The Intellectual Circle Jerk and Why We Can't Stop

Photo by Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru / The National Library of Wales 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 product, brand, and GTM lab.You can buy my book Permissionless here.When did our entire intellectual culture become centered around rearranging and reconfiguring our beliefs, our books, our content, and our ideas to fit a laundry list of accepted, popular, and orthodox concepts we already agree with? We celebrate every book that comes out, as long as it confirms what we’re already prepared to defend, with all the same citations in mildly different forms, by the same authors who circle-jerk their way through the same podcast…