About Venkatesh Rao

I am considering adopting two rules for projects that I think are very promising for 40+ lifestyles.

1. No new top-level projects (TLPs) (twitter thread)
2. Ten-year commitments to projects or no deal (twitter thread)

I don’t mean practically necessary projects like doing something to earn money. I mean non-necessary life projects like writing a blog, or a maker project.

Shitposting and idle dabbling are still allowed so long as they don’t grow into new TLPs. They can grow into subprojects of existing TLPs, but even then I need to make a ten-year commitment or not do them at all. There’s a bunch of ambiguity here, around what’s a project versus the contents of one (is a new blogchain a subproject or just a thread of content for the overall blogging project?), but set that aside for now.

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Yesterday, I was testing a new bench power supply I just bought. I tested it with a multimeter, then connected it up to a motor, to make it go brrr for fun. It’s the sort of thing I haven’t done since grad school, decades ago.

As I was tinkering, I was idly wondering about whether there was any fodder for blog posts in what I was up to. I don’t mean Maker posts. A lot of people write about Maker stuff, and do it a lot better than I ever could. I mean riffs on Life, the Universe, and Everything inspired by tinkering with a new power supply.

Most of my writing to date has been inspired by things like working in an office, consulting, watching TV and of course, reading words written by others. That stuff is good fodder for riffs on Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Though I’m having a lot of fun rediscovering engineering with a middle-aged mind, I’ve found it surprisingly difficult to mine tinkering for insights on Life, the Universe, and Everything. Tinkering In, Words Out, TIWO, is a tougher transformation than SIWO: Symbols In, Words Out. Which is why it’s an interesting challenge.

Possibly it’s just me getting used to once again looking at the world through a long unused lens, but I think there’s more to it. There seems to be some sort of mutual inhibition function between tinkering with ideas with words and tinkering with stuff with atoms. Digital bits, as in programming, are somewhere in between.

While tinkering, you’re thinking a lot of mostly nonverbal thoughts. In this case, I was wondering about what the floating ground terminal was for, noticing how the sound of the motor was changing pitch at different voltages, observing the voltage deadzone between the motor starting/stopping as you turn the voltage up/down, thinking of ways to measure rpm and torque easily, and so on.

Depending on how you think about it, there’s either nothing to say about this sort of mundane tinkering stream of consciousness, far from Archimedean eureka moments, or there’s enough to merit several thousand words of prose. And I don’t mean how-to and instruction manual type stuff.

You could, for instance, write about the edifying, soul-uplifting effects of working with your hands. You could write satire about cliche mid-life crisis activities like tinkering in a home workshop, triggered by too much time spent in the world of symbols. You could wax philosophical about materiality, and sensory-experiential mindsets. You could write some poignant poetry about the smell of multimeters in the morning.

And of course, you could write about the actual activity itself, like the not-in-textbooks metaphysical subtleties lurking beneath apparently well-understood things like voltage and current. That is the sort of thing Brian Skinner has been blogging about on here lately.

But the thing is, whatever you think you might want to say, you have to stop the physical tinkering and start the verbal tinkering. You have to switch context from subsymbolic to symbolic ways of experiencing the world.

Physical activity radiates plenty of cues from which verbalized thought can begin, but to actually follow a verbal train of thought you have to stop the physical stream of activity, and think with symbols again. The context-switching is much more drastic than between two symbolic-domain activities.

I suspect the blue-collar/white-collar divide is about more than pre-modern class boundaries being perpetuated by industrial forms of organization. The prototypical activities involve different sorts of cognition.

Physical tinkering is basically 5-sense environment scanning at a very high bitrate driving tactile action that’s much more complex than producing symbol streams, aka typing. The literal Fingerspitzengefühl — finger-tips feeling — is more complex and less available to ensnare with words. And if you force it, either the words will suffer, or the skill will.

While tinkering, you’re logging a lot of information, and even though most of it is very low-salience, processing it is fundamentally different than working with streams of symbols. Symbol tinkering is very low bitrate, but the acrobatics it can sustain are much more complex. Physical tinkering is a Big Data computation for the human brain, while symbolic tinkering is ordinary computation. Reading and writing of course is mostly symbolic. Writing about social stuff and interactions with other people is also mostly symbolic, though of course there’s a world of non-verbal detail to observe if you want to.

