Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: New Dark Age
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1980
WEBSITE: http://jamesbridle.com
CITY: Athens
STATE:
COUNTRY: Greece
NATIONALITY: British
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1980.
EDUCATION:University College, London, master’s degree.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and artist. London Observer, England, columnist. Has exhibited artwork in shows worldwide; has spoken at numerous venues and events.
AWARDS:Excellence Award, Japan Media Arts Festival, 2014; Graphics Design of the Year, London Design Museum, 2014.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to publications, including the Atlantic, Cabinet, Domus, Frieze, New Statesman, and Wired.
SIDELIGHTS
James Bridle is a British writer and artist. He holds a master’s degree from University College, London. Bridle has worked as a columnist for the London Observer. His articles have also appeared in publications, including the Atlantic, Cabinet, Domus, Frieze, New Statesman, and Wired. His art and writing has focused primarily on technology. Bridle has received awards from organizations, including the Japan Media Arts Festival and the London Design Museum.
In 2018, Bridle released his first book, New Dark Age: Technology, Knowledge, and the End of the Future. In this volume, he discusses the plethora of information available through technology and the helplessness one feels in regard to changing things about the world. Bridle draws connections between technological advances, economic inequality, and climate change. Other topics in the book include surveillance, computer languages, commerce.
In an interview with Adi Robertson, contributor to the Verge website, Bridle discussed his argument on creating agency to have power over technology. He stated: “I don’t think that there’s any kind of anything that will guarantee you some kind of magical power over things. In fact, the hope that you can do so is itself kind of dangerous. But it’s one of the routes that I explore to a possibility of gaining some kind of agency within these systems.” Bridle continued: “One of the ways that I approach these problems is through one particular form of systemic literacy that I’ve developed through my work and my studies, but I also think it’s generalizable. I think anyone can get there from a background in any number of disciplines. And understanding that literacy is transferable and that we all have the capabilities to apply it to think clearly about subjects that seem difficult and complex is one of the main thrusts of the book.” Regarding the mention of the Luddites in the book, Bridle told Robertson: “The Luddites weren’t smashers of technology; they were a social movement, performing a very violent and direct form of critique of the destruction of their livelihoods, of what those machines were doing. … By retelling these stories … it’s possible to rethink what might be possible in the present.”
In a lengthy review of New Dark Age on the London Guardian Online, Will Self suggested: “Bridle isn’t just a purveyor of the armchair jeremiad, who sits there blowing filter bubbles—he does fieldwork as well on our hideous and looming fate.” Self concluded: “One thing about the old dark ages was that they only seemed dark in retrospect, once the dread weight of state power had been reimposed. I bet there were plenty of people besides the Goths (and the Visigoths for that matter), for whom the fall of the Roman empire was a cause for celebration. I realise this isn’t a popular view. And I expect many readers will find Bridle’s perceptive and thought-provoking book terrifying rather than enjoyable—but then as I implied at the outset, I’m very much of the glass half-empty type.” Referring to Bridle, Ben Eastham, critic on the ArtReview website, commented: “Ultimately, his efforts to reconcile the limited capacity of the individual with the possibility of agency lead the author to an old-fashioned conclusion: that to effect meaningful change, it is necessary to share knowledge and build coalitions. Rather than disentanglement, New Dark Age argues convincingly for a more informed integration with the technologies we have created, made possible by new solidarities between citizens armed with the facts.” “Though his prose can be dense, Bridle’s analytical leaps are both illuminating and terrifying,” asserted a Kirkus Reviews writer. The same writer described the book’s style as “Sci-fi meets the aesthetic vanguard in cyberspace, where a new metalanguage addresses problems and solutions alike.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2018, review of New Dark Age: Technology, Knowledge, and the End of the Future.
ONLINE
ArtReview, https://artreview.com/ (May 1, 2018), Ben Eastham, review of New Dark Age.
James Bridle website, http://jamesbridle.com/ (September 12, 2018).
London Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (June 30, 2018), Will Self, review of New Dark Age.
Verge, https://www.theverge.com/ (July 16, 2018), Adi Robertson, author interview.
James Bridle (b. 1980) is an artist, writer, journalist, and technologist.
CV
My artworks and installations have been exhibited in Europe, North and South America, Asia and Australia, and have been viewed by hundreds of thousands visitors online. I have been commissioned by organisations including the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Barbican, Artangel, the Oslo Architecture Triennale, the Istanbul Design Biennial, and been honoured by Ars Electronica, the Japan Media Arts Festival, and the Design Museum, London.
