From Cannons to Chronometers to Factories
A Transmission Hypothesis for the French Precision Revolution and Its American Transformation
Tech
Contraptions.
Janky, wobbly models of everything from philosophy to technology and everything in-between.
Recent essays
30 of 40Time, Enlightenment and Romanticism Between Modernity and Divergence
World Machines learnings from recent book club readings
Commodity Intelligence
The seductiveness of “general intelligence” is rooted in a costly category error
Many Act 2 Games are Afoot
Protocol Institute, Long Now Labs, Strange Rules art show, vgr_zirp update, World Machines, TensTorrent
Capital Must Seek Delight
Too few people are experiencing the delights and serendipity of AI, causing capital misallocation
Ribbonfarm Resurrected
As a museum blog with an AI curator that is
Getting Gooier
How AI is transforming humans
AI in World Machine Theory
The telos of AI is to create liveness at planetary scale
Writing Liveness
The message of the medium of generated text is liveness
Intentions have a surprising amount of detail
Auteur managerialism, the myth of one-shotting, and the chindogufication of engineering
On Cooling America Out
We've been the marks of our own long cons, all the way up
The World Machines Project
Yes, we're doing this nonfiction extended universe dammit
Rediscovering Irony
Counterprogramming cancerous sincerity and the cult of authenticity with AI assistance
Contraption Mansion
An old bit becomes a new it
Archival Selves
What happens when you pay off all your intention debts?
The Divergence Machine II
Progress as a non-stationary argument
Protocolized Writing Workshop
Your chance to race to the frontier of modern AI-forward writing and publishing
vgr: The Twitter Years (2007-22)
I made my twitter into a very nice online book
New Ferality
Seeking new ways of being wild in new nature
Engineering Liveness
New Nature in the Gramsci Gap
Robot Auras
Robotics-native affect beyond googly eyes and human emotions
New Nature
Contours of can’t-be-evil futures
Lost in Bugspace
The temporality of implementation uncertainty in software
The Divergence Machine
Introducing the 2026 Book Club theme
The Modernity Machine III
Completion, Saturation, and Phase Transition
2025 Book Club Hangout (Transcript)
Reflecting on a year of reading about the emergence of modernity, 1200-1600
Revenge of the Dilettantes
Book club and AI adventures, age of bespokeness, study groups, new rules of engagement
Bucket Art
In which I launch a career as a Serious Artist™
Configurancy
Doing Heideggerianism without the baggage of Care/Sorge
What if bigger models, like bigger stars, fail faster?
A different way to think about the “too big to fail” take about OpenAI