New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

by James Bridle

“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 YorkerAs the world around us increases in technological complexity, our understanding of it diminishes. Underlying this trend is a single the belief that our existence is understandable through computation, and more data is enough to help us build a better world. In reality, we are lost in a sea of information, increasingly divided by fundamentalism, simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics. Meanwhile, those in power use our lack of understanding to further their own interests. Despite the apparent accessibility of information, we’re living in a new Dark Age. From rogue financial systems to shopping algorithms, from artificial intelligence to state secrecy, we no longer understand how our world is governed or presented to us. The media is filled with unverifiable speculation, much of it generated by anonymous software, while companies dominate their employees through surveillance and the threat of automation. In his brilliant new work, leading artist and writer James Bridle surveys the history of art, technology, and information systems, and reveals the dark clouds that gather over our dreams of the digital sublime.

Genres: Nonfiction, Technology, Politics, Science, Philosophy, Theory, Sociology

357 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2018

About the author

From https://jamesbridle.com/about:

James Bridle (b. 1980) is a writer, artist, journalist, and technologist.

Reviews

[Mehrsa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book had some real bright spots--the introduction was riveting and made me giddy about the book's possibilities. But it did not meet expectations. I've been waiting for a philosophical take on the internet age (the Neil Postman of the era) to tell us how the medium has changed the message and structure of modern life. The introductory thoughts of the book were as close as I've seen anyone get. The other books about the internet age are all the same--it's killing our brains and attention or the internet will fix everything. This book is on the pessimistic side, but each chapter just catalogs a bunch of problems of new tech without a coherent theory. I already know about surveillance and algorithms and worker abuse and climate change. Tech did not create all these problems and I don't think it will fix them. What I had hoped the book would get at were the profound and higher order problems of community, politics, etc. I think there is something to say here and no one has quite articulated it--I guess in the way I want to see it articulated. Maybe I'll just keep re-reading Neil Postman

[Fatma Al Zahraa Yehia · Rating 2 out of 5]

نجمتان ونصف
هل ستُحسِن "التقانة" أو التكنولوجيا مستقبل هذه الأرض؟

للمؤلف نظرة سوداوية للمستقبل كما هو واضح من عنوان الكتاب، وتلك نظرة لا يستطيع أي عاقل أن ينفي صحتها. يطرح في هذا الكتاب على أرض الواقع مدى نجاح أو فشل تلك التقنيات في خلق عالم أكثر مثالية، وما الثمن الذي تدفعه البشرية الأن وفي المستقبل للإعتماد الكلي والتام على الألة.

في الحقيقة لم أستطع الإلمام بكيفية تنظيم وعرض الكتاب. فقد بدت الكثير من الفصول وعناوينها متشابهة في موضوعاتها. كما أن تمهيد أو "فرشة" الكاتب لكل فصل من الفصول كانت من أكثر أساليب الكتابة "الغير أدبية" تشتتاً التي شهدتها. فقد كنت اقرأ صفحتان في بداية كل فصل، وأقدح زناد فكري محاولةً فهم ما يريد المؤلف أن يقوله، إلى أن أُدرك بعد عناء موضوع هذا الفصل. ثم أحاول ثانية أن أفهم ما علاقة مقدمة الفصل بموضوعه، فلا أجد أي رابط غير انه كان عنده حكاية عاوز يحكيها وخلاص.

أستطيع أن أقول أنني استمتعت ب "روح" الكتاب أكثر من الكتاب نفسه. للكاتب رؤية تشاؤمية لمستقبل عالم يتحكم به قلة من المنتفعين الذين يتقلدون مفاتح إدارته من خلال الإله الجديد "التقنية"، والذين يمضي في ركابهم بتأييد أعمى مؤمني هذا الإله الجديد الذين سيُغرقهم "الطوفان" في النهاية كما سيُغرق الجميع.

يتناول ذلك من خلال تغير المناخ واخطاء التقنية الكارثية، والانهيار الكبير لعدد الوظائف المتاحة بسبب سيطرة الألة الأخذة في الالغاء التدريجي لقدرة الانسان العقلية والجسدية، والاستسلام الأعمى لكل ما يُعرض أو يُقال. والرعب الجديد، كيف تتغلغل الهواتف الذكية داخل عقولنا وتقرأ لنا افكارنا وتتحكم بها.

الكتاب مهم ويلمس الكثير من القضايا الهامة، ولكن عرضه لم يكن بالسلاسة التي تُمكن القارىء من الاستعياب الكامل لافكاره

[Alexandre Coates · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cannot sing the praises of this book enough, it is the kind of thing I have long wanted to read, and here it is, better thought out than I could have hoped. I have thought over many of the topics in this book before, and was still inspired by the richness of thought on display.

The book covers, in readable and clear prose, the various ways technology not only works, but encourages us to think. How by asserting that technology is 'neutral' we blind ourselves to its origins and its aims. Beyond all this the author makes one point, fittingly, very clear. Despite the origins and complications of these systems. The military origins of GPS, computation, the internet. Nobody designed the world, none of this was deliberate, everyone is slightly baffled and confused. The theories don't work, conspiracies run rampant, and we all see a different world from the selfsame sky.

We cannot ban the world, unspool the optical fibres, or grasp buildings and force them back into the ground. The world is here, and this book is a call to say even if we don't understand it, we must still aim to address it. When things are unknowable, we cannot lean into the notion that more data will be the solution, the solution is more thinking. Freer, wider thinking.

