Contraptionist History Book Club

Plus, a dev environment photo-motto contest and an administrative note

We’re going to do a monthly book club on this newsletter this year, which is mainly what I want to talk about this week. I also have a little dev environment photo-motto contest going to kick off 2025, which I want to invite you to participate in. But first, an important administrative note.

💀 Rate Increase 💀

The subscription rate of this newsletter will increase to $7/month $90/year on February 1. If you are already a paid subscriber as of Jan 31, you’ll be able to lock in the current rate ($5/$61) for as long as you remain subscribed. But if you unsubscribe and resubscribe, you’ll lose the legacy rate.

If you’re wondering why the annual rate is greater than 12x the monthly rate, it’s because I want to mildly discourage annual subscriptions in favor of month-to-month. This lowers the rolling “debt overhang” of owed newsletters-to-be-written for me, smooths out cash-flow, and lowers the cost of refunds if I have to/want to walk away for any reason.

Another thing. If you’re new to this newsletter, an important thing to be aware of is that I take a couple of longish breaks every year, during which I pause billing. I do this partly to avoid writing when I’m not feeling inspired, and partly to load-balance around my consulting work. This means that for every month/year you pay for, you actually get +20% or so calendar time. It’s probably easier to think of it as paying for lots of ~4 or ~52 issues at a time, whether they take a 13 or 16 months to actually get sent out.

For me, the core tension of a paid newsletter — all the more acute since I retired the public Ribbonfarm WordPress blog — is between keeping it fun and making a bit of money. Both my weird monthly < annual subscription rate and my long-breaks seasonal routine are designed to make the tension easier to manage.

As for the rate increase itself, it’s partly about staying ahead of inflation ($5 in 2020 is about $6.11 as of November 2024, so at $7 I should be good for a few years), but also about creating some headroom to give away more discounted or comped subscriptions to people who can’t afford even the current $5 rate. So far, I’ve been doing this ad hoc, but I’ll probably set up a couple of discount codes for students/developing countries etc. Not quite sure how to keep the price discrimination low-overhead, but I’ll figure it out.

I also want to give away more comped subs as incentives for some social/interactive experiments I want to try this year. The first two experiments are a photo-motto contest and a book club.

“I just have to set up my dev environment” contest

Here is the prompt for the photo-motto contest. If you want to enter, post an entry in the chat thread before Friday January 10. There’s already about half a dozen entries in there, and there are comped months of paid subscription for prizes.

Contraptionism 2025 kickoff challenge: Instead of sharing resolutions or annual plans, take an hour over the next 24 hours week to set up your main dev environment a bit in alignment with your subconscious 2025 intentions (computer desktop, physical desk, workshop, kitchen, studio, wine cellar…) and share a photo here (with suitable redactions) captioned with a suitable 2025 motto/tagline. Top 3 with most likes win +3/+2/+1 months comped subscription.

The contest was inspired by my favorite meme in recent years. This one:

In the last decade, as I’ve entirely abandoned any sort of disciplined GTD-ing, PKM, productivity porn, and mechanisms like resolutions and annual reviews/plans, I’ve come to rely increasingly on a finely tuned dev environment to get things done. The idea is to put my brain in the environment, so I can be an impulse-driven monkey within it.

This has gone about as well as you might expect. Specifically, it’s gone about as well as Home Simpson’s plan to set up a barbecue pit.

Still, I think I like the “Set up dev environment” approach better than the “productivity” approach of resolutions/planning/reviewing etc. etc. The approach has been especially helpful for me as my “development” activities have expanded significantly beyond writing, to a lot of activities where I have low skill, making planning extra difficult. I can barely stick to plans to write multi-part series or books, and I’m reasonably skilled at writing. So imagine how bad it gets when I try to stick to plans to (say) build a particular robot that calls for skills I don’t even know I don’t have.

It’s much easier to just simply try and make some progress every week rather than trying to make and stick to ambitious plans. Dev-environment-first thinking helps do that.

One way to think about dev environments is that if they’re set up well, they act as potential fields for shaping behaviors over the long-term to have interesting but somewhat unpredictable cumulative effects, even if the hour-to-hour behaviors feel like a random walk. Of course if dev environments are not maintained in a high-potential state, they degenerate into entropic messes.

My real motive for running this contest is honestly inspiration. My own dev environment right now is an entropic mess of colliding projects, toolchains, impulsive shopping forays, and incompatible organizing schemes. I need better ideas to charge up the potential of the potential field, and keep it consistently charged. I suspect many of you could use such inspiration too, even if you are more the planning/goal-setting type.

So throw a photo of your 2025 dev environment, and a 2025 motto, into the ring. Here’s the chat thread link again.

Contraptionist History Book Club

Speaking of dev environments, 13 months ago, I wrote a post titled We Just Have to Set up the Planetary Dev Environment. This post was the start of a line of thinking that has now become a central one for the Contraptions newsletter. Most recently, it showed up in the Dec 7 issue, As Above So Garage. It’s dev environments all the way up… and down.

Civilization, I’m increasingly convinced, is something like a planet-scale machine nestled within a planetary dev environment. A very contraptiony one that requires constant maintenance, tuning, and tinkering. The dev environment of course, is more often than not an entropic mess. But once in a while, it is in a high-potential state and the machine itself is in a good state, so “progress” gallops along. When the machine is broken-down, and the dev environment is an entropic mess, which is most of the time, everybody runs out yelling “meaning crisis!” or just gives up and checks out.

This picture of the world was not always true, but has been increasingly true since about the 13th century, as the world got increasingly organized around accumulating technological capabilities wired together in specific ways at planetary scale.

In 2025, I want to explore this thesis in depth, and perhaps end the year with a nice map and chronology of what the planetary machine looks like and where it came from. Maybe we’ll even discover where the config file is located and how to edit it. One element of how I want to approach this project is to read a set of books that I think illuminate the idea, and do it with people who also “get” where I’m going with this.

So last week, in a chat thread, I floated an idea for a themed book club, devoted to studying the idea of contraptionist world history. Each month, I’ll pick a book and we’ll discuss it in a chat thread. The first pick is City of Fortune, by Roger Crowley, a history of the rise of Venice. I read that last month, and visited Venice while I was reading it, and I was struck by the extent to which medieval Venice was a well-oiled political economy machine. A machine made up of ship-building, sea-faring, and book-keeping technologies, a fine-tuned set of republican governance protocols, and a Rube Goldberg style architecture designed to pump wealth out of global trade networks to make benefit the citizens of Venice. For half a millennium, Venice was a civilizational machine unlike anything the world had seen before. An ENIAC of geopolitical computation. So let’s read about it and do a teardown of sorts together.

There is now a page for the book club (the link is also on the top menu of the substack newsletter page), and I have also picked out the next two books in the queue, so feel free to read out of order a bit, or parallel process.

You don’t have to be either an engineer or a historian to do contraptionist history, but either/both will help.

And to sweeten the deal — for every book you finish in 2025, you earn one comped month. So if you manage to finish all 12, you’ll get this newsletter for free in 2026 basically.

I’ll be writing more in coming weeks about what exactly I mean by contraptionist history, and what it means to look at history as a “machine,” but for now, dive into the Crowley book and start forming your own thoughts. I’ll kick off the chat discussion thread around January 24.

That’s all for now. Here’s to a fun 2025 for all of us!