now hosted on my own site. Subscribe: https://joanwestenberg.com/subscribe