Programming is somewhere in between subsymbolic and symbolic tinkering, and is harder to turn into Life, the Universe, and Everything fodder than either. Maybe that’s why movies and TV shows have struggled the most with portraying lives lived amid code.

2021 is turning out to be a slow year getting off the ground here on ribbonfarm. A quick-and-dirty theory I made up and began testing last year about a kind of play-to-production pipeline for my writing isn’t quite working out:

• Twitter for play-level shitposting and transient lightning-rod stuff
• Ribbonfarm for experimental and R&D writing with no QA (open)
• Breaking Smart and Art of Gig for production-grade stuff with a bit of QA (paywalled)

Ribbonfarm is in a way getting starved of low-hanging fruit to work with as raw material.

On the one hand, if it’s early enough, I shitpost on Twitter about it, often making what I now refer to as threadthulhus — messy intertwingled threads that QT and reference each other in weird ways like a bad Cthulhu dream, exploring a big topic with an utter lack of discipline.

These are not easy to clean up and serialize into essays, so I only do it when the idea feels extra strong, like the Internet of Beefs post which started life as a threadthulhu. But often, the very act of letting something sprawl into a threadthulhu precludes it ever become a cleaned-up essay. You have to switch gears early enough to do that, or it becomes impossible.

On the other hand, if it’s old-style enough (as in, a style I developed here 5+ years ago), it ends up in the newsletters. The subscription mode of the two newsletters keeps me on my toes on the production end, and even when it’s not fun, I’ve disciplined myself to keep writing. And because it is usually very familiar topics, and styles I’ve been honing for a decade, I can produce that kind of content even when I’m not feeling at the top of my game. It’s also stuff that I feel kinda doesn’t deserve a place on ribbonfarm anymore (which is a weird kind of self-snobbery, since I expect people to pay for it) because it is not bold enough in its intentions. It’s safe stuff for me personally. The risk of writing a truly bad newsletter are low because I don’t take many risks with newsletters.

Ribbonfarm is where I’ve always done stuff where I don’t want to be held to others’ expectations (which comes with taking money), but do have my own expectations. The expectations I have of myself here are the opposite of the QA type expectations I have of myself with newsletters and books. I don’t care about consistent quality or thematic coherence. But I do expect stuff I write here to be fun to write, break new ground thematically, and be at least a little technically challenging in writing terms, forcing me to develop new tricks or skills to execute on an idea (I’m almost never methodologically experimental in the newsletters).

This experimental quality means only a small fraction of readers will have the patience to ignore the failed experiments and wait for the experiments that work. It also means it would be kinda unfair to charge for it, since there are no implied promises.

Hey, there’s a 2×2!

The thing that’s making it hard this year is that the two kinds of writing I want to experiment with this year — fiction and maker projects — both involve a lot of upfront design and planning.

For the former, stories have to have more structural work and plotting up front (even if you are a pantser like me, and approach fiction as an improv activity, it still involves way more planning than nonfiction).

For the latter, well, you have to actually design and/or build stuff offstage and take photos to talk about, as in my clockmaking project posts. Otherwise you’re vaping rather than making.

In both cases, you need more time, and longer-range planning. You can’t just make shit up in a day, which creates a problem.

Historically, 90% of the posts on ribbonfarm were conceived and written in a single day — those that took longer did so simply because they were long (~4-5k finished words per day is my physical limit), not because I was planning them. I’ve almost never done preparation, outlining, note-taking etc. I wake up with an idea, and if I have the energy, I write for 4-14 hours, and I have a post. Done.

Lately of course, my energy has been closer to the 4-hour end than the 14-hour end, which is one of the reasons I shifted to the blogchain model. I simply don’t have the physical energy to do the 14-hour–day heavy lifts anymore that fueled this blog in the early years. Worsening middle-aged eyesight and stiffening joints aren’t helping either. I have to pace myself now, and break up writing sessions with physical activity to stay sane and avoid physical pain. Working on stuff that takes more planning and preparation fits better with my current energy patterns in theory, but clearly I’m having some startup troubles.

Anyhow, this is obviously an excuse-post for why more exciting things haven’t been happening here this year, given we’re already into February. The good news is, I’m working it out, and figuring out workflows and tooling and mechanisms to actually write the fiction and maker posts I am itching to write. It’s just taking longer than I expected to retool the factory.