As the book says in the first chapter, our tools enourage us to think a certain way, but there are so many ways to use tools if we step back and really think. We must re-enchant our tools, if we see them not as natural, colossal inevitablities, but as things made for one purpose, which can be utilised for others. Well then we have a chance here and now in the present. After all, in an uncertain world, the only time to act is now.

I cannot recommend this book enough, go read it!

[Bryan Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started James Bridle's New Dark Age thinking it was another entry in the recent spate of "techlash" books. The subtitle, Technology and the End of the Future, is a hint. And the book does follow the tradition laid out by Carr, Morozov, Zuboff, Lanier, etc... yet it also heads in some very different directions.

tl;dr version - I thought this was going to target Silicon Valley, but instead the book reaches more broadly, seeing our world entering a confused, flailing epoch because of many forces, not just technological ones. It uses cloud as a key term, starting from cloud computing, but inflating it to mean a cloudiness of understanding.

New Dark Age does spend a lot of time criticizing technology. Big data, AI, drones... all come under scrutiny, and in many of the ways critics have been following of late. The digital world threatens privacy and institutions, reproducing racial inequalities and exacerbating economic ones, spreading poor information habits and content, while adding to climate change. These technologies "are potentially catastrophic," even computer simulations (15; chapter 2). Bridle offers some new ways into these issues, such as tracing the history of computing from British meteorology. His metaphors are fascinating, like comparing data not to oil, but to atomic power (248-9).

He also follows some observers in finding that human-machine collaboration can be more effective than either people or computers acting alone. A chess legend has made this case, but I'm charmed by the term given to a Google AI protocol: the Optometrist Algorithm ("a stochastic perturbation method combined with human choice") (99, 160). Michael Greer tweeted that the book is "less dark than the title might imply", and this is evidence for that view.

So where does New Dark Age branch off? To begin with, Bridle includes non-technological forces among the drivers of darkness. For example, climate change threatens (among other things!) to erode the physical infrastructure of the digital world, gnawing at cables and data centers (58). Increasing amounts of carbon in the human environment may actually threaten human cognition (73-5). The book sees the digital world making climate change worse, but doesn't blame the planetary crisis solely on bitcoin mining.

Similarly, Bridle spends time updating us on the crisis afflicting scientific research, noting that the pace of discovery has slowed down in some fields. In the pharma world this is dubbed "Eroom's Law" (Moore's Law, with "Moore" spelled backwards). The replication crisis, the shocking inability of researchers to reproduce some key discoveries, is sowing doubt across some fields. Bridle sees some role for tech here (see below), but again, doesn't ascribe blame solely to silicon.

While most tech critics avoid economics, or simply subsume markets and finance to technology, Bridle actually draws out the importance of huge economic forces. A good passage describing the quiet interweaving of data networks through poor neighborhoods doesn't see this as an effect of sinister silicon, but as high-powered finance capital at work (106ff). (But see below)

State power: while most tech critics focus on technology companies and either ignore governments or call for their assistance, New Dark Age carefully points out the role of states in driving technology's negative effects. Chapter 7 in particular dwells on military and intelligence agencies as using digital tools to cloak their operations, while expanding their ability to unjustly probe our own. The conclusion calls out states and allied businesses as imperial and colonial (246-7)

All of these forces, technological and non-, come together in Bridle's modified use of the term "cloud." Cloud computing is only part of the meaning. Bridle extends the metaphor to describe the ways increased information backfires into reducing knowledge, something that obscures our awareness, that not only hosts content but also blots and obscures. "Nothing is clear anymore, nor can it be." (72) "Cloud" also means "network" in a similarly detourned sense:

to include us and our technologies in one vast system - to include human and nonhuman agency and understanding, knowing and unknowing, within the same agential soup. (5)

Network thinking can be very positive, done right, as the network "can be a guide to thinking other uncertainties, making such uncertainties visible..." (76)

Network, cloud: Bridle wants us to rethink technology's language, "re-enchat[ing]... all our tools..." (13) If we think in terms of clouds and networks, understood in New Dark Age terms, we may be better prepared to understand computing and the world it helps shape through a cloud hermeneutics (134).

However, at times New Dark Age overfocuses on technology. The chapter on computing history and simulation, for example, charges technology with being "allied to a concentration of power" (34), yet at that point quietly lets the Cold War military - that immense concentration of power! - off the hook. Bridle's charge that computation thinking helps us confuse the map for the territory is one that applies to other, also influential fields, such as macroeconomics (dinged for precisely this point in 2008) or the modern state, in James Scott's analysis. A criticism of digital mapping failures should have noted that people have suffered from non-digital mapping mistakes.* A criticism of finance networks working through spaces occupied by underfunded hospitals doesn't quite land as a tech problem (110-111). The description of Amazon's workers being strictly controlled by software somehow misses a century of "scientific management."** Criticisms of Amazon and Volkswagen focus on tech and leave business, or neoliberalism, off the hook (119-120).