My writing on literature, culture and networks has appeared in magazines and newspapers including Frieze, Wired, Domus, Cabinet, the Atlantic, the New Statesman, and many others, in print and online, and I have written a regular column for the Observer. My formulation of the New Aesthetic research project has spurred debate and creative work across multiple disciplines, and continues to inspire critical and artistic responses.
I lecture regularly on radio, at conferences, universities, and other events, including SXSW, Lift, the Global Art Forum, Re:Publica and TED. I have been a resident at Lighthouse, Brighton, the White Building, London, and SVA and Eyebeam, New York, and an Adjunct Professor on the Interactive Telecommunications Programme at New York University.
My work received an Honorary Mention at the Prix Ars Electronica 2013, an Excellence Award from the Japan Media Arts Festival 2014, and an Honorary Mention from CERN COLLIDE 2016, and been shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize 2014. I won the Design Museum Graphics Design of the Year in 2014.
I was named as one of the 1000 Most Influential People in London by the Evening Standard in 2007, and one of the 100 Most Influential People in Europe by WIRED Magazine in 2015.
I hold a Master's Degree in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from University College, London, and wrote my dissertation on creative applications of Artificial Intelligence.
Headshots and Biographies
Photos for exhibition and conference material can be downloaded here (Zip file).
Short bio:
James Bridle is an artist and writer working across technologies and disciplines. His work can be found at http://jamesbridle.com.
Longer bio: (100 words)
James Bridle is an artist and writer working across technologies and disciplines. His artworks have been commissioned by galleries and institutions and exhibited worldwide and on the internet. His writing on literature, culture and networks has appeared in magazines and newspapers including Wired, Domus, Cabinet, the Atlantic, the New Statesman, the Guardian, the Observer and many others, in print and online. He lectures regularly at conferences, universities, and other events. "New Dark Age", his book about technology, knowledge, and the end of the future, was published by Verso (UK & US) in 2018. His work can be found at http://jamesbridle.com.
Longest bio: (200 words)
James Bridle is an artist and writer working across technologies and disciplines. His artworks and installations have been exhibited in Europe, North and South America, Asia and Australia, and have been viewed by hundreds of thousands of visitors online. He has been commissioned by organisations including the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Barbican, Artangel, the Oslo Architecture Triennale, the Istanbul Design Biennial, and been honoured by Ars Electronica, the Japan Media Arts Festival, and the Design Museum, London. His writing on literature, culture and networks has appeared in magazines and newspapers including Frieze, Wired, Domus, Cabinet, the Atlantic, the New Statesman, and many others, in print and online, and he has written a regular column for the Observer. "New Dark Age", his book about technology, knowledge, and the end of the future,was published by Verso (UK & US) in 2018. He lectures regularly on radio, at conferences, universities, and other events, including SXSW, Lift, the Global Art Forum, Re:Publica and TED. He was been a resident at Lighthouse, Brighton, the White Building, London, and Eyebeam, New York, and an Adjunct Professor on the Interactive Telecommunications Programme at New York University. His work can be found at http://jamesbridle.com.
QUOTED: "I don’t think that there’s any kind of anything that will guarantee you some kind of magical power over things. In fact, the hope that you can do so is itself kind of dangerous. But it’s one of the routes that I explore to a possibility of gaining some kind of agency within these systems."
"One of the ways that I approach these problems is through one particular form of systemic literacy that I’ve developed through my work and my studies, but I also think it’s generalizable. I think anyone can get there from a background in any number of disciplines. And understanding that literacy is transferable and that we all have the capabilities to apply it to think clearly about subjects that seem difficult and complex is one of the main thrusts of the book."
"the Luddites weren’t smashers of technology; they were a social movement, performing a very violent and direct form of critique of the destruction of their livelihoods, of what those machines were doing. ... by retelling these stories ... it’s possible to rethink what might be possible in the present."
James Bridle on why technology is creating a new dark age
By Adi Robertson@thedextriarchy Jul 16, 2018, 12:48pm EDT
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Graphics by Michele Doying / The Verge
In 2005, Stanford University researcher John Ioannidis published an essay with the explosive title “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” Ioannidis alleged that many researchers were not running meaningful experiments; they were simply sifting through huge amounts of data to find any publishable results, using a technique known as p-hacking or data dredging. Technology made gathering information easier than ever, but the result here was not a deeper understanding of our world — it was greater confusion about it.
