Ribbonfarm is Retiring

After several years of keeping it going in semi-retired, keep-the-lights-on (KTLO) mode, I’ve decided to officially fully retire this blog. The ribbonfarm.com domain and all links will remain active, but there will be no new content after November 13th, 2024, which happens to be my 50th birthday. There will be one final roundup post before then, and perhaps a shortish epitaph post. And the main page will switch to a static landing page. But after that date, this will effectively be a museum site.

I’m not personally retiring of course (I neither want to, nor can I afford to), but this WordPress blog is. Sometime in the next few months, I’ll figure out how to move it to a lower-cost archival hosting model, probably as a static non-WordPress site, simplify the design as befits a retiree, and put up some sort of museum-like landing page with self-guided tour maps, a little museum shop selling books, directions to the service entrance for AI scraper-bots, and so on. If you get your updates via the Mailchimp newsletter, that will be shutting down sometime in the next few weeks. So if you’d like to continue hearing from me, sign up for my substack (fair warning: It’s not a blog, and both the contents and style are distinctly different from what you’ve been used to here).

But in the meantime, in what is going to be the last significant post on here, let’s look back on what has been a 17-year journey.

It’s been 17 eventful years, and this blog has been my home online through some very interesting times, both for me personally and for the world, but it feels like the time is finally just right for it to retreat gracefully to the shadows. Not too early, not too late.

There is no specific reason to retire the blog right now. While the recent minor civil war in the WordPress ecosystem (if you don’t know about it, you probably don’t need to) felt like the portent I was unconsciously waiting for, this decision has been brewing for a couple of years now.

***

I do think that the end really is here for the blogosphere though. This time it really is different. I’ve weathered many ups and downs in the blogosphere over my 17 years in it, but now it feels like the end of the blogging era. And what has emerged to take its place is not the blogosphere (and really shouldn’t try to be), even though parts of it have tried to claim the word.

I don’t think there is any single heir to the blog, or to the public social media landscape it dominated, anymore than there was a single heir to the Roman empire when it collapsed. And this is as things should be. Emerging media should emerge into their own identities, not attempt to perpetuate the legacies of sundowning media, or fight over baggage. And of course, many architectural elements of the blog will live on in newer media, just as many patterns we live with today originated in the Roman empire. Chronological feeds, and RSS-like protocols are part of our collective technological vocabulary. So at least in a technological sense, nothing is dying per se. But in a cultural sense, we are definitely witnessing the end of an era.

But there’s no denying that the legacy we’re talking about is a powerful one that will cast a long shadow. The cultural reign of the blog, roughly 2000-20 or so, coincided with the second full chapter of the internet. Far more than aggregators, photo-sharing services, or social feeds, the blog was “Web 2.0.” Blogs didn’t produce the most Web 2.0 bytes, but they produced the most significant ones.

Perhaps it’s my blogocentric conceit, but it feels like the active lifespan of ribbonfarm in particular, 2007-24, coincides rather neatly with a very well-defined chapter in the grand narrative of civilization itself, with the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the 2024 US Presidential election serving as neat bookends. Whatever the outcome of the election, when this blog officially retires on November 13, we’ll be in some sort of new era. An era blogs helped usher in, but won’t be a part of.

Conceit or not, it’s hard for me to see the story of ribbonfarm as merely my story, or even merely the marginal story of the few dozens of contributors, or of the little subculture of a few hundreds that coalesced around it for the better part of a decade. The story of ribbonfarm has been, in a small one-of-a-million threads way, the story of civilization itself, through the 2007-24 period.

That thought feels nice, in the way I imagine carving my initials onto an ancient monument might feel nice. VENKAT WAS HERE. Actually, I kinda did that, with a friend’s help.

I’d argue that the blogosphere, and the public social media landscape, represented the spirit of this civilizational chapter in a much truer way than old media. Through this period, old media strongholds seemed increasingly like grand and sad old ruins of the past, falling into ever-greater dereliction. While they still exerted a certain baleful influence over the cultural landscape, there was something dead about the gaze of old media on the new world. But public social media… it was alive. Its gaze on the new world was not just lively, it was constitutive. It helped make the world it observed. It was where the real action was. Even the dying old media types knew it, as they increasingly turned to new media not just for informational sustenance, self-disruption ideas, and talent, but for what we might call a sort of life-energy. Journalists didn’t just trawl the old Twitter for stories to print on dead trees. They tapped into it like it was a life-giving elixir they needed to stay spiritually alive. The came for the leads and personalities, stayed for the elan vital. They’ll deny it furiously if you ask of course. They’re a stuffy lot. Nice, but stuffy. And snobby. They’ll pretend it was access to the corridors of power that was keeping them alive all this time. It wasn’t. It was us.