At other times New Dark Age zeroes in on technology's costs without noting its benefits. A discussion of mapping software correctly notes information that's left out, but fails to admit the resulting tool is actually quite useful, despite that flaw (35-6). Bridle argues that "computation... occludes the vast inequalities of power that it both relies upon and reproduces," yet is silent about the way millions use that same computation to expose, understand, and resist power (39). The discussion of mounting problems in scientific research does admit that technology helps correct it:

frauds are also being revealed by a series of connected, network effects: the increasing openness of scientific practice, the application of technology to the analysis of scientific publications, and the increasing willingness of other scientists - particularly junior ones - to challenge results. (88)

One page complains that new taxi drivers in London can get up to speed on that city's road system more quickly than they did in the past, and it's not clear that this is a bad thing. (119) To be fair, Bridle allows that some of us see the internet as "allow[ing] many to realize and express themselves"... only to damn the entire thing by concluding that our use of the net is for ends "overwhelmingly violent and destructive." (229) No evidence is adduced for this claim.

Further, Bridle's account of information problems - overload, a lack of consensus reality, conspiracies flourishing - admits no existing way for us to address them, which misses key realities. Media/information/digital literacy makes no appearance, nor do librarians. There's also a contradiction in the information discussion, as at certain points the book argues that the digital world has shattered consensus, while at others claiming computation thinking forces us into single, too simple thoughts (44).

There are also some curiously too-quick dismissals. Bridle slams geoengineering and new developments in material science in less than a sentence, without citation (64). Hollywood is paranoid, but it's not clear what that means (130). The charge that tech companies "are still predominantly white" (143-4) manages to both ignore the large numbers of Asians in those firms, disproportionate to their representation in the general population, while ignoring the fact that the majority of American adults are white. An early chapter makes good use of an 1884 Ruskin lecture, but then mistakingly sees it describing, not anticipating, World War I's battlefields, a generation later (195).

Overall, recommended, for all of its flaws.

*In one margin I jotted down a note about the Donner Party, misled by Hastings' Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California, because that's how I think.
**In Zamiatin's great dystopia We the doomed denizens must conform many physical activities to Taylorist strictures.

[Bookish Dervish · Rating 5 out of 5]

كتاب يستحق كل دقيقة أنفقتها عليه. يتناول موضوع تغفل عنه الكثير من الدراسات المطروحة بالعربية سواء أكانت مترجمة أم مكتوبة باللغ العربية أصالة.
ها قد عدنا للعصور المظلمة من جديد. هذه المرة سنعاني من تغول التكنولوجيا بدل الطاعون، و عوض المجاعات، سنضطر للتعامل مع تلوث خانق و تغير مناخي سيغير الحياة بشكل درامي، و الأسوأ من هذا كله أنه لا أحد يسيطر على المنحى المتصاعد لتحكم التكنولوجيا بحيواتنا بله لا أحد يفهم ما سيؤول إليه الوضع في النهاية و رغم ذلك، يتحمس الكثيرون لِ و ضد التكنولوجيا.
الإدمان المرضي على وسائل التواصل الإجتماعي، دولة المراقبة بالكامرات
CCTV as Big Brother,
الأخبار الزائفة و نظريات المؤامرة المبالغ فيها...... كلها تجليات مخيفة لما يفرضه علينا عصر التكنولوجيا الذي نكابده حاليا بغض الطرف عن كل الإيجابيات المحتملة.........
كيف سنجهز أبنائنا للتعامل مع ما تفرضه التكنولوجيا؟ هل تؤثر الأصول العسكرية المحضة لبعض الإختراعات على منحى تطور تعاملنا معها؟ (gps, the net,.....)

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Based on the title NEW DARK AGE alone, we might well go in expecting author James Bridle to take on the roll of canary in the coalmine. If carbon ideologues cannot stop carping on their mandate to keep the lights turned on, we might expect Bridle to perhaps paint a picture of an encroaching world in which our thoughtless burning of fossil fuels has made it so that our lights cannot stay on anymore. This is not, in fact, the actual meaning of Bridle's iteration of "dark world." It is less a matter of there being no future than that the future is already here. Things will get worse, naturally, environmental calamity especially so, but our dark world is already here and has been forged by runaway computation, technological opacity, and the overflow of information (productive as this is of a multiplicity of contradictory, divisive, and over-simplified master narratives). This is the age of the network and Bridle insists that we must think the network system-wide. There is too much data and we cannot know how the intelligent machines we have produced think. Data, rather then taking us to some future point where all will be revealed, finds us in a world we can only faintly know; our perplexity and incapacity will only grow. It is not the particulars of our network that are problematic. All of our prejudices and liabilities have been brought to bear from the very inception of the apparatus, and as technologies with a military origin become increasingly woven into the fabric of everyday life, we become more exploited, more frustrated, and our societies more fractious. NEW DARK AGE is structured in ten chapters each beginning with the letter C, from "Chasm" to "Cloud." The cloud itself appears at the beginning and is brilliantly used to represent overarching opacity. Bridle: "the first criticism of the 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 or faraway place, made of water vapour 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 network that spans the earth and conditions the world (as an ongoing culmination of human endeavour) is both virtual and all too actual. Data and computation cannot think our world. Bridle insists that only we, though positioned in the darkness of the shadow cast by that which we have built, can do that. Using data to predict the future is a losing cause; we see it fail more and more. The metadata accumulated by mass-surveillance produces far too much information to be of much use to intelligence agencies. Algorithms become just another tool of exploitation, confusion, and systematic derangement. Cambridge Analytica, troll farms, and Russian interference are emblematic. The Russians especially are a case in point. Viewers of Adam Curtis's HYPERNORMALIZATION will be familiar with the temper of revelations here: the Russians are less interested in cherry-picking Western leaders or pushing measures like Brexit through than they are in producing mass confusion and animus upon which they can capitalize. In the end it becomes all but impossible to disentangle all the players. Our economics and technology are inherently divisive and they are in overdrive. The subtitle of Bridle's book may be misleading. It is not that we have no future left. Quite the contrary. We live in darkness and there is no way out. What do we do? NEW DARK AGE ends by suggesting that the onus is upon us to become provisional guardians of our world, too complex to fully fathom and wholly impossible to steer though it is. Deeper than this outright (though somewhat vague) call to arms, is what I would call a spiritual thread running through the book. Full disclosure: like all readers I bring my own horizon to bear in my encounters with texts. I happen to be an twelve-stepping recovering alcoholic, and to me the primary spiritual principal from which all efficacious spiritual business sprouts is acceptance. We are not excused from taking action. We must. That is the only way to live. But we have no dominion over people, places, and things outside of our control. Submit to this fact ... or live in endless perturbation. At the end of his chapter on "Conspiracy," Bridle speaks of living in the "gray zone." The gray zone "allows us to sample from the myriad of explanations that our limited cognition stretches like a mask over the vibrating half-truths of the world. It is a better approximation of reality than any rigid binary encoding can ever hope to be -- an acknowledgment that all our apprehensions are approximations, and all the more powerful for being so. The gray zone allows us to make peace with the otherwise-irreconcilable, conflicting worldviews that prevent us from taking meaningful action in the present." It is not a matter of finding our way out of darkness but rather of finding a way to live within it; this is what prompts me to speak of the underpinning spiritual register of NEW DARK AGE. I appreciate the reminder that one can live in these times, contrary to the leanings of the species at large, in a state of emotional sobriety and connection.

