Technologically Skwair ▢ blog
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Print by Marian Hardey. We Are All Squares. March 2020.
Print, Falling into Crying Lot, Mariann Hardey, 2025
Chapter One. The Estate of Pierce Inverarity Have you ever had the unsettling experience of reading Thomas Pynchon? You really should. It is neither pleasant nor fast; it is confusing, labyrinthine, and slow. But try. (It is a very short fiction.) His narratives often blend voice and intention until you get lost, and this is precisely the vertigo I feel regarding the rush towards a 'golden age' of AI. I stand, much like Oedipa Maas at the beginning of The Crying of Lot 49, staring down the slope of a new and sprawling legacy. But instead of the grid of San Narciso, with its printed circuits and hieroglyphic streets, we confront the interface of a Large Language Model (LLM). We have been named executrix of a chaotic inheritance, a technology that promises everything and explains nothing. In the novel, Oedipa returns home from a Tupperware party, a scene of unsettling suburban banality, to find she has been made responsible for the estate of her former lover, the wealthy and shadow-casting Pierce Inverarity. She is not a lawyer; she is not a tycoon. She is a woman who, until that moment, felt her life was a "Rapunzel-like" confinement in a tower of her own boredom. Suddenly, she is tasked with untangling a web of assets that seems to encompass all of America: stamp collections, factories, motels, and secret societies. We occupy the same precipice. We have returned from the digital equivalent of a Tupperware party, our scrolling, our emailing, our basic digital lives, to find that the tech giants have died (or rather, disrupted themselves) and left us the keys to the kingdom. We are the executors of the entire internet's knowledge, compressed into a single blinking cursor. Like Oedipa, we feel a strange, jolted duty to organise this mess. We assume the role of the executrix not because we are qualified, but because the will was read, and our name was on it. Oedipa's motivation is not greed; it is a desperate need to find a pattern in the noise. When she looks down at the city of San Narciso, she sees it as a "printed circuit," a hieroglyph that surely, if she just looked hard enough, would reveal a "transcendent meaning." The city is just real enough in this context, yet it remains uneasy for the reader to grasp its reality. This is precisely the sensation of the modern "Prompt Engineer." We gaze at the blank face of the AI and convince ourselves that if we just find the correct incantation, the proper acronym, the proper sequence of R-T-F or S-O-L-V-E, the circuit will close, and the meaning of the legacy will be revealed. Into this chaos steps the modern consultant, the influencers, clutching their maps. They tell us, as noted in a recent viral post, that the population is divided. There are the "90% of ChatGPT users" typing into the void with fundamental ignorance, and then there are the Elect, the "other 10%" who are using it to "print money in their sleep." The distinction, we are told, lies in the code. Not a software code, but a linguistic one. A set of frameworks designed to tame the stochastic beast. The image accompanying this proclamation presents eight sigils, each an acronym such as R-T-F (Role, Task, Format) and D-R-E-A-M (Define, Research, Execute, Analyse, Measure). They are presented not merely as tips, but as the liturgy required to access the machine's grace. If you can just arrange your words into the shape of R-I-S-E, the "exponential leverage" will flow, and the tower of boredom will finally fall. Chapter Two. Maxwell's Demon and the S-O-L-V-E Framework Deep within the paranoid architecture of The Crying of Lot 49 lies the Nefastis Machine, a device containing Maxwell's Demon. Pynchon presents this theoretical intelligence as a tiny sorter tasked with the impossible labour of defeating the second law of thermodynamics by separating fast molecules from slow ones to create a perpetual cycle of energy without heat loss. The modern obsession with prompt engineering reveals itself as a digital reenactment of this thermodynamic fantasy. We seek to build our own Demon within the chat interface, believing that the correct sequence of words might finally extract pure order from the chaotic swirl of the internet. If Maxwell's Demon represents the thermodynamic fantasy of the era, the prompt engineer represents a revival of an older, more theatrical deception: the Mechanical Turk. In the late 18th century, Wolfgang von Kempelen dazzled the courts of Europe with a chess-playing automaton, a turbaned mannequin that appeared to defeat human opponents through pure mechanical logic. In reality, it was a hoax; a human chess master was cramped inside the cabinet, guiding the mannequin's hand by candlelight. The modern practice of prompt engineering effects a curious reversal of this illusion. We are no longer the audience marvelling at the machine; we have become the human operator squeezed inside the box. When we employ frameworks like S-O-L-V-E, we are contorting