History
Ribbonfarm was a blog by Venkatesh Rao, active from 2007 to 2024, with contributions from dozens of guest writers. It began as a personal experiment in refactored perception and grew into an extended conversation about systems thinking, strategy, culture, and the nature of modernity. This page documents what it was and how it evolved.
Timeline
Major milestones across seventeen years.
- July 2007
Venkat starts ribbonfarm as a crude WordPress blog, hosted on Dreamhost.
- October 2009
The Gervais Principle published and slashdotted — the post that put Ribbonfarm on the map.
- July 2010
"A Big Little Idea Called Legibility" published.
- March 2011
Venkat quits Xerox to go free-agent Tempo published
- March 2012
Refactor Camp 2012, San Francisco Zoo — Generativity & Captivity
- March 2013
Refactor Camp 2013, San Francisco Zoo — Jailbreaking the Bay Area
- September 2013
Be Slightly Evil and The Gervais Principle published as ebooks.
- March 2014
Refactor Camp 2014, Computer History Museum, Mountain View — Computing & Culture
- July 2014
Ribbonfarm migrates to WPEngine after a painful bot infection on Dreamhost.
- January 2015
Sarah Perry joins as a contributing editor
- March 2015
Refactor Camp 2015, Plethora, San Francisco — Narrative
- July 2016
Refactor Camp 2016 — Weird Political Economy (first online-only edition, via Zoom)
- August 2017
Four Rust Age ebook collections published (edited by Jordan Peacock).
- August 2017
"The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial" goes viral.
- May 2018
Refactor Camp 2018, GasPedal Ranch, Austin TX — Cryptoeconomics & Blockchain Weirding
- June 2019
Refactor Camp 2019, Philosophie, Santa Monica — Escaping Reality (~120 attendees)
- January 2020
"The Internet of Beefs" published, the last viral hit
- November 2024
Ribbonfarm retires after 17 years and 1,133 posts.
- April 2026
ribbonfarm.com relaunched as a permanent static archive.
Refactor Camp
Refactor Camp was an annual unconference held 2012–2019 (no 2017 edition). Full history, photos, and YouTube archive on the Refactor Camp page.
Design History
Twenty-two Wayback Machine snapshots showing how the site looked from launch to retirement.
Logo History
Eight eras of the Ribbonfarm masthead, 2007–2022, with annotations.
Maps
Two visual atlases of Ribbonfarm's ideas and themes, drawn by Venkat (2012) and Grace Witherell (2015, revised in 2016), from different eras.
2016 map — a comprehensive visual atlas. A narrated video walkthrough is on YouTube.
2012 map (Rust Age) — an earlier version covering the 2007–2012 era.
The Name
Where the name "Ribbonfarm" comes from.
The name refers to the ribbon farms of 18th-century Detroit — strips of land 2–3 miles long, each with 200–300 yards of frontage along the Detroit River, which the French governor used to resolve water disputes. It was a metaphor for a blog trying to get a thin slice of attention from the great river of eyeballs that is the web. Below is an 1818 map of Detroit showing the ribbon farms (courtesy Detroit Public Library).
Taglines
The phrases that defined each era of the blog.
2007–19: Experiments in refactored perception. — A geek joke: changing how you see the world by trying to rewire the software inside your head through writing.
2019–24: Constructions in magical thinking. — Disciplined solipsism and escapism, the mode that carried the blog through its final chapter before retirement.