Summation

Cognologies are general-purpose information technologies that restructure cognition and society by changing the economics and mechanics of meaning: how information is produced, stored, transmitted, and validated. Historically, language, writing, and print each acted as a step-change in collective intelligence by massively increasing coordination bandwidth and cultural memory.

The Printocene names the period in which printed text became the dominant cognitive infrastructure. Print stabilised information into repeatable, portable forms and encouraged institutional authority: canon formation, standardisation, credentialing, bureaucracy, and the idea of an “authorised” version. In this regime, information is culturally perceived as solid, scarce, and sacral—fixed, limited, and imbued with legitimacy by publication.

Generative AI shifts the regime again. It doesn’t merely distribute text; it transforms it—compressing, generating, translating, and reconfiguring information interactively. This changes the felt nature of information toward soft, suffused, and secular: fluid rather than fixed, ambient rather than scarce, and no longer automatically authoritative simply because it appears in a textual form.

Ludicity is the emergent literacy for this new cognological regime: a capacity for exploratory, iterative sense-making—treating information as something to test, probe, and refine (rather than merely consume), while maintaining epistemic discipline (verification, provenance, and calibration of confidence). In this framing, the societal task is to evolve from print-trained reverence toward AI-era play with rigor.