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Venkatesh Rao on Thoughtfluence

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Venkatesh Rao

Essayist at Ribbonfarm known for incisive, idiosyncratic takes on tech, organizations, and culture.

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Books, films, shows, and podcasts they point to — tap a source to read the passage.

Books · 1

book

When We Cease to Understand the World

Commodity IntelligenceVR

Context

Venkatesh Rao uses the book to establish the first stage of the LBB arc regarding the insanity-inducing effects of new knowledge.

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Venkatesh Rao4mo

Commodity Intelligence

The seductiveness of “general intelligence” is rooted in a costly category error

Venkatesh Rao4mo

Many Act 2 Games are Afoot

Protocol Institute, Long Now Labs, Strange Rules art show, vgr_zirp update, World Machines, TensTorrent

Venkatesh Rao5mo

Capital Must Seek Delight

Too few people are experiencing the delights and serendipity of AI, causing capital misallocation

Venkatesh Rao5mo

Ribbonfarm Resurrected

As a museum blog with an AI curator that is

Venkatesh Rao5mo

Getting Gooier

How AI is transforming humans

Venkatesh Rao5mo

AI in World Machine Theory

The telos of AI is to create liveness at planetary scale

Venkatesh Rao6mo

Writing Liveness

The message of the medium of generated text is liveness

Venkatesh Rao6mo

Intentions have a surprising amount of detail

Auteur managerialism, the myth of one-shotting, and the chindogufication of engineering

Venkatesh Rao6mo

On Cooling America Out

We've been the marks of our own long cons, all the way up

Venkatesh Rao6mo

The World Machines Project

Yes, we're doing this nonfiction extended universe dammit

Venkatesh Rao6mo

Rediscovering Irony

Counterprogramming cancerous sincerity and the cult of authenticity with AI assistance

Venkatesh Rao7mo

Contraption Mansion

An old bit becomes a new it

Venkatesh Rao7mo

Archival Selves

What happens when you pay off all your intention debts?

Venkatesh Rao7mo

The Divergence Machine II

Progress as a non-stationary argument

Venkatesh Rao8mo

Protocolized Writing Workshop

Your chance to race to the frontier of modern AI-forward writing and publishing

Venkatesh Rao8mo

vgr: The Twitter Years (2007-22)

I made my twitter into a very nice online book

Venkatesh Rao8mo

New Ferality

Seeking new ways of being wild in new nature

Venkatesh Rao8mo

Engineering Liveness

New Nature in the Gramsci Gap

Venkatesh Rao8mo

Robot Auras

Robotics-native affect beyond googly eyes and human emotions

Venkatesh Rao9mo

New Nature

Contours of can’t-be-evil futures

Venkatesh Rao9mo

Lost in Bugspace

The temporality of implementation uncertainty in software

Venkatesh Rao9mo

The Divergence Machine

Introducing the 2026 Book Club theme

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