New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future
Ratings5
Average rating3.8
15
Ratings5
Average rating3.8
From the highly acclaimed author of WAYS OF BEING. We live in times of increasing inscrutability. Our news feeds are filled with unverified, unverifiable speculation, much of it automatically generated by anonymous software. As a result, we no longer understand what is happening around us. Underlying all of these trends is a single idea: the belief that quantitative data can provide a coherent model of the world, and the efficacy of computable information to provide us with ways of acting within it. Yet the sheer volume of information available to us today reveals less than we hope. Rather, it heralds a new Dark Age: a world of ever-increasing incomprehension. In his brilliant new work, leading artist and writer James Bridle offers us a warning against the future in which the contemporary promise of a new technologically assisted Enlightenment may just deliver its opposite: an age of complex uncertainty, predictive algorithms, surveillance, and the hollowing out of empathy. Surveying the history of art, technology and information systems he reveals the dark clouds that gather over discussions of the digital sublime.
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A common fallacy of the modern age is solutionism, enamored with technology we belief that all problems can be solved with computation. Layers and layers of computation add such complexity to our modern world, that we've lost oversight and insight into our creations. Bridle calls them “hyperobjects”, something that surrounds and controls us, but cannot be seen (or understood) in its entirety. The internet falls into that category, as does climate change. The dynamics and consequences of both are hard to grasp, too overwhelming to address and therefore easiest to ignore. This is the new dark age.
The term stems from a 1926 H.P. Lovecraft quote:
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
