Contraptions is the newsletter that became Rao's primary writing venue following the effective end of ribbonfarm as an active posting platform in 2024. It represents the post-ribbonfarm era of his intellectual practice: more intimate in format, subscriber-supported rather than advertising or traffic-driven, and addressed to a smaller but more committed readership than the open blog attracted.
The Post-Ribbonfarm Transition
The transition from ribbonfarm-blog to Contraptions reflects broader shifts in the independent intellectual publishing landscape. By the early 2020s, the blog as a format — dependent on search traffic, social media sharing, and casual readership — had been substantially supplanted by newsletters as the preferred medium for sustained intellectual writing. Substack and similar platforms enabled a direct reader-writer relationship with payment, bypassing the advertising model that had never quite suited Ribbonfarm's style of writing.
The cozyweb-turn in Rao's thinking makes the newsletter transition legible as more than pragmatics: it is also an enactment of the move toward cozyweb forms that he had been theorizing since 2018-2019. The newsletter addresses a self-selected subscriber community rather than the open internet — a smaller, warmer, more intimate space.
Intellectual Continuity
Contraptions continues the intellectual threads of late Ribbonfarm and of Rao's other post-Ribbonfarm projects. The protocol-thinking work from unreasonable-sufficiency-of-protocols and the temporal philosophy of the-clockless-clock-series both continue to develop in the newsletter context. The format — shorter, more frequent, more conversational than peak Ribbonfarm posts — suits the developmental stage of ideas that are ongoing rather than concluded.
The title Contraptions reflects Rao's interest in thinking of ideas as tools — built objects that do work in the world — rather than as pure theory. This framing connects to the protocol-thinking interest in infrastructure and to his earlier work on how conceptual frameworks function as cognitive tools.
Relationship to The Art of Gig
the-art-of-gig newsletter, which focuses specifically on indie consulting practice, represents a parallel stream of Rao's post-Ribbonfarm output alongside Contraptions. The split between a conceptual/philosophical newsletter (Contraptions) and a practical/career newsletter (The Art of Gig) reflects the two dimensions of Rao's practice: independent intellectual and consultant.