Review: James Bridle, ‘New Dark Age—Technology and the End of the Future’ - New Edition 2023
Review of James Bridle’s New Dark Age - Technology and the End of the Future (Verso Books) 320 pages
Abstract
In New Dark Age - Technology and the End of the Future, the writer, artist and technologist, James Bridle skilfully interrogates how our ‘computer dominated’ age of digital networks, mass surveillance, and data driven cultural industries have come to stifle, not only the advancement of human intellectual thought, but also eschew our ability to participate and shape the way these technologies and digital systems are consumed and used in contemporary technocratic culture. Spanning a diverse range of topics and disciplines from philosophy, art history, literature, political science, and geography and tallied to an almost inexhaustible research base, Bridle’s text adds to the growing call that rampant technological innovation is steering the planet towards global climate catastrophe. Now on the precipice of the AI revolution, Bridle offers an updated afterword that considers some of the most profound developments in computer intelligence seen across the creative fields—the consequences of which point towards a complex future in which our relationship to machines must be reassessed to avoid sinking ever deeper into a form of technological solipsism.
Reviewed by Henry Powell
‘Over the last century’, remarks James Bridle in the opening of New Dark Age, ‘technological acceleration has transformed our planet, our societies, and ourselves, but it has failed to transform our understanding of these things’ (2) Of concern to the author is the eye-watering volumes of information, data and ‘knowledge’ that now circulates and imbeds itself as part of this technological revolution. The maxim of scientific enlightenment which postulated that, ‘the more knowledge- [and] information leads to better decision making’ (10) has given way in the digital era to a form of compartmented ‘computational thinking’ – a belief that the most urgent global issues of our time can be solved with ever more complicated and sophisticated forms of computing. Bridle contends that the sensory overload of digital data coupled with exponentially increasing computer power precludes both our ability to see and make sense of the world, while ‘the plurality of worldviews now accessible to us through the internet are not producing a coherent consensus reality, but one riven by fundamentalist insistence on simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post factual politics’ (11). Postmodernity and its postulations of subjective truth have only added to this miasma of thought.
How then can we untangle ourselves from this epistemological blindfold Bridle asks? The answer is not the total disconnection from the internet as others might advocate (Crary; 2022) but a form of ‘systemic literacy’— Bridle’s shorthand for a re-formed understanding of the way digital technology and its infrastructure(s) function in ways that are often invisible and interwoven’ (12). Thus, it’s only through the optics of ‘new metaphors’ (7) that we can begin to visualise and understand how these pervasive systems are hidden in plain view. From the prosaic architecture of the NYSE Euronext Data center in Basildon (UK) which houses the servers that maintain the continuous flow of liquid capital across the globe; to the omni-present contra-trail clouds produced by commercial jet liners; to the progress of automated machinery in supermarkets, online retail chains and high frequency trading desks; all around us we see the developments of our ingenuity and technological prowess but rarely comprehend, according to Bridle, their ‘radical interconnectedness’ (5).
Thus, each chapter of the text attempts to expose this interconnecting apparatus as a feature of a ‘New Dark Age’— ‘a place where the future is radically uncertain and the past irrevocably contested, but where we are still capable of speaking directly to what is in front of us, of thinking clearly and acting with justice’ (252). While Bridle stresses the opportunities in living and thinking through these technologies by removing their dark ideological shroud, at times, it’s hard to see how one can be both complicit in these technological systems yet at the same time, adopt a critical distance to them.
Nonetheless, in his opening chapter, ‘Computation’, Bridle presents a fascinating account of the birth of computational thinking. Tracing its roots back to the scientific study of meteorology and the drive to better predict and understand the incongruity of the weather. The author shows how these early pioneers of weather forecasting helped to sow the seeds in the creation of computers that could trawl through and analyse vast quantities of data. This nascent capability in computer programming was quickly recognised by U.S scientists working on The Manhattan Project. Bridle then traces out a historic reading of the computer to argue we have come to view machines as modern-day truth tellers, giving rise to the concept of ‘Automation bias’. I.e., If a computer is doing a task for us, it must be faster, better, and smarter than any human intervention. This misplaced confidence in computer ability spans everything from, spellchecks, GPS navigation to autopilot software. Consequently, today, ‘computation has become the foundation of our thought’ (43).
‘Climate’ analyses the complex and often antagonistic relationship between the growth of technology and concerns for the environment. The opening case study examines the perilous ecological situation facing the Siberian Tundra with its warming permafrost. In 2017, notes Bridle, the melting landscape released ‘17 million tons’ (49) of methane into the atmosphere. As the artic landscape continues to cede ice, new oil and gas fields are brought online—releasing further CO2 into the atmosphere. It’s a destructive feedback loop that brings disastrous consequences.
Bridle then invites us to compare two images. One is a satellite image of the Siberian landscape with its spongy mottled ‘pingo’ mounds spread across the permafrost like little volcanos. The other is a magnified photo of human brain tissue afflicted by spongiform encephalopathy, otherwise known as CJD. The comparison couldn’t be starker or more shocking to the viewer. They look identical. And the parallels go beyond the superficial. Unless we radically reimagine our relationship to the delicate ecosphere, we are destined to create a diseased world riven by freak weather events, ecological destruction, and mass areas of the globe rendered inhospitable to man. It’s metaphors like this and others throughout the text that makes Bridle’s arguments so compelling and powerful. The commentary on the chemical processes that underlie climate change are similarly interesting and provocative. Just a modest 500ppm rise in the concentrate of CO2 in the atmosphere has been shown to cause cognitive impairment and clouded judgement to the brain—yet as the chapter alarmingly details, the streets of London regularly top such metrics.