The p-hacking problem is one of many high-tech parables in James Bridle’s book New Dark Age, which will be released in the US tomorrow. Bridle is already well-known for his creative critiques of modern technology, including the 2012 drone-tracking project Dronestagram, a salt circle that traps self-driving cars, and last year’s influential essay about creepy YouTube kids’ videos. New Dark Age integrates these critiques into a larger argument about the dangers of trusting computers to explain (and, increasingly, run) the world. As Bridle writes, “We know more and more about the world, while being less and less able to do anything about it.”
But however grim a new dark age sounds, Bridle explains in an interview with The Verge that his vision isn’t a purely negative one, and his book is a call to study not what computers are telling us, but how and why they’re doing it.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
In your book, you talk about the notion that we’re in a state of knowing more about the world than ever, but we have less and less agency to change it, and we need to develop a kind of literacy around these computing systems. But it seems like we could develop literacy and still not gain any real power over the systems.
Oh, absolutely. That’s certainly possible. I don’t think that there’s any kind of anything that will guarantee you some kind of magical power over things. In fact, the hope that you can do so is itself kind of dangerous. But it’s one of the routes that I explore to a possibility of gaining some kind of agency within these systems.
One of the ways that I approach these problems is through one particular form of systemic literacy that I’ve developed through my work and my studies, but I also think it’s generalizable. I think anyone can get there from a background in any number of disciplines. And understanding that literacy is transferable and that we all have the capabilities to apply it to think clearly about subjects that seem difficult and complex is one of the main thrusts of the book.
You’ve given examples in the past of ways that people could resist “inevitable” technological progress, like taxi drivers making salt traps for self-driving cars. What else could they do?
I did a whole bunch of projects around self-driving cars, which also included building my own — poorly, but in a way that helped me learn how it’s done — so that I gained an understanding of those systems, and possibly as a result would be able to produce a different kind of self-driving car, essentially. In the same way that anyone who tries to work on these systems, build them themselves, and understand them has the possibility of shaping them in a totally different way.
The autonomous trap is another approach to some of the more threatening aspects of the self-driving car. It’s quite a sort of aggressive action to literally stop it. And I think working with and attempting to stop and resist are both super useful approaches, but they both depend on having some level of understanding of these systems.
These seem like individual solutions to some extent. How do you deal with situations like climate change, where you need really large-scale systemic change?
There’s a couple of things I talk about regarding climate in the book, and one of them is to be really, really super direct about the actual threat of it, which is horrific, and it’s kind of so horrific that it’s difficult for us to think about. Simply the act of articulating that — making it really, really clear, exploring some of the implications of it — that kind of realism is a super necessary act.
We’re still fighting this rear-guard action of, “Oh, it’s manageable,” “Oh, we can mitigate it,” or “It’s not really real.” We’re still, despite everything we know, everything people say, stuck in this ridiculous bind where we seem incapable of taking any kind of action. And, for me, that’s part and parcel of this continuous argument we have over numbers and facts and figures and the data and information that we’re gathering, as though this is some kind of argument that has to be won before we do anything. That excludes the possibility of doing anything concrete and powerful and present.
How does it feel to be a critic of these technologies for years and suddenly see people start agreeing with you?
I think there’s a lot of people right now who find themselves in the position of being “Well yes, this is exactly what we meant,” you know? I remember having conversations years ago with someone saying, “What’s the worst that can happen with someone having all this data centralized?” And my answer to that was, “Well, the worst thing that can happen is that fascists take over and have control of that data.” And a few years ago, that felt like the worst possible thing, completely unimaginable. And here we are today — when fascism is alive and well in Europe, and growing in certain ways in the US as well. So it’s suddenly not so remote.
“THE REALLY IMPORTANT THING ... IS TO CONSTANTLY FRAME THIS AS A STRUGGLE.”
But at the same time, people who have been thinking about this for a while have also been building things that are capable of mitigating that. So while I argue against everything being magically fixed, putting this all out in the open in certain ways does start to make some kind of difference. The really important thing, I think, is to constantly frame this as a struggle. Which, again, we kind of don’t often do, particularly in the context of technology — where we see this stuff as a kind of ongoing, always upward unstoppable march.
