The Post-Ribbonfarm era begins with the ribbonfarm-archive event in 2024 — the archiving of the seventeen-year-old blog that had been Rao's primary platform and intellectual home since 2007. The archiving marks a clean break: ribbonfarm-blog becomes a historical artifact rather than an active venue, and Rao's writing production moves primarily to the Contraptions newsletter. Early output of this era includes the-extended-internet-universe, Rao's essay for the Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet, which extends the cozyweb concept into a fuller topology of public, semi-private, and dark internet spaces.
The Archive Decision
The decision to archive rather than simply wind down ribbonfarm-blog is itself meaningful. Archiving preserves the accumulated corpus — the nearly two decades of essays that constitute Rao's primary intellectual record — while signaling that the blog as active venue is closed. The move reflects both the degradation of the blogging ecosystem (RSS readers, blog aggregators, and the blog-native reading habit have all declined substantially since 2007) and the broader shift toward newsletter formats that characterized the cozyweb-turn. Seventeen years of weekly or near-weekly long-form writing represents an extraordinary intellectual output, and treating it as an archive acknowledges its significance as a completed project.
Contraptions Newsletter
contraptions-newsletter represents the primary writing venue of this era. The newsletter format differs from the blog in important ways: it goes directly to subscribers rather than being indexed and discovered; it implies a more committed relationship between writer and reader; it is less dependent on platform intermediaries for distribution. These characteristics align with the cozyweb values Rao had been theorizing since the cozyweb-turn — smaller, more committed audiences in lower-stress contexts rather than viral reach through algorithmically-mediated platforms.
The Contraptions name signals something about the era's intellectual orientation: a contraption is a mechanical device of uncertain elegance, assembled from available parts for a specific purpose. The word suggests craft, improvisation, and pragmatic problem-solving rather than system-building or grand theory. It reflects the permaweird aesthetic — navigating genuinely novel conditions with available tools rather than waiting for stable footing.
Summer of Protocols Continuation
The summer-of-protocols research program continues into this era, sustaining the intellectual community and the protocol-thinking framework developed during the cozyweb-turn. The protocols work has the most institutional infrastructure of anything Rao is currently involved with — the ethereum-foundation backing provides resources that the newsletter-based model does not — and it may become the primary intellectual project of the post-Ribbonfarm period. The yak-collective, the distributed indie consulting community Rao catalyzed in 2020, also persists as a lower-key but ongoing community infrastructure alongside the more formally constituted protocols work.
Open Questions
This era is ongoing and its shape is not yet clear. The transition from blog to newsletter is a medium change with uncertain intellectual consequences: whether the Contraptions format will generate the kind of cumulative argument that the best Ribbonfarm periods produced, or whether it will be more fragmentary and occasional, remains to be seen. The summer-of-protocols work provides one potential axis of sustained development. The blogchain format — serialized linked posts that accumulate argument across many installments — is available as a structural tool, and may allow Contraptions to function as something closer to a serialized intellectual project than a conventional newsletter.
Historical Position
The Post-Ribbonfarm era begins with Rao having completed the most sustained independent intellectual blogging project in the technology-culture space: seventeen years, an archive spanning organizational theory, temporal philosophy, cultural criticism, decision science, and internet sociology. The question of what comes next is not primarily about productivity — Rao's output has never been the constraint — but about form. What is the right container for the kind of thinking Ribbonfarm enabled, in a media environment that has changed substantially from the one in which Ribbonfarm was founded?