our natural language into the rigid, uncomfortable shapes of "Situation," "Objective,"and "Vision" to ensure the machine functions. We provide the logic, the context, and the strategic foresight, performing the cognitive heavy lifting while cramped within the narrow cabinet of the prompt window. The AI takes the credit for the checkmate, but it is the human user, twisted into the posture of a bureaucrat, who is actually moving the pieces. Consider the rigid geometry of the S-O-L-V-E framework, which demands the user delineate Situation, Objective, Limitations, Vision, and Execution. These acronyms serve as bureaucratic incantations intended to filter the heated, hallucinogenic potential of the Large Language Model into the cold, orderly work of capital. The framework promises that a sufficiently specific "Vision" combined with strict "Limitations" will bypass the messy friction of actual thought to produce a frictionless automation of workflows. There is a distinct, almost tragic irony in applying these stiff corporate methodologies to a machine built on probability. The user attempts to shackle a psychedelic mirror to the grid of 1950s middle management. By commanding the infinite latent space, a high-dimensional manifold of semantic relationships, to role-play as a "Commercial Director" via the R-I-S-E method or a "Brand Strategist" through R-T-F, the user forces the sublime and terrifying chaos of the model into the beige suit of a mid-level executive. This effort parallels the "crying" of the lot itself. In legal and auctioneering terms, the crying represents the vocal assertion of value and finality over a collection of discarded debris. Oedipa Maas wanders through the wreckage of Pierce Inverarity's estate, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of unconnected things, waiting for the auctioneer to cry the lot and impose a binding definition upon the confusion. The prompt engineer acts as this auctioneer. They shout their frameworks into the void, engaging in a hysterical sorting of molecules to produce "qualified inbound leads" while ignoring the encroaching night of total entropy. Chapter Three. The Trystero and the Digital Elect The most Pynchonesque element of this new movement resides in the class anxiety it diligently cultivates. The viral proclamation separates the world into a stark binary that mimics the theological division between the Elect and the Preterite - the chosen few and the passed over. It posits a hidden layer of reality where a "smart" ten per cent operate a clandestine machinery of wealth, while the unenlightened ninety per cent wander the streets of the internet, posting their basic queries into government-approved boxes and receiving only silence in return. This is the new Trystero. In the novel, the Trystero is a secret postal network used by the marginalised to communicate outside the official monopoly. Here, the dynamic is inverted: the secret network belongs to the "high performers." Those inducted into this underground possess the frameworks as if they were passkeys to a shadow economy. They wield C-A-R-E (Context, Action, Result, Example) and T-A-G (Task, Action, Goal) not merely as organisational tools but as the alchemical formulas required to transmute the leaden text of a chatbot into the gold of exponential leverage. The act of typing ceases to be communication; it becomes a ritual invocation of a hidden order. This reveals the distinction between the "smart" and the "basic" user to be less a division of skill and more a revival of the Cargo Cult. Richard Feynman famously described the post-war Pacific islanders who, having witnessed the material abundance brought by military aircraft, constructed elaborate mock airstrips from bamboo and straw. They carved headphones from wood and stood in makeshift control towers, waiting in faithful silence for the planes to return. They had perfectly replicated the technology's form while remaining entirely ignorant of its mechanism. The modern user constructs similar effigies out of language. Rigid acronyms like R-A-C-E serve as the digital equivalent of the bamboo control tower; users mime the structure of computer code in the superstitious belief that if the liturgy is performed correctly, the "cargo" of intelligence will descend from the latent space. Such divisive rhetoric fosters a pervasive paranoia that the actual signal remains forever just beyond the threshold of perception. Oedipa Maas found herself haunted by the image of a muted post horn scrawled on latrine walls and sidewalk surfaces. The modern user stares at the D-R-E-A-M framework (Define, Research, Execute, Analyse, Measure) with the same fervent suspicion, convinced it contains the encoded map to salvation. The belief takes hold that the market's chaos will align into a perfect vector of profit if only the correct acronym is whispered into the machine. This phenomenon illustrates Jean Baudrillard's dark prophecy concerning the precession of simulacra. Baudrillard argued that in the postmodern condition, the map no longer depicts the territory; rather, the map precedes and engenders the