Neo-Etiquette Basics: The New Rules of Being Human

Twenty-one rules for living among other people when every device encourages you to forget their sentience

🍕 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.

---

“Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.”
— 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

AI has its place.

That place is not in a 3 AM text conversation with someone who thinks there’s a human being on the other end.

2. Remove your headphones when another person enters the interaction.

If you’re ordering a coffee, take out your AirPods.

Show the person taking your order that you don’t see them as disposable.

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.

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.

If you use AirPods as a hearing aid, you can literally tell the person you’re speaking to. Indicate that you’re paying attention.

There are solutions here.

(If you want to see them, that is…)

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.

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.

4. Keep your private soundtrack private.

Use headphones for music on the train, TikToks in the waiting room, and phone conversations in the supermarket.

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.

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.

Don’t enroll people in small digital societies without their consent. Just ask.

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.

Instant delivery doesn’t require anyone to respond immediately. And it doesn’t give you the right to demand their focus and attention every single time you feel the urge to share, ask, or prod. You are not the arbiter of anyone’s time, no matter how powerful your phone might make you feel.

7. When you’re with someone, stay with them.

A phone placed face-up on the table joins every conversation as an unwelcome and uninvited third guest, alert and constantly open to distraction, always ready to outrank the person who came to see you.

Put it away.

Turn it off, for the brief 45 minutes you’ve agreed to devote to someone else over a cup of coffee.

If the world comes to an end inside those 45 minutes, it will find another way to let you know about it.

Privacy

8. If people can’t see the camera, don’t use it.

Smart glasses, the now-confirmed AirPods with cameras, and any other device that obscures a camera - or at least makes it less obvious that you’re using one - are the domain of pure assholes.

Don’t use them.

People deserve to know when someone can turn an interaction into a file and broadcast it to the world. If you can’t commit to not using Meta Ray-Bans or whatever other form they’ve taken this year, at least disclose it. It’s not hard to say, “just so you know, my glasses have the option to record you; if you’d be more comfortable, I can take them off, or you can examine them.”

If that’s too hard of an ask - you shouldn’t be wearing them in the first place.

9. Other people’s children aren’t your content.

Don’t publish a child’s face, personal details, school, routines, or vulnerable moments. Not your child, and not anyone else’s child either.

Adults shouldn’t assemble a public identity for a child who can’t yet understand what “public” means. It’s your job to protect the kids in your life from the panopticon, not host a firesale on their privacy for your own gratification.

Yes, this means the end of parenting influencers.

No, nobody is going to miss ‘em.

10. Don’t screenshot the group chat

Don’t trade somebody’s confidence, anger, affection, or bad joke for social approval. If you don’t like what’s going on in the group chat, you’re welcome to leave. You’re welcome to call it out and burn it down. But sharing screenshots of someone who thought they could trust you probably makes you an asshole.

Are there exceptions? Sure. If the people in your group chat are planning on bombing a Walmart, it’s probably worth capturing some evidence of their malice aforethought. Anything outside of that - deal with it as an adult, don’t share it with the world for clout.

11. Don’t film strangers at their worst.

A person crying on a platform, confused in a shop, or unwell on the street isn’t the opening scene of your next viral post. Or at least, it shouldn’t be.

Help them, find someone who can, or give them space, but don’t convert their distress into proof that you were nearby. Maybe they’re crashing out. Maybe they’re being assholes to the folks in their immediate vicinity. Neither of those things are actually helped by your documentation and livestreaming.

If someone’s committing a crime and you need to capture evidence, go right ahead. That principle applies pretty broadly to all of these rules. But someone being a dick isn’t a crime that needs a global jury; people need to be able to sort their crap out between each other, one to one, as grown-ups.

We used to be able to do that.

Why can’t we do it now?

12. On the subject of disclosure by the way…make it your guiding light for AI, too.

If you use AI - if you’re excited about AI - be honest about it.

Stop hiding it.

Refusing to admit to it is cowardly behavior, and it says you’re ashamed of your workflow, jealous of writers who don’t use AI, and uncomfortable with your own choices.

