Notices by JA Westenberg (daojoan@mastodon.social)

Measles is spreading. Kids are dying. And RFK Jr., as HHS Secretary, is pushing cod liver oil instead of vaccines.

Read why his failures will cost lives.

https://mastodon.social/@theindex/114109189189034043

Billionaires hate this one weird trick

This is Trump 2.0

There is no meaning. There is no purpose. There is no direction. There is no end goal.

There is only the void.

It's an over-priced combination meal-deal of blundering, ham-fisted incompetence and total nihilism.

https://www.theindex.media/what-the-hell-are-we-doing/

There are no “papers of record” anymore. Just papers of accord.

You don’t “realign” your marriage by cheating on your wife, and you don’t “realign” politics by betraying everyone who helped you. That’s just being a disloyal sack of shit with a thesaurus.

Our job is to ask questions. So why do so many journalists treat Substack’s monopoly power like it’s a “don’t ask, don’t tell” situation?

This year, I founded an indie news blog doing long-form Op-eds.

It's 100% free and 100% reader funded. No venture capital, no ads, no bullshit.

And it is unapologetically opposed to Nazi fuckery.

Read/subscribe and support:
https://www.theindex.media

Elon Musk wants you to think Republicans, X, and the assholes wrecking the planet and crushing the vulnerable are punk rock.

They’re not.

The open web is punk rock.

Decentralization is punk rock.

Billionaire bootlicking? That’s just embarrassing.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/big-tech-wants-you-trapped-the-open-web-sets-you-free-2/

The Americans who voted for Trump in 2024 weren't deceived.

They were convinced.

They didn't hold their noses while voting for mass deportations and stripping transgender people of their civil rights.

They huffed the scent and loved it.
https://www.theindex.media/the-soil-not-just-the-harvest/

I just deleted my book.

A thread about choices, and doing the right thing.

Because we're all facing a lot of that right now.

🧵

And I realized I had to say no.

Not just say no—I had to delete the whole thing from my website. Remove it from Gumroad. Kill it completely. No matter how much money I was leaving on the table. No matter how many copies had already been sold.

Because the world had shifted under my feet.

I self-published it this year. I was happy with the launch. It found its audience. People bought it, shared it, sent me messages saying it resonated.

Recently, a publisher reached out. They wanted to release the book. Expand its reach. Give it legitimacy.

So I sat down to read it again...

The book was about taking the DIY ethos and applying it as a manifesto for problem-solving, social change, cutting through bureaucracy, pushing past institutional overreach. A manifesto for people who saw the world as something they could rebuild, rather than something they had to accept.

During COVID, I started working on a book called Permissionless.

It was born out of frustration—the kind that gnaws at you when you see how broken the systems are, how unnecessary the gatekeepers have become, how much red tape gets in the way of solving real problems.

They don’t believe in permissionless the way folks like me meant it. They don’t want to create. They want to destroy. They want to gut expertise, dismantle institutions, break things just to watch them shatter, then call it innovation.

And I refuse to be useful to them in any way, shape or form.

They’ve taken concepts like regulatory bloat and institutional decay and rent-seeking and duplicitously turned them into blunt objects they’re currently using to destroy the world I love. 

Elon Musk and his acolytes—his billionaire cronies, his reactionary fanboys, the cult that believes burning everything down is the same thing as building something better—have twisted ideas like mine into weapons.

But that’s not the world we live in.

And I can’t pretend otherwise.

I believe in the ideas in my book. But I also believe in responsibility. I believe in knowing when something you create could do harm in the wrong hands. I believe in looking at a movement and asking, Who benefits? Who suffers?

There’s a version of Permissionless that exists in a better world—a world where breaking down barriers is about lifting people up, not tearing them down. A world where expertise isn’t the enemy, where knowledge isn’t discarded in favor of whoever yells the loudest.

I want to write a new version. A better version. It might take weeks. It might months.

If you bought the book, please know - I love and appreciate you, and I do not regret writing and sharing it with you. And you’ll get the new version free, as soon as it’s ready.