The Tyranny of “Ongoing Harms”

Photo by Adrian Swancar 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.The laziest rhetorical device on social media is the accusation of “ongoing harms.”It’s a shorthand and a shortcut that lets the loudest people on the internet gain maximum attention by damning whoever they choose with a spot, without ever having to name the “harm” or identify the “harmed”; without having to prove a causality or even offer anything resembling a remedy. It’s a way of sounding wonderfully morally serious without having to do the work of arguing something - anything.If something is…