James Bridle > Quotes

“Thus paranoia in an age of network excess produces a feedback loop: the failure to comprehend a complex world leads to the demand for more and more information, which only further clouds our understanding – revealing more and more complexity that must be accounted for by ever more byzantine theories of the world. More information produces not more clarity, but more confusion.”
― James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

“The crisis of global warming is a crisis of the mind, a crisis of thought, a crisis in our ability to think another way to be. Soon, we shall not be able to think at all.”
― James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

“Imagine a system with clearly defined goals, sensors and effectors for reading and interacting with the world, the ability to recognize pleasure and pain as attractors and things to avoid, the resources to carry out its will, the legal and social standing to see that its needs are catered for, even respected. That's a description on an AI - it's also a description of a modern corporation.”
― James Bridle, Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence

“we find ourselves today connected to vast repositories of knowledge, and yet we have not learned to think. In fact, the opposite is true: that which was intended to enlighten the world in practice darkens it. The abundance of information and 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. It is on this contradiction that the idea of a new dark age turns: an age in which the value we have placed upon knowledge is destroyed by the abundance of that profitable commodity, and in which we look about ourselves in search of new ways to understand the world.”
― James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

“Uncertainty, mathematically and scientifically understood, is not the same as unknowing. Uncertainty, in scientific, climatological terms, is a measure of precisely what we do know. And as our computational systems expand, they show us ever more clearly how much we do not know.”
― James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

“We connect to the cloud; we work in it; we store and retrieve stuff from it; we think through it. We pay for it and only notice it when it breaks.”
― James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

“the big data fallacy is the logical outcome of scientific reductionism: the belief that complex systems can be understood by dismantling them into their constituent pieces and studying each in isolation. And this reductionist approach would hold if it did in practice keep pace with our experiences; in reality, it is proving to be insufficient.”
― James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

“Technology is not mere tool making and tool use: it is the making of metaphors.”
― James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

“All contemporary computation stems from this nexus: military attempts to predict and control the weather, and thus to control the future.”
― James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

“Like an air control system mistaking a flock of birds for a fleet of bombers, software is unable to distinguish between its model of the world and reality – and, once conditioned, neither are we.”
― James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

“What I think I’ve come to understand, more deeply than ever before, is that the enemy is not technology itself, but rather inequality and centralization of power and knowledge, and that the answer to these threats are education, diversity and justice. You don’t need artificial intelligence to work that out. You need actual intelligence. But more importantly, you need all the actual intelligences – every person, animal, plant and bug; every critter, every stone and every natural and unnatural system. You need a crab computer the size of the world. The problem is never technology itself; after all, remember, the computer is like the world.

I remain as excited as ever about the power and possibilities of computers and networks as I have ever been; I just abhor the structures of power, injustice, extractive industry and computational thinking in which they are currently embedded. But I hope I’ve shown, to some degree, that it doesn’t need to be this way. There are always other ways of doing technology, just as there are other ways of doing intelligence and politics. Technology, after all, is what we can learn to do.”
― James Bridle, Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence

“In what could be taken as the founding statement of computational thought, he wrote: ‘All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control.’14”
― James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

“What is needed is not new technology, but new metaphors: a metalanguage for describing the world that complex systems have wrought.”
― James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

“A simply functional understanding of systems is insufficient; one needs to be able to think about histories and consequences too. Where did these systems come from, who designed them and what for, and which of these intentions still lurk within them today?”
― James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

“But perhaps the most obvious is that despite the sheer volume of information that exists online – the plurality of moderating views and alternative explanations – conspiracy theories and fundamentalism don’t merely survive, they proliferate. As in the nuclear age, we learn the wrong lesson over and over again. We stare at the mushroom cloud, and see all of this power, and we enter into an arms race all over again.”
― James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

“Where we start to move forward is when we learn to ask questions which are less concerned with ‘Are you like us?’, and more interested in ‘What is it like to be you?”
― James Bridle, Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence

“This is the magic of big data. You don’t really need to know or understand anything about what you’re studying; you can simply place all of your faith in the emergent truth of digital information. In one sense, the big data fallacy is the logical outcome of scientific reductionism: the belief that complex systems can be understood by dismantling them into their constituent pieces and studying each in isolation. And this reductionist approach would hold if it did in practice keep pace with our experiences; in reality, it is proving to be insufficient.”
― James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

“In the case of the airport, code both facilitates and coproduces the environment. Prior to visiting an airport, passengers engage with an electronic booking system – such as SABRE – that registers their data, identifies them, and makes them visible to other systems, such as check-in desks and passport control. If, when they find themselves at the airport, the system becomes unavailable, it is not a mere inconvenience. Modern security procedures have removed the possibility of paper identification or processing: software is the only accepted arbiter of the process. Nothing can be done; nobody can move. As a result, a software crash revokes the building’s status as an airport, transforming it into a huge shed filled with angry people. This is how largely invisible computation coproduces our environment – its critical necessity revealed only in moments of failure, like a kind of brain injury.”
― James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

“Today the cloud is the central metaphor of the internet: a global system of great power and energy that nevertheless retains the aura of something noumenal and numnious, something almost impossible to grasp. We connect to the cloud; we work in it; we store and retrieve stuff from it; we think through it. We pay for it and only notice it when it breaks. It is something we experience all the time without really understanding what it is or how it works. It is something we are training ourselves to rely upon with only the haziest of notions about what is being entrusted, and what it is being entrusted to.

