New Dark Age

New Dark Age:Technology and the End of the Future

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How computation makes it more difficult to understand the world: Fully updated and revised

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.

Reviews

  • NEW DARK AGE is a masterful study of all the things approaching out of the future's night. Compelling and essential.

    Warren Ellis, author of NORMAL and TRANSMETROPOLITAN
  • Computation brings humanity more darkness than enlightenment: a goblin horde of digital superstitions, invented and unleashed in just half a century. Yet James Bridle is fearless in our gloomy post-truth predicament; he's a theorist, artist, technical visionary and even a moralist. Has he foreseen the worst?

    Bruce Sterling, author of Pirate Utopia
  • Highlights the ways in which we are deliberately being kept in the dark and are sleepwalking into a future of non-stop surveillance and ‘the dark clouds [gathering] over our dreams of the digital sublime.

    Financial Times [Summer Reads 2018]