[Marián Tabakovič · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pochmúrne analýzy súčasného stavu spoločnosti, ktoré varujú pred tým, čo prichádza, sú mojím obľúbeným subžánrom. Ako keby mi nestačilo to, čo každý deň žijeme.

Temný novovek na to ide cez našu čoraz väčšiu závislosť na technológiách, ktoré sa nám vymykaju spod kontroly. Všetko sa neustále zrýchľuje, my sa topíme v dátach a prestávame rozumieť tomu, ako fungujú algoritmy, ktoré nám zabezpečujú čoraz viac každodenných činností. Možno sme už dosiahli zlom poznania, keďže nad niektorými vecami (klíma, predpovedanie počasia, obsahy sociálnych platforiem, obchodovanie na burze) máme čoraz menšiu kontrolu.

A propos, klíma. Zvyšujúca sa koncentrácia CO2 v ovzduší má okrem otepľovania planéty ešte jeden nepríjemný efekt - je ďalšou vecou, ktorá nás osprosťuje. Ak pôjde všetko tak ako doteraz, na konci storočia bude vo vzduchu toľko oxidu uhličitého, že budeme ako v nonstop vydýchanej izbe a naše kognitívne schopnosti budú znížené cca o štvrtinu. Čiže máme čoraz menšiu schopnosť niečo s tým urobiť, čo je v nepriamej úmere s tým, že máme čoraz väčší problém.

Všadeprítomné algoritmy nám vnucujú robotické myslenie a čoraz menej im rozumieme. Tomu, ako funguje umelá inteligencia v Googli, vraj už nerozumejú ani jej tvorcovia. Na YouTube stroje donekonečna vytvárajú iracionálne koláže iných videí v snahe generovať čo najviac klikov, vo veľkých eshopoch sa automaticky generujú produkty, ktoré v skutočnosti neexistujú (Amazon predával obaly na mobil s motívom hendikepovaného starca na vozíku, alebo tričká s nápisom Zachovaj pokoj a často znásilňuj), burzy už nefungujú ako vo filme Wall Street, ale prostrednícvom “vysokofrekvenčného obchodovania” v “čiernych bazénoch”, o ktorom prakticky nikdo netuší prakticky nič.

Tieto témy sú ťažko uchopiteľné, nedajú sa extrahovať do novinových titulkov a preto o nich ľudia neradi premýšľajú. O svete vieme čoraz viac, ale sme čoraz menej schopní konať. Čo s tým? "Čo má robiť racionálny aktér uprostred iracionálneho systému? Jeho konanie aj tak vedie k iracionálnym výsledkom," dodáva autor knihy.

[Burak · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aslında oldukça sevdim Yeni Karanlık Çağ'ı ama yazarın çok daha iyi bir eser, hatta bir başyapıt ortaya koyma fırsatını kaçırdığını düşünmeden de edemiyorum. Kitabın ilk bölümünü okuduğumda Postman'ın Teknopoli'sinin günümüzü konu alan versiyonunu okuyacağımı düşünmüştüm, umduğumu bulduğum bölümler de oldu ancak Bridle bazı kısımlarda odağını belli sektörlere gereğinden fazla yoğunlaşmıştırmış. Öyle ki kitabın anlatmaya çalıştığı derde hiçbir katkısı olmayan teknik açıklamalara dahi yer vermiş. Böyle olunca kitap arka kapağın bize hissetirdiği geniş çerçeveyi sunmakta pek başarılı olamıyor.

Yine de dediğim gibi epey iyi bir çalışma Yeni Karanlık Çağ. Bridle teknolojinin düşünme yapımızı nasıl değiştirdiğini, içinde yaşadığımız sistemin yozlaşmasına nasıl katkı sağladığını teknoloji düşmanlığı yapmadan, çok sıkıcı da olmadan anlatabilmiş. Kusurlarına rağmen günümüzde her zamankinden daha fazla ihtiyaç duyduğumuz teknoloji eleştirilerine iyi bir örnek olarak sayabiliriz Yeni Karanlık Çağ'ı.

