The phantasmagorias of space to which the flaneur devotes himself find a counterpart in the phantasmagorias of time to which the gambler is addicted. Gambling converts time into a narcotic (Benjamin 1999: 12). The disruption that Benjamin identified in the gambling halls finds unexpected resonance in today’s computational interfaces. The rise of “prompt engineering” as a new technical practice to shape the outputs of LLMs reveals an engagement with probability and chance that I claim mirrors the temporal and psychological structures that Walter Benjamin identified in his Arcades Project and the Passagen-Werk. In Benjamin’s short fragment, Notes on a Theory of Gambling, for example, there emerges a figure that I want to explore as of particular relevance for our computational moment: the gambler (Benjamin 2005: 297-298). Benjamin’s gambler is not merely a person who bets, but a temporal person haunted by chance, perpetually suspended between possibility and ruin.
Editors’ Choice: Prompt Anxiety
