Prompt Anxiety
David M. Berry 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 2002: 12). The disruption that Walter Benjamin identified in the gambling halls in the early 20th century 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 Benjamin identified in his Arcades Project ( Das 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 2006: 297-298). Benjamin's gambler is not merely a person who bets, but a temporal person haunted by chance, perp...
