Neo-Etiquette Basics: The New Rules of Being Human
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Neo-Etiquette Basics: The New Rules of Being Human<br>Twenty-one rules for living among other people when every device encourages you to forget their sentience
JA Westenberg<br>Aug 20, 2026
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🍕 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.<br>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.<br>You can buy my book Permissionless here.
“Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.”<br>— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The point of having good manners isn’t to honor an arbitrary ritual; it’s to show a modicum of respect to the folks you come into contact with every day of your life.<br>We are - as George Costanza would unhappily tell you - living in a society.
No matter how much certain corners of the internet might complain about respectability politics and insist that they’re specially anointed creatures to whom social expectations cannot possibly apply, there is a basic level of decency that we have to agree on.<br>We need a baseline that acknowledges a simple moral fact: that other people are actually real people. They have inner lives you can’t and don’t get to see; they have sentience, no matter how inconvenient that might be. You don’t get to treat them as disposable, you don’t get to process them into content, and you don’t get to claim their time, publish their flaws, or distribute their worst moments at will.<br>Technology didn’t create selfishness, but it has made selfish acts extraordinarily easy and almost inconsequential. It’s easier than ever to treat a friend as an audience, use a stranger for content, present a private moment as evidence, feed a human voice into a training set, and turn somebody else’s misfortune into afternoon entertainment.<br>Attention
1. Write to the people you love in your own voice, not OpenAI’s.
Don’t outsource intimacy to ChatGPT or any other tool.<br>A clumsy message from you means more than immaculate copy generated on your behalf. The people who love you aren’t waiting for polished prose. They want evidence that you were present. If you’re fighting with your spouse, fight with them. Have some skin in the game. If you’re confronting someone who’s fucked up, confront them; don’t hide behind a chat output.<br>AI has its place.<br>That place is not in a 3 AM text conversation with someone who thinks there’s a human being on the other end.<br>2. Remove your headphones when another person enters the interaction.
If you’re ordering a coffee, take out your AirPods.<br>Show the person taking your order that you don’t see them as disposable.<br>I posted this on Threads, and a huge number of people were wonderfully offended by the notion that they should have to inconvenience themselves for even a second to remove a listening device and show the person in front of them that they see them as human.<br>But nobody should have to compete with a podcast for proof of their existence. Same goes for phone calls, music, everything else. Even if you take a single AirPod out and see // hear the human in front of you, it counts.<br>If you use AirPods as a hearing aid, you can literally tell the person you’re speaking to. Indicate that you’re paying attention.<br>There are solutions here.<br>(If you want to see them, that is…)<br>3. Don’t make your convenience somebody else’s administration.
A seven-minute voice note may save you time (of course, writing out a text has now become an impossible ask) but only by taking seven minutes from its recipient.<br>If your message takes minutes to transcribe, interpret, and excavate, write it clearly or ask whether the recipient has time to listen. And if they don’t, make time to see them yourself. Sit down and have that conversation.<br>4. Keep your private soundtrack private.
Use headphones for music on the train, TikToks in the waiting room, and phone conversations in the supermarket.<br>Everyone shares public space, and no single person gets to program it. Your tastes might be refined, but they are not the tastes of every human you interact with. The commons shouldn’t be polluted by the tinny speakers of your smartphone, no matter how interesting it may be to you.<br>5. Ask before adding someone to a group chat.
A group chat does more than collect contacts. It repeatedly captures people’s attention, often exposes them to strangers, and follows them on a device pressed against their bodies.<br>Don’t enroll people in small digital societies without their consent. Just ask.<br>6. A read receipt isn’t a subpoena.
People may open a message and think before answering. They may feel tired, distracted, busy, or unsure of what to say, and they may forget.<br>Instant delivery doesn’t require anyone to respond immediately. And it doesn’t...