Archive - Contraptions

Engineering Liveness

New Nature in the Gramsci Gap

Feb 1 • Venkatesh Rao

January 2026

Robotics-native affect beyond googly eyes and human emotions

Jan 25 • Venkatesh Rao

Contours of can’t-be-evil futures

Jan 16 • Venkatesh Rao

Lost in Bugspace

The temporality of implementation uncertainty in software

Jan 10 • Venkatesh Rao

The Divergence Machine

Introducing the 2026 Book Club theme

Jan 5 • Venkatesh Rao

December 2025

The Modernity Machine III

Completion, Saturation, and Phase Transition

Dec 24, 2025 • Venkatesh Rao

2025 Book Club Hangout (Transcript)

Reflecting on a year of reading about the emergence of modernity, 1200-1600

Dec 24, 2025 • Venkatesh Rao

Revenge of the Dilettantes

Book club and AI adventures, age of bespokeness, study groups, new rules of engagement

Dec 20, 2025 • Venkatesh Rao

In which I launch a career as a Serious Artist™

Dec 15, 2025 • Venkatesh Rao

Doing Heideggerianism without the baggage of Care/Sorge

Dec 11, 2025 • Venkatesh Rao

What if bigger models, like bigger stars, fail faster?

A different way to think about the “too big to fail” take about OpenAI

Dec 7, 2025 • Venkatesh Rao

Causal Why vs Teleological Why

English sucks as a “why” language

Dec 7, 2025 • Venkatesh Rao

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