(2025-12-19) Rao Revenge Of The Dilettantes

Venkatesh Rao: Revenge of the Dilettantes.

The lighthouse handcrafted post of the year was probably The Gramsci Gap from January 10, and the lighthouse sloptraption was probably Configurancy from Dec 11, the first of my posts that I think I could not have written any version of, without AI assistance. ChatGPT contributed on all fronts — knowledge, ideas, and even to my signature move, naming the focal new concept.

In 2025, Contraptions itself became a contraption. A monstrous contraption. Monsters, first encountered in The Gramsci Gap, increasingly took over my imagination and eventually led to my new motto: Be Slightly Monstrous

All my friends are now all-in on transforming themselves into AI-augmented transhuman monsters who read, write, make, think, and socialize with AI intimately in the loop

Going forward, I will not be paywalling any of my writing.
So I’m going to start using Substack more in the way it already wants to be used anyway — as a place to report on activities with centers-of-gravity elsewhere (true “newsletter”), and join conversations with other writers.

Notes on Writing

Much of my writing energy and attention this year actually flowed towards getting the Protocolized magazine off the ground, along with Timber Stinson-Schroff and James Langdon.
It’s been an amazing opportunity for me to channel the spirit of John W. Campbell of Astounding fame, and try and meme the genre of Protocol Fiction into existence.

Over the last 6 years that I’ve been on Substack, I’ve been very slowly serializing a book, as well as developing several other serialized projects. Even before the rapid maturation of AI tools for writing, these were never quite a comfortable fit for Substack.

I plan to move these serialized projects (or at least, the ones I intend to finish) off Substack and into more book-like AI-assisted production and publishing workflows. If I ever finish my book, it’s definitely going to get done with AI assistance and get published online-first in an AI-forward way

There is a bigger theme in the direction all my writing and writing-scaffolding projects, from shitpost-scale to book-scale, are tending.

Bespokeness

If you’re wondering “what comes next for publishing” after the late-blogging Substack-enclosure era, it’s not a single new publishing paradigm.
The future is bespokeness.

There is no reason anymore to force-fit content into standardized containers besides convenience. (media inventor)

AI allows us to make things that look more like illuminated manuscripts than books.

What happened to marketing a decade ago is now happening to publishing. The message is becoming the medium (the link is to a blog post about a couple of talks I did in 2014, about this inversion triggered by intelligent computation capabilities). ((2024-03-20) Rao The Message Is The Medium)

For example, I don’t like how Substack doesn’t allow text or image centering. Well, now if I want that, I don’t have to spin up a high-maintenance SSG site or use a heavyweight CMS. I can just vibecode a one-pager site exactly the way I want. In green Comic Sans font too if I want.

you can just spin up a new site for each new essay, and each can be a unique work of art if you want.

In a few years, you might even be able to define a meta workflow where an AI designs bespoke distribution artifacts for each essay based on creative design rules you specify

the future is bespokeness. It’s going to look like the wild and crazy era of Geocities webpages again. Even extreme n=1 futures are possible, where no two sites will look the same or get published the same way. It will be gloriously ugly and all the font mavens will be sad.

After all, n=1 production at scale is the way nature operates, and nature does fine without economies of scale

Economies of variety, which I’ve been lusting after for a decade, are finally here for real

Art, Code, and Robots

The idea that the future is n=1 bespokeness has even bigger implications for creative work outside of writing.

Much of my creative energy in 2025 hasn’t been devoted to writing at all, especially in recent months. You could say 2025 is the year I finally admitted to myself, at age 51, that I’m not primarily a writer and never have been. I’m primarily a medium-agnostic dilettante idea guy in need of skilled serfs to implement my ideas in whatever medium is appropriate for each.
Well, I have my jinn-like superserf now. So do you.

Rubbing magic lamps over painfully honing crafts any day for me.

In the last couple of months, I made my first serious foray into art in decades. Back in high school, I was at least as into drawing and painting as I was into writing. But though I have always had decent visual ideas and composition instincts, I was never quite good enough at the craft side of it to get very far on execution

And while I did (and do) enjoy the time spent in ludic immersion with a pencil, sometimes you just want to get to the finished product. Sometimes it’s not about the journey. It would take an image generator 10 seconds to do better than this of course.

The emergence of AI assistance first inspired me to get back into handmade art more seriously, which then led on to my first non-trivial experiment in generated art. You can read about that in Bucket Art from last week.

The red helicopter motif, by the way, which has been my stable pfp for several years now, was originally generated by a friend with Dalle2, based on my then-pfp of the standard helicopter emoji 🚁. My identity is now unreasonably indexed to an emoji that has now been through a few generations of AI transformations.

The publishing solution for the Bucket Art project, of course, is a hideously bespoke contraption comprising a vibe-coded single-page site, a hosted AI model, and an NFT collection. This is what it means to be slightly monstrous.

More recently, I’ve finally gotten seriously into vibecoding. You’ve already seen a couple of early results: The gallery page for Bucket Art, and the updated Art of Gig site now featuring the online Yakverse Chronicles book. Both were vibe-coded without me having to touch a single line of code.

For my Twitter archives online book, which is a massively more complex project, I’ve already generated and used more code (github repo here) than I hand-wrote in my entire past life as a pre-AI engineer. The code is a mess, but it only needs to work once, and is cheap to produce.