territory. The viral infographic acts as precisely this sort of hyperreal cartography. The distinct demographic of the "Top 10% of Super Users" did not exist as an empirical reality until the influencers drew the lines of demarcation. These digital cartographers invented a class system solely to sell the navigation tools required to ascend it. The users scrambling to master R-T-F are not uncovering a hidden truth about AI; they are desperately attempting to become the territory depicted on the slide. They seek to inhabit a demographic that is nothing more than a marketing hallucination, proving that the simulation of competence has finally become more lucrative than competence itself. Oedipa eventually wonders whether she has stumbled upon a real conspiracy or is merely projecting meaning onto static, much like a digital Hamlet driven to madness by the ambiguity of signs. The prompt engineer faces an identical vertigo. They seek to organise the sprawling, hallucinatory output of the AI into the rigid columns of R-A-C-E, hoping that structure will save them from the void. Yet the suspicion remains that the "Top 10%" is less a statistical reality than a shared delusion, a frantic attempt to bind the encroaching entropy with the fragile logic of a LinkedIn slide. Chapter Four. The Muted Prompt One cannot deny the functional value of the frameworks. Structure acts as the primary antagonist to the blank page, and the definition of a "Role" or the setting of "Limitations" effectively prevents the AI from drifting into the entropic haze that Pynchon so frequently chronicled. These acronyms serve as necessary scaffolding for thought, preventing intent from dissolving into the white noise of the model. Yet the divergence between the map and the territory looms large. Thomas Pynchon maintains a ghostly presence as an author who constructs labyrinths to reflect the disintegration of meaning, famously vanishing to let the complexity of his text stand alone. In stark contrast, LinkedIn influencers position themselves as the new authors of certainty, placing their personal brands at the centre of the narrative. They peddle the seductive illusion that the sprawling, chaotic text of the world can be condensed into a single page of bullet points. While Pynchon embraces the noise, the creators of the R-T-Fand S-O-L-V-E cheat sheets seek to banish it. They present themselves as high priests of a digital order, promising that the correct incantation will subdue the ghost in the machine. The terror inherent in The Crying of Lot 49 resides in the ambiguity of the conspiracy. Oedipa Maas never receives confirmation that the Trystero exists or if she is merely projecting order onto random debris. A similar vagueness haunts the prompt engineer. The secret society of the "10%" who have supposedly unlocked the universe likely does not exist outside the marketing copy. The frameworks function merely as frameworks rather than magical keys, remaining useful, dry, and ultimately limited tools that offer the comforting illusion of control over a stochastic process. This obsession with correct formatting reveals a sociological pathology that Robert Merton identified as Bureaucratic Ritualism. Merton described a mode of adaptation in which the subject, overwhelmed by anxiety or blocked from achieving the organisation's actual goal, abandons the organisation's goal but adheres obsessively to its rules. The "smart"10% of users are not necessarily innovators; they are ritualists. They have elevated the means of production, the R-T-F framework, and the perfect context-setting above the ends. They care more about filling out the form correctly than the quality of the creative output. By demanding that every interaction be prefaced with a Role, a Task, and a Format, they are effectively doing the paperwork for art. They have turned the wild, unpredictable act of creation into a compliance exercise, convinced that if the bureaucratic ritual is performed with sufficient exactitude, the result will matter. It is a hollow victory of method over meaning. End. Treating AI solely as an engine for "exponential leverage" via rigid acronyms ignores the strange, vibrant weirdness of the tool. Such a utilitarian approach reduces the clandestine intrigue of the W.A.S.T.E. system to the pedestrian efficiency of FedEx. One might employ R-T-F and S-O-L-V-E while remaining deeply suspicious of their reductive power. Behind the "Role" and the "Context," the unpredictable human pulse continues its search for meaning in the lot's crying, waiting in the silence for the auctioneer to finally speak. Dedication In a landscape crowded with artificial intelligence, I remain hopelessly devoted to the genuine article. My sincere thanks to the Jester who dares to laugh at the machine, and for possessing the kind of dangerous, un-prompted intellect that keeps this Professor on her toes. While the rest of the world searches for the secret code to unlock the universe, I am content knowing I’ve already found the only signal in the noise. Links & ReferencesThe Theory (Decoded):
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