This is Contraptions, a weekly newsletter by me, Venkatesh Rao. Sample these posts to get a sense of the themes. There is an opt-in section called Sloptraptions that features my AI-assisted essays. At present the content is roughly 50-50 handwritten and AI-assisted writing.
As the name of the newsletter and the samples suggest, the general idea is to explore our world as a contraption-of-contraptions, with contraptioney mental models, and a contraptioneer sensibility. The sensibility is that of half-assed engineering, but the scope is universal. I talk about contraptions of all sorts, not just technological ones. So you’ll find discussions of political, economic, and philosophical contraptions.
This incarnation of the newsletter is very new (I adopted the current name in October 2024), but the newsletter itself started in 2015, and has been through two previous incarnations. More on the history below if you’re interested.
Currently, I publish one article a week. I am not currently paywalling writing, but paid subscriptions are turned on if you’d like to support the newsletter.
I take 1-2 breaks per year, during which billing is paused. For paying subscribers, the next bill date is pushed out appropriately (it’s unpaid vacations from this newsletter basically).
Some History
This is the third incarnation of a newsletter that has been going continuously since 2015.
Between 2019-2024 it used to be called the Ribbonfarm Studio newsletter, and was a kind of Substack expeditionary outpost of my now-retired Ribbonfarm WordPress blog (still online but archived). If you search the titles of my older posts, you’ll find many old links to that domain redirecting to this one.
Before that, between 2015-19, it used to be called the Breaking Smart newsletter, and associated with another retired project of mine. You can find an ebook compilation of the 2015-19 newsletter issues here.
The idea with this new name and third incarnation was to give myself a 50th birthday present in the form of a curated mostly blank canvas, selectively carrying over a few themes from my older projects, but otherwise trying to engineer contraptioneer a fresh start for myself.