Technology always walks this kind of weird knife edge. It becomes hard for us to understand and change — everything disappears behind glass, inside little black boxes. But at the same time, if you do manage to crack them open just a little bit, if you get some kind of understanding, everything suddenly becomes really quite starkly clear in ways that it wasn’t before. I’m kind of insisting on that moment being the moment of possibility — not some kind of weird imaginary future point where it all becomes clear, but just these moments of doubt and uncertainty and retelling of different stories.
Speaking of stories, you reference authors like H.P. Lovecraft and Iain M. Banks in New Dark Age. How is fiction shaping the way we deal with this future?
A lot of the way that we think of technology, and the internet in particular, has been really shaped by the ideas of it that came along before the thing itself arrived, right? Just as our ideas of space exploration are completely shaped by fantasies of space exploration from long before we got to space practically. The really interesting science fiction to me now happens kind of in the next week or the next year at most because it’s so obvious to us how little we can predict about long-term futures, which really, for me, is more of a reflection of reality than reality is a reflection of science fiction.
I’m unsure about the value of stories to pull us in a particular direction. Most science fiction writers insist that all their fiction is really about the present, so they’re really just different ways of imagining that.
Jeff VanderMeer has also said that futuristic dystopias are a way of shifting real problems “over there” out of reality.
Yeah, exactly. There’s a whole genre of design fiction as well that posits these political things as design objects as a way to kind of pull those futures into being. But I always think there’s something very risky about that, because it also positions them as somewhere else, right? Not as tools that we have access to in the present. And VanderMeer’s fiction is pretty interesting, because while it’s obviously somewhat future-oriented, it’s also deeply about the weird and strange and difficult to understand.
I think that is better than what I said before, really. That is the most interesting current within science fiction right now: not imaginings of weird futures, utopian or dystopian, but ones that really home into how little we understand about the world around us right now.
How do we critique the idea of inevitable, upward progress without overly romanticizing the past? In the US, criticism of automation gets tied up with calls to protect jobs that fit a stereotypical 20th century white, male vision of work.
There’s always that danger of romanticization, it’s true. It’s still being played out. That also comes about because of our really narrow view of history — that we have these quite small and very essentially made-up histories of things that we’re so acculturated to. So one of the things I try to do in the book is pull out these alternative histories of technology, and that’s another current that’s quite strong at the moment.
“WE HAVE THESE QUITE SMALL AND VERY ESSENTIALLY MADE-UP HISTORIES.”
I just read Claire Evans’ book Broad Band, about the number of women involved in the creation of the internet as we know it today. Many of the characters, real people in her book, they’re not just engineers and programmers. They’re also community moderators and communicators, people who shaped the internet just as much as people who wrote the lines of code.
And so as soon as you dig up that history, you then can’t help but understand the internet as something that’s very different in the present. And therefore you can understand the future as something else as well. So if we talk about automation, then one of the works we can do is not just to hark back to some kind of golden age, but to trouble that legacy as well, to talk about who worked then and under what conditions, you know?
There’s always technological resistance. Like the Luddites, who are pretty well-known now, but the fact is that the Luddites weren’t smashers of technology; they were a social movement, performing a very violent and direct form of critique of the destruction of their livelihoods, of what those machines were doing. And so now we have many, many other tools of critique for that. But by retelling these stories, by understanding them in different ways, it’s possible to rethink what might be possible in the present.
QUOTED: "Though his prose can be dense, Bridle's analytical leaps are both illuminating and terrifying."
"Sci-fi meets the aesthetic vanguard in cyberspace, where a new metalanguage addresses problems and solutions alike."
Bridle, James: NEW DARK AGE
Kirkus Reviews. (June 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Bridle, James NEW DARK AGE Verso (Adult Nonfiction) $26.95 7, 17 ISBN: 978-1-78663-547-1
A British visual artist, journalist, and "New Aesthetic" champion offers nightmarish prophecies on the descent into darkness.
"Our vision is increasingly universal," writes Bridle, "but our agency is ever more reduced. We know more and more about the world, while being less and less able to do anything about it. The resulting sense of helplessness, rather than giving us pause to reconsider our assumptions, seems to be driving us deeper into paranoia and social disintegration." Like an Orwell of the computer age, he has been shaped by the very forces that now fill him with dread, convinced that there is a connection between climate change and information overload and between the network that nobody understands and the increased disparity between the haves and the have-nots. Though his prose can be dense, Bridle's analytical leaps are both illuminating and terrifying, suggesting that, on levels beyond surveillance and conspiracy, we have unleashed technology to establish systems of such complexity and control that it can be difficult for anyone to understand who's in charge and what they want. The new paradigm requires new language, new perspective, and new understanding. Yet we are losing data and our connection with the past as the data overflow turns the prospects for a brighter future into the new dark age of the manifesto's title. So should we abandon all hope? "Our understanding of those systems and their ramifications, and of the conscious choices we make in their design, in the here and now, remain entirely within our capabilities," he concludes. "We are not powerless, not without agency and not limited by darkness. We only have to think, and think again, and keep thinking. The network--us and our machines and the things we think and discover together--demands it."
