Texts as Toys - by Venkatesh Rao - Contraptions
In 2009, a couple of years into my blogging career, as I began finding my feet, I wrote a post that was very popular at the time, The Rhetoric of the Hyperlink. I think I’m finally finding my feet with LLMs, a dozen sloptraptions in, and have developed a comparable mental model for reading and writing with AI.
Writing is now toy-making, and reading is playing with toys. The textuality of the AI era is to pre-AI textualities as video-games are to screen media.
The big thing to understand about pre-AI text culture is that reading and writing are both relaxing, pleasurable activities for those who do a lot of either or both. They are ludic immersion activities.
The ludic quality of engaging with texts is one thing I am now highly confident will not change. The major strength of the texts as toys mental model is precisely that it not only preserves this ludic quality, it actually strengthens and centers it.
By contrast, many mental models of AI treat it as a purely instrumental, functional technology, with no particular affective disposition. No particular mood, let alone a subtle one like playfulness .
