These terms are working theories — sharp enough to use, loose enough to refine. Each one names a part of the same broader claim: that we are living through the fourth great cognitive transformation in human history, and that the conceptual tools we inherited from the print era are not adequate to the era now arriving.
The vocabulary is offered as a heuristic system, not a scientific one. It is meant to be useful for thinking, writing, speaking, and strategy — not to be a closed final account. Most entries link through to a longer treatment.
Where technology extends what bodies can do, cognology extends what minds can do — and AI is its activation moment. To call AI a technology is a category error: it belongs to a different lineage altogether, one that runs through the invention of the alphabet and the printing press rather than through the wheel and the steam engine.
The term is meant to do for cognitive infrastructure what technology did for material infrastructure: name the category so the conversation can move on.
Each cognology — language, writing, print, AI — has not merely added capability; it has reshaped how intelligence itself is stored, shared, and amplified. The pattern across all four is consistent: disruption, resistance, adaptation, and eventually a new literacy that lets ordinary people participate in the new information environment rather than be merely subject to it.
Read the full essay on Cognology →The Printocene produced the cognitive habits we still mistake for thinking itself: linearity, fixity, scarcity of information, the authority of the bound volume, the sanctity of the single correct version. Mass schooling, the modern university, the journal, the daily newspaper, the encyclopaedia, the peer-reviewed paper — all are printocene institutions.
These habits are not eternal. They are artefacts of a particular medium, now being replaced by another. Naming the Printocene is the first move in being able to think outside it. As long as its conventions are invisible to us, we cannot see what is changing.
The Printocene is not bad and was not a mistake. It produced the modern world. But like every cognological era before it, it is being succeeded — and the succession demands a new literacy and new institutions.
Throughout the print era, information was solid, scarce, and sacred: it lived in fixed physical artefacts, was expensive to produce and reproduce, and accrued authority precisely from its difficulty of access.
The shift now under way is to information that is soft, suffuse, and secular: malleable rather than fixed, ambient rather than rare, and authoritative through usefulness rather than through scarcity or sanctity.
The mechanism beneath the shift is distributability. Each cognology — language, writing, print, AI — has expanded the distributability of thought, but AI is the first to dissolve the print-era assumption that fixity and scarcity were intrinsic to information rather than artefacts of the medium. The Three Ss were never properties of information itself; they were properties of the printocene. The shift names what is left when that medium is no longer the substrate.
This site is one attempt to work within those new properties rather than against them.
Ludicity is the literacy that the new cognology requires. Where Printocene-era literacy was about parsing fixed text, Ludicity is about playing fluently with malleable meaning. It includes the capacity to prompt, probe, recombine, and discard; to treat information as soft rather than solid; to find the productive move rather than the correct one.
It is closer to jazz than to grammar. Closer to play than to study. The word borrows from ludic — pertaining to play — because seriousness without play is what got us into the rigid, brittle thinking that Cognology now disrupts.
Ludicity is not a soft skill in the dismissive sense. It is the load-bearing cognitive capacity of the AI era — the difference between using these tools well and being baffled by them. The framework was originally developed under the term Hyperludics, a name now retired in the public lexicon (though retained as the name of the consultancy, Hyperludic Ltd) in favour of the cleaner Cognology / Ludicity pairing.
Read the full essay on Ludicity →The first honest response to AI — before the takes, before the framings, before the strategy decks — is usually some version of woah. Not awe exactly, not fear exactly, but the cognitive vertigo of encountering something the existing language doesn't quite fit.
Woah is not a stopping point. It is the doorway between the old literacy and the new one. Treating it seriously — rather than skipping past it toward analysis or dismissing it as naïve — is the first move in becoming Ludicate.
The framework around Woah is set out in The Little Book of Woah, a free downloadable guide structured around four principles: Wisdom (seeing the deeper shift), Opportunity (recognising the openings), Adaptability (cultivating resilience), and Harmony (keeping human values and technology in dialogue).
Read the full essay on Woah →Mootball is the central civic institution of the Interdependent Stake — the society depicted in the novel O.Welles 19/8.4, written in 2017. The published Laws of Mootball function as appendix to that book, in the tradition of Orwell's Principles of Newspeak.
Mootball is the project's performative wing: the Cognology thesis rendered as ritual. A working society does not eliminate contest. It civilises it.
The sport is governed by the fictional International Mootball Authority, plays out over 120 minutes, and is built on a single founding premise — that the ability to think and the ability to act are not in opposition, and that a society which treats them as such will eventually find it can do neither well.
Read the Laws of Mootball →"Most independent thinkers' sites look scattered because they are scattered. This one is plural by design — because the thesis demands it. The work is offered as a body, not a book."