Sci-fi meets the aesthetic vanguard in cyberspace, where a new metalanguage addresses problems and solutions alike.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Bridle, James: NEW DARK AGE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540723307/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9962e915. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A540723307
QUOTED: "Bridle isn’t just a purveyor of the armchair jeremiad, who sits there blowing filter bubbles—he does fieldwork as well on our hideous and looming fate."
"One thing about the old dark ages was that they only seemed dark in retrospect, once the dread weight of state power had been reimposed. I bet there were plenty of people besides the Goths (and the Visigoths for that matter), for whom the fall of the Roman empire was a cause for celebration. I realise this isn’t a popular view. And I expect many readers will find Bridle’s perceptive and thought-provoking book terrifying rather than enjoyable—but then as I implied at the outset, I’m very much of the glass half-empty type."
New Dark Age by James Bridle review – technology and the end of the future
The consequences of the technological revolution may be even more frightening than we thought
Will Self
Sat 30 Jun 2018 02.30 EDT
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Google Data Center in Berkeley County, South Carolina.
I suspect your enjoyment – or otherwise – of James Bridle’s New Dark Age will depend very much on whether you’re a glass half-empty, or a glass exactly-filled-to-the-halfway-mark-by-microprocessor-controlled-automatic-pumping-systems sort of a person. I like to think that while I may have misgivings about much of what the current technological revolution is visiting on us, I yet manage to resist that dread ascription “luddite”. It’s one Bridle also wishes to avoid; but such is the pessimism about the machines that informs his argument, that his calls for a new “partnership” between them and us seem like special pleading. As futile, in fact, as a weaver believing that by smashing a Jacquard loom he’ll stop the industrial revolution in its tracks.
If we’re in ignorance of what our robots are doing, how can we know if we’re being harmed?
At the core of our thinking about new technology there lies, Bridle suggests, a dangerous fallacy: we both model our own minds on our understanding of computers, and believe they can solve all our problems – if, that is, we supply them with enough data, and make them fast enough to deliver real-time analyses. To the Panglossian prospect of Moore’s Law, which forecasts that computers’ processing power will double every two years, Bridle offers up the counterexmple of Gates’s Law, which suggests these gains are negated by the accumulation in software of redundant coding. But our miscalculations concerning the value of big data are only part of the computational fallacy; Bridle also believes it’s implicated in our simple-minded acceptance of technology as a value-neutral tool, one to be freely employed for our own betterment. He argues that in failing to adequately understand these emergent technologies, we are in fact opening ourselves up to a new dark age. He takes this resonant phrase from HP Lovecraft’s minatory short story, “The Call of Cthulhu”, rather than the dark ages of historical record, although the latter may turn out to be a better point of reference for our current era. Lovecraft’s new dark age is, paradoxically, a function of enlightenment – it’s the searchlight science shines into the heart of human darkness that brings on a crazed barbarism. Bridle’s solution is to propose “real systemic literacy”, alongside a willingness to be imprecise – cloudy, even – when it comes to our thinking about the cloud.
I’m not against this; indeed, I often think that in a world crazed by its sense of certainty, the best way to stay calm is to allow yourself the luxury of doubt. But while I can see it as making good stoical sense for the individual, I’m not sure it’s sufficiently rousing to prepare humanity, en masse, to cope with what’s coming down the steely, preprogrammed track. Bridle offers us techno pessimists plenty of examples to worry about. Some – such as death by slavish adherence to GPS navigation systems, and the woeful effects of the computational fallacy – I was already familiar with; but others did give me novel heebie-jeebies.
Bizarre and abusive ‘kids’ videos, such as parodies of Peppa Pig, have appeared on YouTube.