For a couple of decades, public social media, with blogs serving as a sort of network of fortresses scattered across that feudal landscape, was where the world happened. A public, grand sort of world. It wreaked havoc too of course, but a grand sort of havoc. The maturing cozyweb phase we’re in right now, while it has its own intimate charms, to be found in the warren of discords, slacks, and group DMs we all inhabit these days, lacks the raw grandeur of the public social media era.

Here on ribbonfarm, the era unfolded as a three-act story. The core 2012-2019 period, when Refactor Camp was an active event, is a good proxy for the “subcultural” phase of ribbonfarm. During those years, I had the social energy both to curate a lot of writing by others, and events of various sorts. I also tweeted up a storm. But perhaps more importantly, the zeitgeist itself had the right kind of energy to respond in a lively way to such curation. The periods before and after, 2007-12, and 2019-24 were more personal eras, defined by my own interests.

If you’ve been a long-time reader, you know that this three-act story corresponds roughly to my rather grandiose scheme of “Ages” for periodizing the ribbonfarm archives. The three ages of ribbonfarm (the Rust Age (2007-12), the Snowflake Age (2013-18), and the Charnel Age (2019-24)) constitute a story that’s perhaps 10% about me personally, perhaps 20% about the various intersecting milieus that gave rise to the short-lived subculture of the second act, and 70% about the world at large.

Throughout the life of this blog, an old world was dying, and a new world was struggling to be born. And this blog channeled the energy of that ongoing transformation for lulz and profit. Gramsci would have approved.

I have joked to friends, building on a very clever Drew Austin (an early ribbonfarm contributor) observation, that the entire three-age ribbonfarm story was a product of low interest rates. This blog was sponsored by ZIRP. The future historians who dive into these archives for archaeological research will likely be economic rather than cultural historians, trying to reconstruct the play-by-play impact of ZIRP. Many of the big hits of this blog, such as The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial, and The Locust Economy (a forgotten hit from 2013) had ZIRPy subtexts.

This is not an entirely flippant observation. The blog in its heyday was a product of open-source software, cheap hosting, and perhaps most importantly, essentially free global distribution. First through RSS, then through Twitter. This free distribution was in turn an artifact of cheap venture capital. It began to collapse when interest rates began to rise, forcing distribution deals with devils upon all of us, which only the most desperate and ambitious were willing to take. The rest of us began retreating to the cozyweb rather than pay up to the protection rackeeters who began taking over public distribution channels starting around 2017, culminating in Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in 2022.

***

The young cozyweb era currently taking shape and replacing public social media is equally a product of higher interest rates and paid distribution, but is at least not a distribution-channel protection racket.

I coined the term cozyweb in 2019 (appropriately enough in my substack, rather than here), which is around when it was born. It was perhaps my last major meme. Equally appropriately, that essay has ended up part of a rather cozy little book from a cozy little publishing startup.

The cozyweb anchors an era that’s threatening to be as long-lived as the public social media era, so it might last till 2035 or so. In fact, I don’t think we’ll see really low/zero/negative interest rates again in my lifetime. Which means we may not see anything like the blogosphere or the public social media era either.

It’s worth noting that the cozyweb is already 5 years old. Maybe I should start a new periodization. I need a label for my own first age in the cozyweb, 2019-24. I ported over my old Breaking Smart list into what is now my main substack in 2019, started and finished the short-run Art of Gig newsletter as another substack, helped found the cozy Yak Collective Discord community, got myself a 5-year Roam subscription, and (much to the dismay of some of you), went crypto-bro (crypto is a very cozyweb type part of the internet).

There have been structural signs of all this of course, and many of my tactical moves over the past few years, which I thought of in the moment as random acts of creative experimentation, were in hindsight preparations for an exit from both the blogosphere and the public social media landscape.

A few examples.

For example, in 2019, I deliberately shifted gears to writing what I’ve called blogchains, over stand-alone posts. These eschew theatricality and engagement farming, and adopt an intimate rhetorical style better suited to the cozyweb. They do not work well with blogs either structurally or thematically. They are really closer cousins to a much older medium: The monograph.

As another example, in 2020, I consciously stopped trying to write “viral hit” type posts, and even bent over backwards to try and write anti-viral posts. The Internet of Beefs, which I wrote in January 2020, was not just my last viral post, it was my last viral-intent post. I also kinda consciously intended it to serve as a sort of epitaph for the public social media era, which by that time I had come to see as being in irreversible decline.

Events since then have only strongly confirmed those early premonitions. Virality as such, is mostly dead as a cultural phenomenon in long-form writing. When it occurs these days, it feels somehow deadening and cheap.