[Hamed · Rating 4 out of 5]

ترجمة عنوان الكتاب بالعربية عصر مظلم جديد وصدرت طبعته العربية ضمن سلسلة عالم المعرفة الشهيرة ترجم الكتاب مجدي عبدالمجيد ناصر والترجمة أكثر من رائعة يقع الكتاب في عشرة فصول بداية من تاريخ الحوسبة وتكنولوچيا المعلومات ومدى سيطرتها على حياتنا من كل الجوانب في عرض علمي شائق جذاب للغاية لموضوع معقد ربط المؤلف به الذكاء الصناعي بالتغيرات المناخية بأضرار الرأسمالية مما أدى في النهاية إلى رسم صورة ديستوبية مظلمة للمستقبل

[Artem Gordin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't say it's a good book, but "New Dark Age" raises questions so important and I enjoyed it so much that I feel necessary to rate it highly. Just like its subject – the interconnected cloud/network – it sprawls in multiple directions at once and doesn't present an easily discernible narrative for a moderately educated person like me, but reads more like a collection of thoughts and approaches inspired by a common underlying philosophy.
Because of this, the book will probably seem too basic for advanced techno-philosophical readers and for a completely unprepared person it will be too alarming to process and is likely to be rejected altogether.
But I personally enjoyed it, found a lot of areas and questions worth investigating and reading on further and can recommend it to anyone who considered themselves a technological optimist, but is ready to question that notion.

[Luna · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unfortunately, I have not seen fulfilled the promises of the introduction. It could have been a great read was it not mainly consisting of a number of unremarkable remarks about the advance of technology.

[Antônio Xerxenesky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Resenha em breve

[Drewberry · Rating 5 out of 5]

How To Step Out of A Feedback Loop

This book will blow your mind, and not in the most comforting way. Technology has worked its way into every single facet of our society and in so doing has restructured and reorganized everything around itself. James Bridle takes us through the many ways in which technology has transformed the world, and the ways in which we have lost control of it, and therefore ourselves. If that doesn't sound encouraging or hopeful, you'd be right. However, as Bridle himself points out, in order to correct the system we must first reckon with it in an honest and straightforward matter. Pretending the problem doesn't exist only takes us further and further away from fixing it.

This isn't a very long book by any means, but it packs a punch. Bridle takes us through the history of computation and how it transformed industry after industry until it became inseparable from our daily lives in the Information Age. With this idea of computation as the base, we look at different elements of our modern world and how technology has shaped and molded reality into its own image.
One of the scariest themes of this book is how fragile this giant, worldwide machine really is. One chapter is about the physical infrastructure of the internet - server farms, undersea cables, antennae, etc. Even though it feels abstract and unreal, the internet and all its workings have a very tangible and real presence (and energy demand/carbon footprint). The workings of the world rely so heavily on this network, and so any disruptions can have catastrophic global impacts.
This is one of the many ways that Bridle explores what I believe to be the main theme of this book - that we as humans have become too reliant on technology to think for us, rather than using it to help us think. Computers excel at modeling situations and taking into account all its logical outcomes, but by and large lack the human capacity to push in an illogical or unexpected direction. These algorithms base their results on simulations run billions of times over, and we have allowed our own reality to be based on the simulation of a computer. (This is an oversimplification I'm sure, but I think the point still stands.) The lines between reality and simulation are increasingly blurred, and so in an ironic twist, we are increasingly living in a simulation, but it's one of our own creation.

All hope isn't lost, however. Bridle discusses situations where creations were made and new innovations discovered when humans and computers worked in tandem. Scientists using the raw computational power of a program were able to see a much broader view of the problem they were working on, but pushed it in a much different direction than the computer would have determined on its own. They were informed by the results of the computer, but not commanded by it.
I think that Bridle would be among the first to tell you the value of technology as a whole and the potential it has to inform our understanding of the world around us. However, it's only a tool. It cannot explain every facet of reality, cannot predict the future, cannot eliminate all uncertainty. When we rely on it to do so, we enter an overwhelming feedback loop of looking backwards to try and tell us which is the right step forward. An over-reliance on technology has brought us into the warped world we live in, where no matter how much data we produce, the less things make sense.

I admit I felt hopeless at the beginning of this book because it laid bare so many of the problems with how technology has used, as well as the sheer scale of these problems. However I think there's an optimism infused here, even within the oftentimes brutal honesty. Technology is a tool - the scale of technology in the modern world is far beyond a simple hammer or spear, but it is still a tool, albeit a much more pervasive one. We have lost sight of this, and become far too reliant on this tool to tell us exactly what to do, all the time. I don't think the solution is to get rid of all technology, and I don't think Bridle would advocate that either. If there is a solution to all this, I think it begins with rethinking our relationship with data and tech - using it to help and support us, but not to lead us. If we can start to think with technology instead of trying to make it think for us, we might have a chance at undoing some of the damage we've caused. But first we have to take that step forward, for ourselves.