Downtime aside, the first criticism of this cloud is that it is a very bad metaphor. The cloud is not weightless; it is not amorphous, or even invisible, if you know where to look for it. The cloud is not some magical faraway place, made of water vapor and radio waves, where everything just works. It is a physical infrastructure consisting of phone lines, fibre optics, satellites, cables on the ocean floor, and vast warehouses filled with computers, which consume huge amounts of water and energy and reside within national and legal jurisdictions. The cloud is a new kind of industry, and a hungry one. The cloud doesn't just have a shadow; it has a footprint. Absorbed into the cloud are many of the previously weighty edifices of the civic sphere: the places where we shop, bank, socialize, borrow books, and vote. Thus obscured, they are rendered less visible and less amenable to critique, investigation, preservation and regulation.

Another criticism is that this lack of understanding is deliberate. There are good reasons, from national security to corporate secrecy to many kinds of malfeasance, for obscuring what's inside the cloud. What evaporates is agency and ownership: most of your emails, photos, status updates, business documents, library and voting data, health records, credit ratings, likes, memories, experiences, personal preferences, and unspoken desires are in the cloud, on somebody else's infrastructure. There's a reason Google and Facebook like to build data centers in Ireland (low taxes) and Scandinavia (cheap energy and cooling). There's a reason global, supposedly post-colonial empires hold onto bits of disputed territory like Diego Garcia and Cyprus, and it's because the cloud touches down in these places, and their ambiguous status can be exploited. The cloud shapes itself to geographies of power and influence, and it serves to reinforce them. The cloud is a power relationship, and most people are not on top of it.

These are valid criticisms, and one way of interrogating the cloud is to look where is shadow falls: to investigate the sites of data centers and undersea cables and see what they tell us about the real disposition of power at work today. We can seed the cloud, condense it, and force it to give up some of its stories. As it fades away, certain secrets may be revealed. By understanding the way the figure of the cloud is used to obscure the real operation of technology, we can start to understand the many ways in which technology itself hides its own agency - through opaque machines and inscrutable code, as well as physical distance and legal constructs. And in turn, we may learn something about the operation of power itself, which was doing this sort of thing long before it had clouds and black boxes in which to hide itself.”
― James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

“within it subordinate their goals to that of the collective, which pursues the three corporate objectives of growth, profitability, and pain avoidance,’ Stross writes. ‘We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals.’13”
― James Bridle, Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence

“The logical conclusion of the development of wildlife corridors and protected areas -- even mobile ones -- is that there are places which must be left to non-humans, even in a more-than-human world.
This is not a new suggestion. It goes back at least to the beginning of the twentieth century in Western culture, to the founding of National Parks in Europe and America, and it is intrinsic to non-Western conceptions of our place among the species of the planet. But there is growing awareness that it is now more urgent and must be much more extensive than a few scattered parks and sanctuaries. Indeed, there is a strong scientific and moral case that it should comprise at least half the entire Earth.”
― James Bridle, Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence

“Catch-22 exemplifies the dilemma of rational actors caught up within the machinations of vast, irrational systems. Within such systems, even rational responses lead to irrational outcomes. The individual is aware of the irrationality but loses all power to act in their own interest. Faced with the roiling tide of information, we attempt to gain some kind of control over the world by telling stories about it: we attempt to master it through narratives. These narratives are inherently simplifications, because no one story can account for everything that's happening; the world is too complex for simple stories. Instead of accepting this, the stories become ever more baroque and bifurcated, ever more convoluted and open-ended. Thus paranoia in an age of network excess produces a feedback loop: the failure to comprehend a complex world leads to the demand for more and more information, which only further clouds our understanding - revealing more and more complexity that must be accounted for by ever more byzantine theories of the world. More information produces not more clarity, but more confusion.”
― James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

“What would it mean to build artificial intelligences and other machines that were more like octopuses, more like fungi, or more like forests?”
― James Bridle, Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence

“We pay for it and only notice it when it breaks.”
― James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

“The weakness of ‘learning to code’ alone might be argued in the opposite direction too: you should be able to understand technological systems without having to learn to code at all, just as one should not need to be a plumber to take a shit, nor to live without fear that your plumbing system might be trying to kill you. The possibility that your plumbing system is indeed trying to kill you should not be discounted either: complex computational systems provide much of the infrastructure of contemporary society, and if they are not safe for people to use, no amount of education in just how bad they are will save us in the long run.”
― James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

“Computation replaces conscious thought. We think more and more like the machine, or we do not think at all.”
― James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

“Essentially a vast, space-based clock, the time signal from GPS satellites regulates power grids and stock markets. But our growing reliance on the system masks the fact that it can still be manipulated by those in control of its signals, including the United States government, which retains the ability to selectively deny positioning signals to any region it chooses.”
― James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

“One of the arguments often made in response to weak public understanding of technology is a call to increase technological education - in its simplest formulation, to learn to code. Such a call is made frequently by politicians, technologists, pundits and business leaders, and it is often advanced in nakedly functional and pro-market terms: the information economy needs more programmers, and young people need jobs in the future. This is a good start, but learning to code is not enough, just as learning to plumb a sink is not enough to understand the complex interactions between water tables, political geography, aging infrastructure, and social policy that define, shape and produce actual life support systems in society. A simply functional understanding of systems is insufficient; one needs to be able to think about histories and consequences too. Where did these systems come from, who designed them and what for, and which of these intentions still lurk within them today?”
― James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

“We can’t read water in the same way as we can’t read data…Working with it makes us more aware of the distance between ourselves and the matter under consideration: it reminds us that we share this world rather than own it. Knowledge produced through the medium of the shifting surface of a bucket of water is made in cooperation with the world, rather than by conquering it.”
― James Bridle, Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence

“Reading a book, listening to music, researching and learning: these and many other activities are increasingly governed by algorithmic logics and policed by opaque and hidden computational processes.”
― James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future