The cozyweb zeitgeist favors a deeper, quieter sort of writerly ambition, with classier, more high-minded aspirations. Where the viral blog post of the last decade was something of a loud public-park pop-music performance, good 2024 longform feels more like chamber music performed for exclusive invite-only audiences. One under-appreciated reason for Substack’s success at taking over some of the blogosphere’s role is that it’s conducive to this chamber-music style of writing. One of my current operating theories is that this style is in fact the culturally load-bearing part of Substack, even though most of the attention is on high-profile refugees from old media. The proprietors of the platform don’t quite appreciate the chamber music scenes they harbor, which is one of the reasons I’m not convinced the platform will last.

I don’t read any of the old-media refugee substacks, but I do read a lot of chamber-music style substacks. And one of the reasons I don’t quite feel at home on Substack is that while I like reading the chamber-music style stuff, I don’t really do it well myself. I’m too much of a careless shitposter, and the chamber music style calls for a certain earnestness of approach. It calls for a certain amount of self-conscious gravitas (which can easily turn into humorless self-importance, the main failure mode on Substack; one that gives it decided LinkedIn overtones).

This sense of anxiously performed gravitas is perhaps the governing vibe of Substack. They’re sincerely trying to make meaning over there. We here in the blogosphere were just having fun watching the world burn for a couple of fiery decades. A kind of psychotic, nihilistic humor was the governing vibe of the blogosphere at its best. So far I haven’t seen anything like it on Substack. I miss it of course, but one must move on with the times.

On Substack, the mere prospect of making money reliably (something the blogosphere was spectacularly shitty at, and remains so in its dotage) seems to get people to adopt a more respectable demeanor, and second-guess the shitposting instincts that would have served them well in the blogosphere at its peak. The blogosphere didn’t so much move to Substack as get gentrified by it, much as they’d like you to believe it did. And many of us transplanted bloggers got a shave and haircut, put on a suit, and went to work there, shoulder-to-shoulder with the old media types we once maintained ritual rivalries with, but are now increasingly indistinguishable from.

The rest of them, that is. Not me of course. I’m only wearing the Substack Suit ironically. Why can’t anyone see I’m only wearing the Substack Suit ironically!

But kidding aside, this is fine (and not in a burning-house dog gif sense). Mediums should grow into their own true natures. And if the message of the Substack medium (and subscription newsletters generally… there’s a handful of other contenders) is one of earnestness and gravitas, so be it. Let it get good at it, just as the blogosphere got good at shitposting. Really good.

Perhaps the most revealing example. Sometime around late 2021, thanks to my interests shifting steadily towards what I might call studious interests in things like storytelling, fermi estimation, and tinkering in my pandemic-born lab, my posting here began taking on the tenor of a semi-private notebook. Ribbonfarm began to resemble my private Roam notebooks more than its own past as a slovenly, loud, meme-making, virality-chasing, content junkyard. And it’s no accident that the notebook/digital garden type of medium began to emerge around 2019. A vast amount of good writing these days is happening entirely in private. A tiny fraction is shared (Sarah Constantin, a long-time friend of this blog, has a public Roam for example), and a slightly larger fraction (including a lot of my own Roam content) is likely intended for eventual public sharing in some form. But much of the notebooking universe will remain private forever. It is interesting that a kind of semi-public notebooking is how my blogging story is wrapping up. A kind of semi-public notebooking is a good description of the original vibe of blogs, circa 2002-09.

But we’ve moved on to a deeper kind of notebooking now (deeper in the sense of much more richly and densely hyperlinked internally). A much deeper kind than blogs can sustain. Deep notebooking and content gardening too, aren’t blogging — and shouldn’t try to be. That would be selling that new medium short.

Fourth and final example: I quit actively posting on Twitter when Musk took over. Not directly related to the ribbonfarm story, but a key adjacent subplot. In the moment, it felt like a tactical reaction to the (political and cultural) writing that was clearly on the wall, and I’m glad I quit when I did. But in hindsight, the Muskening was not an independent story. It was just another chapter in the larger story of the rise and fall of the blogosphere and public social media.

Anyhow, where to next?

***

Much of the appropriate subset of my nonfiction writing, of course, has already migrated to my substack, which is already five years old (time flies, huh?), but still doesn’t quite feel like home, and I suspect never will. At least not in the way this blog has felt.

Mostly what I write there has to do with technology trends and serialized book-length projects. There’s not much left here that’s suitable for substacking. It’s mostly stuff that does not look good when it puts on a suit, so I probably won’t try to put it there.

