Joan Westenberg

That was an interesting read. Even more if you take a look into another of the author's text on the decline of personal thought [1]. I believe the author is engaging with very interesting questions: what is knowledge? How can I achieve it? How does it feel during the pursuit?

Of course the answer is deeply personal. My take is that I agree with the author on that knowledge should be inhabited, as I quoted Arendt on a former blog entry of mine [2] "For memory and depth are the same, or rather depth can only be reached by man through remembrance.".

If your journey using whatever tool du jour helps you, more power to you! But if it feels like a burden, drop it and adapt. In my process, I tried many different methods of note taking, but the one I haven't dropped is pen and paper. The act of writing is thinking to me. I do not have a plan to go through what I have written and treat them as a fortuitous encounter rather than having a procedure/method in place. But I still find the idea of having digital notes somewhat appealing, luring even.

[1]https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/cognitive-offshoring-and-the-decline-of-personal-thought-26c6d43ac5089a9a [2]https://gtpedrosa.github.io/blog/on-taking-notes-and-learning-methods/

Great summation of how it looks (and smells) from the outside. The only thing that jarred me out of furious agreement was this line:

> At least I have my integrity.

And I may be throwing stones from a glass house but, in my opinion, they have 6 months of integrity on a backdrop of <unknown number> of years of quite specific non-integrity.

Exiting the speeding-train-with-no-brakes saves you. Helping to stop the train has at least the chance to save others, which earns integrity.

Write an (anonymous?) blog describing how to recognise the bullshit, what the strategies are that you, yourself employed to convince the rubes. Expose your methods so that others who are employing them are made toothless.

There lieth integrity.

Edited to add:

This kinda thing, it's good to see the reversal: https://www.joanwestenberg.com/techs-accountability-tantrum-is-pathetic

Some suggestions

Privacy Guides home:

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/

The Protesters' Guide to Smartphone Security

https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2025/01/23/activists-guide-securing-your-smartphone/

Infosec 101 for Activists

https://infosecforactivists.org/

Using Tails When Your World Doesn't Feel Safe Anymore

https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2025/01/29/installing-and-using-tails/

How I’m Building a Trump-Proof Tech Stack Without Big Tech

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/american-tech-is-compromised-heres-my-replacement-stack-2/

EFF guides: I don't have the URL's handy

https://eff.org

See also:

https://riseup.net

That seems unfair without a cursory search to check whether the op-ed writer already felt there was something hollow or unsustainable going on.

A couple minutes finds this tepid if not dismissive take from September:

> As large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 continue to improve, they’ll get even better at mimicking human communication patterns and producing content that’s virtually indistinguishable from what a mediocre (sorry, but it’s fucking true) human writer might create.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/shitposting-our-way-through-the-singularity/