‘Complexity’ charts how the rise of mass automation is changing traditional notions of work and labour. It is no surprise that as the capabilities of technology increase those at the bottom of the social strata suffer inexorably— cheap labour is now routinely augmented by machine technology and digital infrastructure creating further social and economic division. ‘The internet itself helps shape this path to inequality, as network effects and the global availability of services produce a winner-takes-all marketplace’ (113). Bridle examines how the global retail giant Amazon fuses automation, computer intelligence and neoliberal governance to drive worker speed and productivity in their sprawling distribution centres. Named ‘Chaotic Storage’ (114) in a nod to its outwardly perplexing item arrangement, Bridle describes how operatives working inside these monolithic structures use a hand-held GPS device that leads them to each item—the seemingly illogical placement of products renders pickers effectively ‘blind’ and wholly reliant on their digital device. Worker speed is meticulously tracked and logged, turning each one into a moving algorithm. While Bridle’s research makes for chilling reading the indoctrination towards neoliberal performativity is already well underway throughout technocratic Western societies—think Smart watches, fitness trackers and productivity apps (see Bauman; 2012, Zubroff; 2019, Alphin; 2021).
‘Cognition’ explores the drive to develop smart computers and neural networks that have the capacity to learn. Once again, Bridle shows how the U.S military has been spearheading these technologies for decades—often with unforeseen consequences. For example, the U.S Army’s failed autonomous tank detection program which attempted to program a machine that could identify hidden military vehicles on the battlefield. It’s another story of hubris that gets to the heart of a perennial problem creating “intelligent machines”: ‘whatever artificial intelligence might come to be, it will be fundamentally different, and ultimately inscrutable, to us’ (136). Thus, any future shared with Artificial Intelligence must be cognizant to these differences. Yet, it’s not just that AI technology behaves in ways that are wholly alien, unpredictable, and illogical to us. As Bridle brilliantly shows later, our programming of machines is similarly flawed. Take the Nikon Coolpix digital camera or the Hewlett-Packard Pavilion webcam; both examples of ‘encoded biases’ (142) in which they fail to detect physiological features of non-Caucasians: ‘The past is a very racist place’ notes the author’ and we only have data from the past to train Artificial Intelligence’ (144). If we are to create a more equal world, then, we must, as the text suggests, identify how to create inclusive, non-discriminatory digital products that are freed from inherent cultural bias.
‘The failure to comprehend a complex world leads to the demand for more and more information, which only further clouds understanding’ (188) begins Bridle in ‘Conspiracy’—a fascinating chapter which details how social media, mass-communication technology, and our own flawed social psychology has across the ages, fuelled a litany of conspiracy narratives. From the birth of GCHQ which denied its existence to the public for decades to the ‘Chem Trails’ allegedly sprayed into the upper atmosphere as part of military research, to the continuous post 9/11 claims of a government cover-up— the paranoia and feeling that there is some “truth” hidden from us is both pervasive and entrenched throughout human history. Yet, as the chapter demonstrates, this ‘grey zone’ (214) in which “truth” mingles alongside ‘unprovable facts’ and ‘provable falsehoods’ can be beneficial to culture that tries to reduce reality into a ‘rigid binary’ (214) of understanding. Bridle himself puts it like this: ‘the network that brings us knowledge wraps around us, refracting our perspective into a million points of view, simultaneously illuminating and distorting us’ (206).
The latter section of the text exemplified through the chapters, ‘Concurrency’ and ‘Cloud’ consider developments around the digital platform YouTube and its growth towards video content aimed at young children, and later, the drive by social media organisations such as Google and Facebook to capture our personal data for profit. YouTube for example, is shown to have systemic ‘racial and gender bias’ (224) in its presentation of video content, while at the same time create the conditions for a vicious feedback loop in which algorithms create playlists that keep young users plugged into a repetitive cycle of endless consumption. Besides the disturbing metrics that point towards a Western culture now brought up fetishizing the ‘unboxing’ (216) of new products, the chapter laments how visual distraction has become the modus operandi in celebrating the ideals of banal consumerism.
In the updated (2023) afterword Bridle explores the growing commercialisation of AI learning programs such as ‘Open AI’ and their burgeoning influence across popular consumer culture. In particular, he discusses how intelligent computer software now has the capability to generate artistic creations based on the ‘wholesale appropriation of existing images’ stored on the internet (252). An activity that not only blurs the rules and regulations surrounding intellectual property, but as Bridle agues, erodes the idea of human agency and definitions of ‘creativity’.
In conclusion, New Dark Age is a captivating force of scholarship. Written in clear, non-jargon prose. Bridle’s text skilfully pulls back the ideological curtain of technology to show how many of the digital innovations, services, and products we have come rely on in the modern world are tied to a darker logic that contain invisible political fault lines and commercial interests that may not have been created to make us free and independent thinkers. Bridle’s engagement with these topics would be a valuable resource to readers interested in digital technology, cultural politics, and environmental policy.
References
Alphin, Caroline (2021) Cyberpunk and Neoliberalism: Living on the Edge of Burnout, Routledge.
Bauman Zygmunt and David Lyon. (2013). Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation. Cambridge UK: Polity Press.
Crary, Jonathan (2022) Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World. Verso Books.
Zuboff, S., & Schwandt, K. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Profile Books.
Henry Powell holds a PhD from Kingston University. His research interests include performance studies, visual culture, and contemporary political philosophy. Henry has published book reviews, articles, and blog posts that critique developments in techno-culture, digital representation, and educational discourse.
Email: Hpowell98@gmail.com
