Would you accept "Oopsie!" from your accountant? Your doctor? Why do we accept it from companies holding our data and our money?
Westenberg.
Uh Oh! The Infantilization of Failure
When apps fail, when software breaks, you'll likely encounter a message constructed from a specific vocabulary: "Oops!" "Uh oh!" "Whoops!" Sometim...
I fail to see the necessity of announcing one's departure from a social media platform. If you wish to leave, leave. We shall endeavor to survive the loss of your opinions.
We’ve achieved peak skepticism (trust in institutions at all-time lows, fact-check everything) and peak gullibility (MLM schemes, crypto scams, wellness grifts at all-time highs) in the same generation. This shouldn’t be possible but here we are.
The person who checks their notifications is, afterward, exactly the same person who wanted to check their notifications five minutes ago. The thin desire reproduces itself without remainder. The thick desire transforms its host.
Westenberg.
Thin Desires Are Eating YourΒ Life
The defining experience of our age seems to be hunger.Β  We're hungry for more, but we have more than we need.Β  We're hungry for less, while mor...
The worship of "more" is the path of least resistance for a civilization that has forgotten how to sit still.
Westenberg.
Growth is a Poor Man's God
We've built an entire civilization around a single metric: growth.Β  GDP must grow. Startups must grow. Your follower count, your revenue, your pe...
Conservative: "Companies say 'Happy Holidays' because they hate Jesus." Economics 101: "Companies say 'Happy Holidays' because they want to sell cheap plastic garbage to 100% of the population instead of 65%." The 'War on Christmas' is just the Free Market you claim to worship working exactly as intended. You are fighting the Invisible Hand. And losing.
The Culture War is a toxoplasma. It bypasses your rational defenses by hacking your tribal loyalty circuits. If you find yourself genuinely furious about a minor controversy involving a sub-group you didn't know existed last week, you aren't "informed." You are being optimized for engagement.
I don't have a particular hill I'm prepared to die on, but there are a handful of slight inclines on which I'd be okay with experiencing mild discomfort.
"Facts don't care about your feelings" has mutated into a much dumber heuristic: "If I am hurting your feelings, I must be stating a fact." This is a logical fallacy. It is entirely possible to be an asshole and be factually incorrect. In fact, the correlation is likely positive.
We've entered the era of "brainrot." We became a global fragmentation of doom scrolling, context-lacking, uncurious, blindly accepting, regurgitating masses. The cycle of viral content is faster than the cycle of understanding. People aren't generating thoughts so much as playing back content they've absorbed.
Westenberg.
On Brainrot
The conservative commentator Erick-Woods Erickson observed on his Substack this week that Twitter has now convinced large swaths of the American ri...