These remaining active threads on this blog — narrative theory, fiction experiments, mediocrity musings, outtakes from my lab tinkering — don’t fit Substack and have never quite fit the blog medium either. They need transplanting to media where they can flourish. Lab tinkering really belongs in video, and in cozy conversations with small groups of co-conspirators, such as I’ve been able to find via the Yak Collective (also already 4 years old). Fiction really does not like the reverse-chronological tendency of the blog, and wants to create its own escaped reality, complete with its own temporality, in pre-temporal media spaces. I’m not yet sure where to take my fiction experiments. I suspect I’ll be parking ongoing efforts either in Roam or in novella-length ebook drafts. A few non-fiction threads — narrative theory, mediocrity — will likely eventually turn into monograph-style ebooks/books. They’re kinda done, really. They just need a round of editing and packaging.

That leaves a few loose ends which don’t really belong anywhere in the future at all. They feel like increasingly fussy footnotes, not just to my own archives here, but to the blogging era itself. The impulse to post here now feels like an archival impulse. An impulse to tend to the needs of a gradually settling and cooling past, rather than the needs of a restless and warming future. Garbage collector janitorial work in a memory palace where the temperature is dropping slowly to cold-storage levels.

I’ll be redirecting the energy fueling the memory-curation impulse towards gradually putting together a decent collection of book-length volumes from the archives. And perhaps a fine-tuned LLM that can serve as a ghostly era-bound after-image of myself too. And maybe a glossary and a set of footnotes too, why not. With my twitter archives (also sitting around) thrown in for good measure. They belong spiritually with this blog.

I look forward to chatting with the Ghost of Ribbonfarm+vgr-on-twitter in the metaverse, whenever that option is available and cheap enough to exercise. For now, I’m starting out on this memory curation project by working on a book of key posts spanning the entire life of the blog. A selection I hope will tell at least my subplot of the larger story this blog belongs to. Taxidermy-ing the twitter archives (particularly the threads, not so much the conversations) into a suitably mummified form is a tougher challenge I haven’t yet figured out.

But the memory curation is, to be frank, a backburner priority. Retiring this blog is a poignant moment for me, but I’m fundamentally a future-oriented guy.

These half-assed retirement plans still leave an important function of this blog unaccounted for: As the default outlet for all my random impulses for nearly two decades. What I’ve called my salt-seeking tendencies. Without this blog serving as a sort of /etc folder, I will be sort of cognitively homeless after November 13, since such impulses are probably my most primal ones. It might sound silly, but “where will I put my random 2x2s now” is a real and serious question for me.

I have no idea where I’m going to put my random hare-brained theories, 2x2s, crappy maps, bad cartoons, and so on. Substack and post-Twitter protocol media don’t feel right. Neither does a private notebook. There’s a decidedly social element to that kind of /etc salt-seeking thinking. It thrives best when embedded in global and public distributional media as shitposts, ready to trigger Cunningham’s Law dynamics (“the easiest way to get the right answer is to post a wrong answer”). It struggles along in freshwater publishing media like books and newsletters. And it wilts entirely in private media like notebooks. A bathtub is no place for ideas that yearn for the ocean. There’s no fun or dopamine in making a 2×2 if you can’t immediately share it, as publicly as possible. If you have to put it in a suit to send out via substack, or limit it to niche cozy media, or pay Elon to put it out in the post-apocalyptic sewage stream that is “public” social media, it doesn’t feel quite right.

I’m sure having no outlet for this core part of my thinking will drive me nuts, but that’s a good problem to have. You have to harbor a certain inner restlessness if you want to be a good homeless nomad. Maybe I’ll start putting certain thoughts down on paper, and tossing them into the ocean in plastic bottles. Luckily I live by the Pacific Ocean, the biggest tank of saltwater around. And I’m told they just cleaned up the garbage gyre, so we can start making a new one, and killing a whole new generation of turtles.

Speaking of nomadism, a curious inversion is underway in my life. I’ve been digitally at home here on ribbonfarm for 17 years, but a nomad in my physical life, having lived in 23 apartments in 10 cities over the last 27 years. If my cunning plans work out, that will flip. I’ll be digitally homeless once more (as I was 2000-2007), but hopefully manage to buy a house mansion within the next year if this damn housing market thaws soon. Ideally in the Seattle area. We’ll see.

As I said, I’ll post a final roundup sometime in the next month, and perhaps some sort of final epitaph post on the 13th itself (rather appropriately, I’ll be in Thailand that week, a country that will likely go down in history as a sort of blogger Mecca during the heyday of public social media, when blogosaurs ruled the Earth).

In the meantime, thanks for coming along with me on this long journey, and hope to see you at my rental apartment on Substack. I’m somewhat active in the Notes section there, and also on Farcaster. I’m on Bluesky too, but not very active there (something isn’t quite working for me there).