[Steffi · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Tech stuff’, actually not my cup of tea which is probably a very stupid thing to say in 2018 where every aspect of our lives is in one way or another influenced by ‘the internet’ and ‘technology’ and ‘artificial intelligence’. Global financial capitalism would in this form not be possible without it. And maybe that’s part of what the book ‘The new dark age’ (VERSO, 2018) is about. As the world around us increases in technological complexity, our understanding of it becomes less. The underlying idea is that our existence is understandable through computation and the idea that if we had all the data and means to compute it we could fix just about any social problem. I am not so much interested in the tech stuff – although it is indeed unsettling of what is technologically possible and its implications on power (surveillance and manipulation) etc – but more so in its ideological implication. I feel like the idea of reasoning through computation is an expression or reinforcement or both of the technocratic post-political ideological hegemony. I am not sure if this is what the authors says, but that was my semi-epiphany: computers don’t take over humans because they think like us, but because we started to think like them (technocratic, essentially a variation of supply-demand thinking).

From my own professional experience, the McKinsey approach to any social problem (public health in Africa, food franchise in the west, running a refugee camp) is based on precisely this idea of computing maximum efficiency and effectiveness based on quantifiable input data (dividing complexity into isolated process units that can be improved against KPIs) – this kind of development work could soon or probably already be undertaken by computers/ AI. Not that I understand a lot about this but this kind of technocratic thinking doesn’t need humans anymore, it doesn’t need critical reflection or normative choices. I was thinking that especially today’s apolitical humanitarian responses– if you add to this GPS and other data – could be easily designed by computers, then dispatching and tracking the required supplies from the most efficient hub through drones. I can totally see this replacing NGOs trying to figure out stuff (essentially logistics stuff – who needs what quantity where and when) that technology could probably solve in tens of seconds and that Amazon and General Motors have figured out decades ago. Donors or crowd funders could then push a button whether they want the drones to dispatch or not or to whom. The future of humanitarian aid. Imagine the amount of time saved in coordination meetings 😊 I know I am VERY late in the game but I can kind of see where all this 21st century is headed.

[Natalia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting take on AI and the current state of technology - definitely worth reading.

[Paz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pfff, I gave up.

I didn't finish it, although I really attempted to complete it. Boring, disappointing, hardly new info is developed.

This could be a blog post.

[Mohamed Ateaa · Rating 5 out of 5]

ممتع جدا
يحتاج عدة مرات لفهمه
ارشحه كثيرا
موجود في اكشاك الصحافة بمصر بسعر ١٥ج مصري

[Moh. Nasiri · Rating 4 out of 5]

From social media addiction to fake news to mass surveillance, new technologies have changed our lives, our societies, and even our planet – often, in ways we hadn’t initially anticipated.

Once hailed as the harbingers of a new enlightenment, the internet and other important tools of our networked world seem to have engendered new genres of social and political division, violence and abuse, misinformation and conspiracy theory. Amidst a sea of information, we seem to be plunging into a new dark age: a period where we are able to gather more and more data on our complex world, and yet seem to understand less and less of it.

Now more than ever, we need to learn to think critically through all the uncertainty. We need to investigate the technologies that shape our world and our thinking, and examine where they came from, how they function, and who they serve. These blinks will lay bare some of the vast and unexpected ways that new technologies affect us — and why and how they came to do so.

Conspiracy theories provide the comfort of simple narratives in a complex world.

Since the beginning of history, humans have been inclined to spin complex events into simple stories to make sense of the world. In a way, our conception of history is, itself, an example of oversimplification.
Though conspiracy theories provide the comfort of reducing our frightening chaotic world into a simple narrative, these can turn out to be just as frightening.

In order to live with meaning in a new dark age, we need to abandon computational optimism and embrace complexity.
British mathematician and architect Clive Humby was hinting at the drawbacks of computation when he coined the phrase “data is the new oil” in 2006. In his original statement, he went on to explain that like oil, data can’t be used in its unrefined state. In order to be of value it needs to be broken down and analyzed.

Instead of focusing on collecting progressively more data in order to predict increasingly complex events, we need to learn to think consciously and critically about where our data is coming from, what it's being used for, and who owns it. We need to closely examine the global technological networks that produce and use this data, and the ways we can change them for the better. This is the only way we can bring meaning to this new dark age of our making.

Final Summary

While new technologies of the digital age allow us to connect, collect and share information, they’re ushering us into a new dark age, where the world seems more complex and confusing than ever before. This is because, as examples from early computing, history, and science demonstrate, more data doesn’t always produce better results. Moreover, when new technologies are used for capitalist aims, they tend to perpetuate and deepen existing power structures. That’s why, if we want to live meaningfully in the present, we need to start questioning the origin, function, and purpose of our technologies.
.....
summary from Blinkist.com

[Paulo Reis · Rating 5 out of 5]

If the Talking Cricket would write a book about information technology, this would be it.
Divided in thematic chapters, each one on a specific view/topic on how information systems is transforming the world and ourselves, the author presents a critical reflection on the dangers of the optimistic view of technology as the panacea for all problems.
From climate change to biased AI or Twitter automatic account bots driving discussions and results on Brexit and US elections, the book presents a world of fast changes, driven by opaque technology whose motivations are not clear, and the need to rethink technology itself.
This is not a book for anyone looking for answers, there aren’t easy ones for these topics. If you’re looking for that type of book, look somewhere else.
This is a book about awareness.
I will definitely have a conversation with my daughters about YouTube’s recommendation algorithm and the motivations behind it.
A final note, would suggest reading with digital support, the references along the book are a valuable source of complementary information.
Highly recommended.