Either use AI and admit to it, or don’t use AI.

But don’t be defensive and play games with people.

It’s that simple.

I keep a monthly-updated “How I AI” disclosure on my Substack About page for anyone to see.

Being transparent about how I use these tools is non-optional for me.

It’s not a high bar.

13. Aim your surveillance at your own property.

Use doorbells, dashcams, and security systems to protect what you own without documenting your neighbors’ entrances, conversations, and daily routines.

Protecting your property doesn’t give you unlimited jurisdiction over everybody else’s life.

Public Life

14. Don’t let a screen remove your body from the world.

The footpath, doorway, and queue still exist, along with the person trying to walk around you.

You’re more than welcome to focus on a screen, but don’t block the path. Move out of the way.

You wouldn’t stop your car in the middle of a freeway to read a text. Don’t stop in the middle of a footpath either.

15. Don’t join in a punishment because it has attracted a crowd.

An algorithm will regularly show you a stranger and invite you to help destroy them. It will offer one clip, sentence, or accusation, then encourage immediate certainty.

Refuse the pleasure of acting as judge, jury, and eager member of the crowd.

You probably don’t know the whole story, and the crowd certainly won’t know when to stop. Even if it’s all entirely justified, the mob doesn’t need another pitchfork-wielding, pearl-clutching, outraged asshole.

Kierkegaard’s formulation: “The crowd is untruth.” The algorithm has simply given the crowd push notifications.

16. Give credit as a matter of honesty.

Credit the person who created the joke, photograph, argument, report, artwork, or recommendation you share.

“Found online” often means, “Someone made this, and I didn’t consider their identity worth finding.”

Take a few minutes to research where it came from.

You have the time. You know you do.

Put the effort in.

17. Do the small work of civilization.

Return the trolley, clear the table, move your bag from the empty seat, leave the shared kitchen usable, and let people off the train before you board.

People with more convenient lives can more easily neglect these gestures, but they haven’t become obsolete.

Human Things

18. Don’t announce a life that isn’t yours.

You may know about another person’s death, diagnosis, pregnancy, engagement, break-up, or redundancy, but you don’t get to publish the news.

Information can involve you without belonging to you.

Ask yourself - why does it matter so much to you to be the first person who knows? Why does it matter to you, beyond getting attention and having the gratification of other people sharing your announcement?

And isn’t there a higher aspiration than being a rabble-rousing town cryer who’s only paid in likes?

19. Answer human effort with human effort.

When someone offers you grief, courage, love, or vulnerability, don’t answer with generated language to avoid the discomfort of finding your own words.

Write the apology, toast, or condolence card yourself.

Your words can be imperfect.

That’s allowed.

Encouraged, even.

20. Allow people to leave their former selves behind.

The internet preserves old material by default, while human beings survive because they can change.

Don’t excavate an old photograph, abandoned opinion, or decade-old mistake merely because a search engine preserved it. Hold people accountable with context and proportion, and allow them to become someone better.

Don’t turn a permanent record into a permanent sentence.

Remember: cancel culture is fairly pointless, at the best of times. It’s even more pointless if you won’t offer anyone a chance at redemption.

21. Never forget the nervous system.

Every account ends in a human body.

The person in the photograph can feel humiliation. The person behind the username may shake while reading your words. The person in the viral clip must continue living after the crowd grows bored.

Before you record, post, forward, expose, mock, or reply, ask:

Would I do this if the person was actually standing in front of me?

Would I use these words if I could see their face change, take the photograph if they could look into the lens, or press send if I had to remain in the room?

As Kant put it - “Man alone… is an end in himself.”

People are never (or perhaps, should never) be merely a means.

They are not raw material for your content, background characters in your day, obstacles to your convenience, or instruments for your gratification. Their attention is not yours to seize, their privacy is not yours to trade, and their worst moment is not yours to publish. Every rule here comes back to that one fact: other people do not exist for your use. They exist for themselves. Act accordingly.