Heretics for Hire

Photo by Nathyn Masters on Unsplash🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, you’re in the right place.While you’re here, a few things I’ve 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 thought leadership agency for founders x VCs.You can buy my book Permissionless here.Starbucks didn’t use to sell coffee. At least, not in the way we’re used to. When it was founded in 1971, it sold roasted beans and coffee-making gear. It was a retailer, not a cafe. You could get the coffee itself, and you could get whatever you needed to brew a cup of joe, but that was it. The “Cafe” in the sense of a place to buy a drink was mostly the domain of diners and dogwagons and small independent joints. When Howard Schultz arrived in 1982 as their Director of Marketing, he came at…