[Jonathan Hinckley · Rating 5 out of 5]

As hellish as it is brilliant. Some kind of information age necronomicon which has left me checking flight scanners and searching for the monolithic, unmarked data centres of Slough.
The book examines the simultaneous unwieldiness and un-accountability of information technologies as they grow ever into our lives: the duality of their invisibility and daunting physicality, their opacity and transparency. Spanning (among others) climate change, finance-capitalism and the military industrial complex, Bridle stares into the abyss of crisis while at each stage unearthing flashes of radical, even Utopian, potential.
This is to my knowledge the best critical analysis of the internet age and a wildly necessary addendum to a data poisoned world.

[invertedcrosss? · Rating 5 out of 5]

v v good

[Rehmat · Rating 4 out of 5]

New Dark Age explores how humans amidst a sea of information seem to be plunging into a new dark age; ranging in topics from climate change to mass surveillance to child abuse, New Dark Age reveals some of the darker sides of the digital age.


The author examines that big data fallacy that encourages quantity over quality is palpable in all of science. While the number of scientific studies, journals, and papers has been steadily increasing over the past decades, so has the number of mistakes, plagiarism and fraud in scientific research. Experts are increasingly talking about the replication crisis of modern science. This refers to the fact that when many scientific studies are conducted a second time by a different group of researchers, they cannot reproduce the original results.

In 2006, at Zeitgeist conference, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt made a startling claim. If camera phones had been around in 1994, the horrifying Rwandan genocide of that year would never have happened, because people would have been able to film and share news about the atrocities taking place.

It sounds convincing. But the author takes his readers to analyze the situation in other way. Just take a closer look at Schmidt’s example of the Rwandan genocide. In 1994, over the course of 100 days, an estimated one million Rwandans were murdered in a brutal massacre spurred on by inter-ethnic tensions, while the rest of the world stood by and did nothing — supposedly, because they didn’t know about it.

But since then, investigations have revealed that several NGOs, foreign embassies, and the UN were closely monitoring the situation. The US government, for example, was tracking the developments via high-resolution satellite pictures. Contrary to what Schmidt suggests, the genocide in Rwanda was not abetted by a lack of knowing, but instead by a lack of doing.

It means data alone is not the solution rather it is will of those at helm of affairs can change the situation other way around.

However, new technologies of the digital age allow us to connect, collect and share information, they’re ushering us into a new dark age, where the world seems more complex and confusing than ever before. This is because, as examples from early computing, history, and science demonstrate, more data doesn’t always produce better results. Moreover, when new technologies are used for capitalist aims, they tend to perpetuate and deepen existing power structures. That’s why, if we want to live meaningfully in the present, we need to start questioning the origin, function, and purpose of our technologies.

[Heidi · Rating 5 out of 5]

At the heart of what James Bridle calls the New Dark Age is the consolidation of wealth and power by an ever-shrinking group of people. The mechanics of that consolidation have become increasingly hidden inside cryptic algorithms and underground cables that span the entire globe. All the while, we're assured the world is getting better; technology will rescue us from environmental disaster, and life will become more convenient.

The truth is that the Internet has overloaded us with information – so much that it's become impossible to discern fiction from reality. We're exhausted and disillusioned from trying. So it's understandable when we welcome the assistance of algorithms to offload some of that cognitive work, right? Why research the media we consume when an algorithm already has a suggestion? Why familiarize ourselves with a city when GPS can tell us exactly how to get to our next destination? Why remember anything we learn when we can look it up instantly?

It seems harmless, but it's a slippery slope down a completely dark and unlit path. The darkness is intentional; it prevents us from seeing who benefits from the data we exchange for convenience. It also prevents us from seeing the destruction it has brought to our environment, our social lives, our emotional wellbeing, our creativity, and our freedom.

There is so much more I'd like to say, but I don't have time to write it, and you don't have time to read it. Amazon probably owns this review now too, so you shouldn't trust it. Welcome to the New Dark Age.

[Ahmed Elkorbegy · Rating 3 out of 5]

أول خطوة أخطوها تجاه سلسلة عالم المعرفة وأول كتاب أقرأه من مختاراتهم الفريدة والحقيقي أنا فخور بيهم، فخور ان كتاب لا تتعدى تكلفته دولار واحد ( وأقل من دولار كمان لأني شاريه ب 15 جنيه والدولار دلوقتي عدى ال 25) موجود ف أقرب مكان تقدر تشترى منه مطبوعات ورقية: عند بتاع الجرايد، يعني مش محتاج تروح مكتبة بعيدة عنك أو تتحمل تكلفة الكتب اللي أسعارها عالية جدًا، كل اللي عليك انك تنزل من بيتك، تروح عند بتاع الجرايد، تجيب الكتاب وتقعد تقرأ.. بس كده.

بالنسبة للكتاب اللي معانا، فهو جيد جدًا، ومفيد، ومخيف في نفس الوقت! لدرجة ان مجرد رؤيتك لبعض مقاطع يوتيوب مخصصة للأطفال عن أصابع بتغني و ترقص هيخليك تشعر بالغرابة والحذر! (دي آخر صورة في ذهني حاليًا بعد ما أنهيت الكتاب)

أعجبتني الفصول اللي بتتكلم عن المناخ وال gps، والمؤامرة، و الجزئية الخاصة باستخدام التقانة في بناء صور للأحلام والخيال مثلًا أو التأثير على الحملات الانتخابة أو نشر أخبار وإشاعات قد تؤدي إلى حروب أهلية.

