Series

Can the social sciences ever achieve the predictive precision of physics? A long-running inquiry into patterns, complexity, and the possibility of a science of history.

A defense of the mediocre — not as settling, but as a sustainable and honest mode of being in a world that demands superlatives.

Notes on what it means to run a blog into its elder years: the meta-layer of an archive becoming aware of itself.

A theory of storytelling — what stories are made of, why they work, and what they do to the people who tell and hear them.

Tracking the Gen Z cultural turn toward the cozy, the local, and the deliberately small-scale.

A blogchain: irregular dispatch notes on the state of the voyage.

Real-time documentation of the Great Weirding — the years when the future arrived faster than the language to describe it.

Speculative worldbuilding as a philosophical and artistic practice — building other worlds to understand this one.

A map of the thinkable: what can be thought, what resists thought, and the strange animals at the edges of cognition.

On liminal time — the seasons between one era and the next, when the old has ended but the new has not yet arrived.

Attempts at fiction: stories and thought experiments in narrative form.

A series by Jacob Falkovich on the rationalist psychology of how people construct, maintain, and defend identity.

A blogchain on epochal art by Mónica Belevan — what it means for a work to inaugurate an era.

Notes and essays from Refactor Camp 2019, the annual Ribbonfarm unconference on technology and culture.

Posts from the Tempo book blog (2011–2012), companion to Venkat's book on decision-making and timing, incorporated into the Ribbonfarm archive.

Annual Roundups

Notes on deep dive book reads, based on live-tweeted notes.

Experiments with building clocks

A journal of Ribbonfarm's ongoing voyage into Web3, NFTs, DAOs and such

A blogchain of terms I try to define to my taste. Either idiosyncratic definitions of common terms, or straightforward definitions of neologisms.

Name inspired by Hithchiker's Guide joke about most work being done by random people while leaders are out to lunch. Notes on an approach to leadership that works for a post-organizational context of collectives, open ecosystems, exit > voice, guilds, squads and such. Covering ideas such as BDFxing.

An exploration of futures containing mansions, and ways to bring them about.

Tracking the progress of my fellowship project at the Berggruen Institute.

A short series of semi-satirical pop science articles, called "Here's why we don't understand". The science presented is mostly accurate.

Roundups of links and readings

Fun in the ribbonfarm lab

A series by Renee DiResta on technology in politics, influence, propaganda, and such.

A world-building series for the Zemser universe, introduced in the story Liminal Explorer of the Adjacent Possible.