Orientation

The blogosphere in its heyday is hard to describe to those who weren't around to experience it. A heady mix of self-hosted digital homesteads, free distribution, explosive virality, and intoxicating new forms of sociality, all underwritten by a zero-interest-rate global economy awash in free money. It offered the frontier freedoms of the pre-web internet, but without the formidable technical barriers to access or narrowness of milieu. It offered the global reach of the platform era that came after, but without the inescapable culture-warring, enclosure effects, or enshittification.

Ribbonfarm was a blog that was actively published through this era (2007–24), and very much a product of it. It was founded by Venkatesh Rao, with Sarah Perry serving as contributing editor for several years. It accumulated over a thousand posts by 60 contributors and over 13k comments by 5000+ commenters through this period. An active scene of in-person meetups and the Refactor Camp conference flourished through the 2010s.

This archival version is designed to help you explore the era from a reflective, historical perspective rather than a sentimental and nostalgic one. The live experience is beyond our reach now, but on the plus side, we can use AI to experience the era, and mine the corpus for value (both serious and campy) in ways that were impossible for those who lived through it. In some ways, this site is more alive now than when it was being actively published.

You can read all the content of course, and as you might expect, some posts have aged poorly while others feel more relevant now than they did when originally published. But you can do more than just read. You can talk to vgr_zirp, the era-specific digital ghost of Venkatesh Rao, which (who?) serves as the curator of this site. You can search semantically and browse the archives through many filtered and sorted views. You can follow curated series trails. You can explore the corpus with several other tools.

Whether or not you were part of the active era of Ribbonfarm as a writer or reader, you may want to start by browsing the history page, then sampling parts of the highlights series, and then having a chat with vgr_zirp to explore further.

To follow Venkatesh Rao's current adventures, head over to the Contraptions Substack.

Highlights Tour