Overview

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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9781786635488

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New Dark Age is among the most unsettling and illuminating books I've read about the Internet, which is to say that it is among the most unsettling and illuminating books I've read about contemporary life. - New Yorker Lucidly argues how our enthusiasm for, and reliance on technology is working against us by undermining our ability to reliably anticipate future risks ... Bridle's multidisciplinary research deftly hopscotches across science, politics and the arts. --Frieze I expect many readers will find Bridle's perceptive and throught provoking book terrifying rather than enjoyable. --Will Self, Guardian 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 books of 2018] My copy of this book is full of underlining and notes that climb around the margins. I feel like those overwhelmed organic chemistry students, highlighting everything because it all matters and it all connects, and yet ultimately the information world he's describing--none of it makes sense. Which is kind of his point ... Dense, demanding, and totally compelling. --Barbara Fister, Inside Higher Education An extraordinary, perceptive analysis of the various ways in which the rise of information technology has obscured, rather than illuminated, the operations of power in the world, and diminished our capacity to improve it. It's brilliant and bracing. --Mark O Connell, author of To Be a Machine, Guardian (Summer reads selection) James Bridle is a master of finding contradictions within existing technologies [and] New Dark Age is an important text for the present moment. --Bernard Hay, The Quietus A masterful study of all the things approaching out of the future's night. Compelling and essential. --Warren Ellis, author of Normal and Transmetropolitan James Bridle, one of our surest guides, here offers us a widely informed, deeply felt, and occasionally terrifying course on living in and with the enveloping darkness of our time. It's a must-read for anyone who's ever wondered how we might come to terms with technological complexity, and emerge with our humanity intact. --Adam Greenfield, author of Radical Technologies 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 Technology is not the answer. Nor is it a solution. James Bridle's lucid and fearless writing instead insists on technology as an open question and urgent problem--which nevertheless needs to be confronted in order to think the present and free the future from false algorithmic certainties. --Hito Steyerl, author of Duty Free Art One image that I cannot get out of my head reading James Bridle extraordinary new book is that even as we can access vast tech capabilities we may actually know less and less. --Saskia Sassen, author of Expulsions A book-length argument for the idea that vastly proliferating knowledge--from mass surveillance, social media, artificial intelligence, and other sources--is paradoxically making the world harder to comprehend, while the technology that underlies it is creating environmental damage that we're ill-equipped to understand or solve ... Highly nuanced in its analysis of technology, and it provokes [one] to think more about the unspoken social and political assumptions underlying a lot of [the] industry. --The Verge An Orwell of the computer age. --Kirkus A startling call to arms. Argues convincingly for a more informed integration with the technologies we have created. --Ben Eastham, ArtReview The young British artist is spearheading a conceptual-art movement--'the New Aesthetic'--through Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram, as he tries to capture technology's strange effects on society. --Vanity Fair A doomy overture to a new era. A work of digital gothic in which the chills are provided by the unpredictable and unstoppable forces we've unleashed on the world in the decades since the Manhattan Project. --Hettie Judah, Vice Powerful insight and useful provocation throughout. Harrowing and fascinating. --Jamie Bartlett, Spectator Original and provoking book. --Pat Kane, New Scientist As an artist and author whose work explores the contested intersections of capitalism, surveillance, and computer intelligence, Bridle unravels these vexing issues across his new book. --Tanner Howard, Rhizome The glorification of technological progress is one of the cornerstones of the contemporary cultural and artistic mainstream, and Bridle justly stands up against it. --Nikita Dmitriev, Port An essential read on the key subjects around AI, and the dangerous feedback loops that are currently being produced. --Ben Vickers, Dazed New Dark Age is enlightening but frightening, a dystopian warning about the implications of the convergence of data and robotics, code and quantum computing, science and technology. --David Gorin, Financial Mail Brilliant and beautiful. --The Australian New Dark Age is a paradoxical work, elegiac yet futuristic, which embraces paradox and the limits of knowledge--especially the limits of knowledge that the present moment's technological advances, political instability, and environmental chaos have conferred upon us. --Tobias Carroll, Literary Hub Foreboding, at times terrifying, but ultimately motivating account of our technological present ... He insists that what is needed is not understanding, but a new language, new metaphors--a new image--that would allow us to look at the darkness directly and--hopefully--begin to see. --Orit Gatt, The White Review Touching on a wide variety of topics, including search algorithms, surveillance, climate change, and many more, Bridle makes a compelling case for pumping the brakes on technology to allow ethics to catch up. --World Literature Today [James Bridle's] approach is more accurate than the ahistorical meme that everything is suddenly fake, and more exciting than the truth-hustling of disoriented pundits. --Nathan Jurgenson, Real Life Magazine Whichever way the reader veers, the argument that we need better education about technology and more careful thought about what is it for and what is it here to do is a compelling one. --Tim Sandle, Digital Journal

Author Information

James Bridle is a literary editor, technologist, writer, journalist, and visual artist. He writes for Guardian, Observer, Wired, Frieze, Atlantic, and many other publications.

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