My true white whale though, is robotics

Some of the projects I’m now idly dreaming of doing would require combining writing, art, code, and hardware engineering. I don’t have any more spare time in the evenings and weekends than I used to. But I can now do a lot more in the hours I have, without needing to turn into a full-stack genius-god overnight.

What all this means — you can expect to see relatively more reports of art projects, vibe-coding projects, and robotics projects in this newsletter.

Full-Stack Dilettante Futures

Routinely reaching well beyond my native creative aptitudes is a heady feeling. Apparently, I’ve always-already been an artist/programmer/roboticist etc. It’s just that previously you had to be some sort of full-stack genius-god on the aptitudes front to express such a personality.
Now you can just invoke a full-stack-genius-god jinn to complete your natural personality for $20/month.

it is becoming clear that temperamentally, I tend towards a breadth that demands full-stack depth for realization.

This train of thought inspired a bon mot recently — a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, else what’s vibecoding for?

Looking back, in high school, I was something like the Jason Schwartzman character Max in Rushmore. Frenetically dabbling in a dozen different hobbies, from astronomy and airplanes to writing and theater, pursued with dilettantish vigor and amateurishness.

This is not a mode of being you can keep up as an adult unless you have a trust fund underwriting your life. You have to identify your best aptitudes (or in my case, my least worst ones), focus, and do your best to make a living with or near them. You have to do that “hone your craft” thing so many tedious people seem to fetishize, and which I find to be mostly hell on earth.

I’ve spent most of my life just looking for the best leverage I can find for my minimally, reluctantly honed amateur tendencies. This mostly meant gravitating to n=1 margins with so little competition, low-craft amateurishness was never the issue.

It’s time for a revenge of the dilettantes. The self-consciously deep types are going to hate it.

The Book Club

The highlight of the year was not any piece of writing or even non-written creative project, with or without AI. It was reading with AI. (meta-read)

It may not be immediately obvious how AI affects a book club, but it did. Not only were at least a third of the picks AI-assisted picks (found by exploring bunny trails in search of good reads), many would not have been readable at all without an AI assistant on hand.

From translating bits of Latin or Greek in books like Giordano Bruno in the Hermetic Tradition that would otherwise have been beyond me, to exploring the dozens of obscure historical side quests sparked by each book, AI suffused every aspect of the reading process. I tackled books I would previously have set aside as too dense and scholarly to take on. So did the others in the book club.

One of the more subtle affordances of AI in the reading loop was the ability to sustain exploration of an overarching grand thesis — that modernity began much earlier than people think, around 1200 rather than around 1600. (cf (2025-06-14) Collaborative Groups Of Thinkers That Instigated Significant Technological And Political Changes)

This is the sort of ambitious thematic focus that requires... go beyond casual reading to something that resembles studying and research.

It was clear from the discussions that all the regulars were using LLMs to read around the books as much as they read through them. Not quite the same thing as close reading in the academic or scholarly sense, but something that feels perhaps more powerful. Perhaps we should call it thick reading, by analogy to thick description in anthropology.

The Studious Dilettante

The AI-assisted reading —> studying phase shift is even more pronounced when it comes to short-form reading (essays and papers).

For several years now, much of my free time has been structured by participation in weekly or biweekly study groups. I’m now regularly part of four such groups, and occasionally drop in on three more. The structure in each case is similar — we read for 20 minutes, then discuss for 40 minutes. Before AI, the structure meant you could at most tackle a long essay or short/simple paper. Now with AI, we often get through 2-3 dense papers or reports in a single session.

The idea of a studious dilettante seems like an oxymoron, but with AI in the loop, it needn’t be. AIs can do the studious part.

The trick is to find a way to rein in the the runaway chain reaction that can happen when you close the loop between idle curiosity and a jinn who either knows everything about, or will diligently think through, any idle shitposty thought (brainfart) that crosses your mind.
The best way to do that is to form study groups with other humans.

Humans can hold each other accountable for staying on topic in ways AIs cannot, because most of us care what other humans think of us, but most of us currently don’t care what AIs think of us

Many of my sloptraptions this year have in fact been something like private study and brainstorming notes. The sort of thing that in the past would likely have stayed in my private notebooks.

Whither Substack?

Over the past year, Substack has transformed to be more a social network of writers than a publishing platform (or as someone vividly put it, a farmer’s market of writers most of whom are engaged in keeping each other’s spirits up by buying each other’s wares). (self-licking ice-cream cone)

Unless you want to fight the message of the medium, the best way to write on Substack is to collaborate and compete with other writers on themes that attract a critical mass of shared interest, while trying not to get sucked into the obsessively self-involved community dynamics, mimetic envy gyres, or attention-cornering headline themes.

On a timeline where AI hadn’t emerged, I would care about all this. Despite it being the tenth such platform trajectory to play out in exactly the same way.
In this timeline, where AI has emerged, I honestly can’t bring myself to care about any of it

Substack today features all the sound and fury signifying nothing that typically marks a cultural endgame slowly having the vitality sucked out of it because it rejects the most vital part of the future. Not least because the median writer on here reflexively hates AI.

The future, as I have noted, for reasons having nothing to do with Substack, is about AI-powered bespokeness and variety in the media landscape. In both form and content

That said, Substack is still a great place to host a basic newsletter, rig up some no-worries payment plumbing to make some money, and stay in touch with other writers you want to track or be tracked by. It’s a publishing Schelling point.

But it is already not the place where any sort of interesting creative future is unfolding.

Which means, increasingly, this is not where my attention will be, but for the forseeable future, it is going to remain the easiest place to tell you about where my attention has been.