New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

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.”