Bizarre and abusive ‘kids’ videos, such as parodies of Peppa Pig, have appeared on YouTube. Photograph: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Att6nOP9DE
I hadn’t bitten down on the fact that the very heat generated by the internet itself is a strong factor in global warming, which pretty much nixes any view that a more wired world will be a more sustainable one. Nor was I aware of the increase in a phenomenon known as “clear-air turbulence” (although really, it speaks for itself), which may well ground a lot of commercial aviation by the middle of this century. And while I may have known at an intuitive level that the Syrian conflict had an environmental dimension to it, Bridle is the first person I’ve read who authoritatively labels it as a resource war, provoked by drought. Meanwhile, those hot and powerful secret government computers are being used to speciously survey us (he makes a convincing case for the complete uselessness of CCTV systems), while with their spare processing capacity they try to crack the prime-factoring encryption system that’s vital for online privacy and commerce.
That the US National Security Agency has already cracked some of the more commonly used prime number factors was, again, news to me. And I don’t think of the fake variety: for Bridle isn’t just a purveyor of the armchair jeremiad, who sits there blowing filter bubbles – he does fieldwork as well on our hideous and looming fate. I particularly enjoyed his inquiry into the weird and wobbly realm of British airspace and the link between drone programmes and so-called “plausible deniability” – the invisibility cloak for so much of our rulers’ dabbling in the dark arts. But perhaps the strangest and most unsettling aspect of the coming new dark age is the emergence of machine intelligence.
I suspect many readers will find Bridle’s perceptive and thought-provoking book terrifying rather than enjoyable
Here Bridle makes an excellent and possibly original point: we’re accustomed to worrying about AI systems being built that will either “go rogue” and attack us, or succeed us in a bizarre evolution of, um, evolution – what we didn’t reckon on is the sheer inscrutability of these manufactured minds. And minds is not a misnomer. How else should we think about the neural network Google has built so its translator can model the interrelation of all words in all languages, in a kind of three-dimensional “semantic space”? I’d wondered why it was that Google Translate had massively improved – moving from being a reliable provider of nonsensical silliness, to, well, an effective and instantaneous way of translating. The problem is, we have a general idea how the program is doing it – but it can’t tell us exactly; and, as Bridle observes, this is tantamount to transgressing the first of Isaac Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics – for if we’re in ignorance of what our robots are doing, how can we know if we’re being harmed?
Intelligent computer systems are already menacing us with weird products devised algorithmically and offered for sale on Amazon, as well as bizarre and abusive “kids’” videos, which are mysteriously generated in the bowels of the web, and uploaded by bots to YouTube. Bridle borrows Timothy Morton’s modish conception of the “hyperobject” as a way of discussing our inability to apprehend the totality of the risks embodied in such vast phenomena as machine intelligence and global warming – but I’m not sure that acknowledging the ungraspable nature of anything really helps us to grasp it.
Garry Kasparov plays against the IBM Deep Blue computer in 1997.
Garry Kasparov plays against the IBM Deep Blue computer in 1997. Photograph: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images
Bridle looks to so-called “centaur chess” as a way forward for our wetware: computers may now effortlessly beat the grandest of masters at the game, but one of the defeated, Garry Kasparov, has developed a fight-back method, in which humans partnered with computers can indeed regain the podium. On this basis, Bridle argues, it’s possible to conceive of a new kind of “guardianship” of our frazzled planet and its poisoned wells, one in which we all work together. This seems Pollyanna-ish as much as Panglossian to me – I’m more struck by Nicholas Carr’s observation, in his takedown of the coming era of self-driving cars, The Glass Cage, that our inability to grasp the emergent techno realm may be a function of our having devised tools that do away with our need to use tools.
Rise of the machines: has technology evolved beyond our control?
Read more
Most of us already float free from the world of making, doing, extracting and refining – and observe it indolently and imperfectly through the scumbled lens of the cloud. We carry on ditching single-use plastic, and ordering stuff from Amazon, and giving our personal information away promiscuously, not, I’d argue, because global warming and AI are too big to grasp, but because we understand only too well that real change could only be effected by a great mass of individuals. And that, as Bridle acknowledges, is an impossibility, given the new technologies atomise rather than fuse our social formations.
Still, no doubt once the microprocessors malfunction and the pumping system splutters to a halt, we’ll hopefully pick up pretty much where we left off before the Enlightenment – or possibly the Renaissance. One thing about the old dark ages was that they only seemed dark in retrospect, once the dread weight of state power had been reimposed. I bet there were plenty of people besides the Goths (and the Visigoths for that matter), for whom the fall of the Roman empire was a cause for celebration. I realise this isn’t a popular view. And I expect many readers will find Bridle’s perceptive and thought-provoking book terrifying rather than enjoyable – but then as I implied at the outset, I’m very much of the glass half- empty type.
