"Against Waldenponding" (December 2018) is the essay in which Rao coined the term waldenponding: the impulse to retreat from the "noisy internet" into a romanticized, simplified offline or low-connectivity life, named after Thoreau's Walden Pond experiment. Published in the Breaking Smart newsletter, it generated significant discussion in the "indie intellectual" and tech-reflective circles that comprised Rao's audience, and established waldenponding as a useful critical term for a recognizable contemporary tendency.
The Coinage and Critique
The essay's core argument is that waldenponding — the performative retreat from connectivity — misdiagnoses the problem. The genuine problem with contemporary internet life is not that there is too much connection but that the quality of connection is poor: too much broadcast, too much conflict, too much passive consumption, too little genuine exchange. Retreating to Walden Pond does not fix this; it simply exchanges noisy bad connection for silence.
The term targets a specific cultural tendency visible in advice literature: the "digital detox," the retreat to analog tools, the celebration of offline living as inherently superior. Rao argues this is romanticization — Thoreau's Walden experiment was not actually about disconnection (he visited Concord regularly) and the contemporary version reproduces the same bad faith: the "walden-ponderer" typically continues to benefit from network infrastructure while performing rejection of it.
Relationship to Cozyweb
The waldenponding-essay and the domestic-cozy-essay are companion pieces in Rao's thinking about the appropriate response to a degraded public internet. Where "Against Waldenponding" argues against retreat into offline life, "Domestic Cozy" describes a better alternative: retreat into smaller, more intimate online spaces — the cozyweb of group chats, small forums, and curated communities rather than the broadcast public internet.
Together, the two essays define the cozyweb-turn in Rao's thinking: the diagnosis that the public internet has become hostile and the prescription that the right response is selective withdrawal into richer, smaller-scale digital connection rather than wholesale abandonment of connectivity.
Significance in Rao's Trajectory
The essay reflects Rao's disillusionment with the more optimistic technology analysis of breaking-smart-season-1 — or at least a complication of it. Season 1 celebrated software's agoral dynamics; "Against Waldenponding" grapples with the social costs of those dynamics without endorsing the most common proposed remedies. It represents the nuanced position Rao was working out through the late 2010s: technology-positive but not techno-utopian, critical of both boosterism and primitivism.