New Dark Age by James Bridle (Verso, £16.99). To order a copy for £14.44, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
QUOTED: "Ultimately, his efforts to reconcile the limited capacity of the individual with the possibility of agency lead the author to an old-fashioned conclusion: that to effect meaningful change, it is necessary to share knowledge and build coalitions. Rather than disentanglement, New Dark Age argues convincingly for a more informed integration with the technologies we have created, made possible by new solidarities between citizens armed with the facts."
Rage against the systems: James Bridle’s new polemic is a call to arms
By Ben Eastham
That no one any longer fully comprehends the economic, political and climatic systems upon which civilisation depends might seem self-evident.
Recent and interrelated crises in each field have exposed infrastructures so complicated by technology that they defy human understanding. Yet still the public is asked blindly to trust that algorithm-driven financial markets will self-regulate, that automated information-gathering systems will not undermine the privacy of citizens, that bot-driven news-distribution networks will not subvert the public discourse underwriting democracy, that a global ecosystem catastrophically unbalanced by manmade emissions will, through further technological intervention, right itself.
In this startling call to arms, Bridle warns that this abdication of control leaves us all vulnerable: to exploitation by those able to manipulate these systems at the local level and, by extension, to the unpredictable escalation of local crises into systemic failures. If the subprime mortgage crisis or global warming illustrate the point most starkly, then most of us can also provide anecdotal evidence: this morning the Glasgow hotel in which I am staying suffered a software malfunction that locked guests out of their keycard rooms. Meaning, according to the member of staff I talked to, every guest in every room in its numerous franchises across the world.
THE SENSE OF POWERLESSNESS THAT THIS RELIANCE ON INVISIBLE INFRASTRUCTURES ENGENDERS IS, BRIDLE PROPOSES, AT THE HEART OF RECENT SOCIAL UNREST AND POLITICAL UPHEAVAL IN THE WEST
The sense of powerlessness that this reliance on invisible infrastructures engenders is, Bridle proposes, at the heart of recent social unrest and political upheaval in the West. It shouldn’t be surprising that voters suffering from the unequally distributed effects of automation, globalisation and climate change, and told by their elected governments that it is impossible to effect structural change in a global economy, are vulnerable to the simplifying falsehoods put forward by the far right. It is in the interests of those who profit from them to render these vast infrastructures invisible and illegible, in order that discussion over such change can be stonewalled.
So, in chapters devoted to themes including ‘complexity’, ‘computation’ and ‘climate’, Bridle attempts to shine a light into the darker corners of the ‘network’ in which we are enmeshed. He cites the Amazon warehouses arranged by computers into inhuman logics that its workers are forced to follow; the racial prejudices reinforced by supposedly neutral technologies like digital cameras; the always shocking fact that at the atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide predicted for the century’s end, human cognitive ability drops by 20 percent. Many of these examples will be familiar, but their collective impact illustrates Bridle’s point that the issue is not the availability of this information – we are, as even the NSA has complained, drowning in data – but its organisation into legible and compelling narratives. So New Dark Age functions as a call for literacy rather than Luddism, on the principle that the apparatuses of oppression should be reclaimed rather than destroyed.
Acknowledging that is impossible to imagine these complex ‘hyperobjects’ (the term is borrowed from Timothy Morton’s description of the Internet) in their entirety, and yet seeking to counteract the cowed awe that their contemplation entails, Bridle instead puts forward that the reader should embrace a ‘clouded’ state of ‘practical unknowing’. This attempt to formulate a unifying theory from a selection of scattered insights, however sharp, is the least convincing aspect of the book. It is not hard to see how the promise of a ‘new dark age’ might be corrupted and co-opted by those with a less progressive agenda (a fate that Bridle, who coined the term the New Aesthetic, has suffered before).
Ultimately, his efforts to reconcile the limited capacity of the individual with the possibility of agency lead the author to an old-fashioned conclusion: that to effect meaningful change, it is necessary to share knowledge and build coalitions. Rather than disentanglement, New Dark Age argues convincingly for a more informed integration with the technologies we have created, made possible by new solidarities between citizens armed with the facts.
New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle is published by Verso Books, £16.99 (hardcover). From the Summer 2018 issue of ArtReview
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