يعيب الكتاب في نظري سوء ترتيب المواضيع في بعض الأحيان، والتكرار، والتطويل في أمور جانبية (وإن كانت بغرض إيصال المعني كاملًا إلا إنه كان يمكن إيجازها)

[Sirana · Rating 1 out of 5]

The only positive thing I can say about this book is that it's short. While the author (mostly) does an adequate job of pointing out subjects worth thinking about, every conclusion he reaches is wrong. What he calls computational thinking is at the basis of every evil that plagues human society, no matter how much he has to squeeze and mutilate the facts. While the earlier chapters at least are written in an understandable, if jargon-filled style, the latter chapters (especially chapters 9 and 10) are barely intelligible.
Don't waste your time.

[Iskander · Rating 5 out of 5]

Following James Bridle's work for years the book is a compelling residue of his thinking and visions. Very well written and providing the food for thought you expect from Bridle.

For people new to his work, this will introduce you to the impact of technology on our society and beyond. It will make you think, and hopefully stimulate to keep thinking. The book is the perfect ammunition.

[Sarinys · Rating 4 out of 5]

Giustamente apocalittico, mi è piaciuto soprattutto quando parla della morte da gps e di come diventeremo tutti più stupidi a causa dell’anidride carbonica. Scritto con una prosa più accattivante e divulgativa rispetto ad altri titoli Not che ho letto nello stesso anno (interessantissimi, ma un po’ carenti da quel lato).

[Jim Razinha · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted to find out what Bridle had to say because I've been calling the rightwing draconian control backwards trends in the US the "New Dark Ages" for years now. This took a bit to work into...the read is easy, but Bridle was inconsistent, exaggerative and repetitive. Still, what he has to say is scary. Bridle opens with

‘If only technology could invent some way of getting in touch with you in an emergency,’ said my computer, repeatedly.
Following the 2016 US election result, along with several other people I know and perhaps prompted by the hive mind of social media, I started re-watching The West Wing: an exercise in hopeless nostalgia. It didn’t help, but I got into the habit, when alone, of watching an episode or two in the evenings, after work, or on planes. After reading the latest apocalyptic research papers on climate change, total surveillance, and the uncertainties of the global political situation, a little neoliberal chamber play from the noughties wasn’t the worst thing to sink into.

And we end with a message that technology is bad; no wait! it's good; no...bad; so bad as to be really bad. And it is. But we can't avoid it. Nor can we control it. The genie's bottle is opened, Pandora's box has let loose the demons, and maybe Bridle isn't exaggerating.

Bridle's chapter titles alliterate with the letter "C": Chasm, Computation, Climate, Calculation, Complexity, Cognition, Complicity, Conspiracy, Concurrency, Cloud. "Cloud" plays an early part because it is innocuous, clouds are ephemeral, insubstantial, but the cloud is anything but. It's "in the cloud". Safe, right?

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, socialise, borrow books, and vote. Thus obscured, they are rendered less visible and less amenable to critique, investigation, preservation and regulation.

That is the Chasm.

And so 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.

Bridle observes: "Automation bias ensures that we value automated information more highly than our own experiences, even when it conflicts with other observations – particularly when those observations are ambiguous." We are reliant on technology because it has to be better than humans, right? Lewis Fry Richardson wrote, "Einstein has somewhere remarked that he was guided towards his discoveries by the notion that the important laws of physics were really simple. R.H. Fowler has been heard to remark that, of two formulae, the more elegant is the more likely to be true. Dirac sought an explanation alternative to that of spin in the electron because he felt that Nature could not have arranged it in so complicated a way." Richardson's studies on the ‘coastline paradox’ (correlation between the probability of two nations going to war and the length of their shared border was a problem as length of the border depended upon the tools used to measure it) came to be known as the Richardson effect, and formed the basis for Benoît Mandelbrot’s work on fractals. It demonstrates, with radical clarity, the counterintuitive premise of the new dark age: the more obsessively we attempt to compute the world, the more unknowably complex it appears." But that paradox isn't diminished with more data... rather, worsened.
But, Bridle says

In a 2008 article in Wired magazine entitled ‘End of Theory’, Chris Anderson argued that the vast amounts of data now available to researchers made the traditional scientific process obsolete. No longer would they need to build models of the world and test them against sampled data. Instead, the complexities of huge and totalising data sets would be processed by immense computing clusters to produce truth itself: ‘With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.’

And then he seems to contradict himself: "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." Uh, technology good?
He observes

Since the 1950s, economists have believed that in advanced economies, economic growth reduces the income disparity between rich and poor. Known as the Kuznets curve, after its Nobel Prize–winning inventor, this doctrine claims that economic inequality first increases as societies industrialise, but then decreases as mass education levels the playing field and results in wider political participation. And so it played out – at least in the West – for much of the twentieth century. But we are no longer in the industrial age, and, according to Piketty, any belief that technological progress will lead to ‘the triumph of human capital over financial capital and real estate, capable managers over fat cat stockholders, and skill over nepotism’ is ‘largely illusory’

True sense there...we are no longer "industrial" and the models don't play right anymore. "Technology, despite its Epimethean and Promethean claims, reflects the actual world, not an ideal one. When it crashes, we are capable of thinking clearly; when it is cloudy, we apprehend the cloudiness of the world. Technology, while it often appears as opaque complexity, is in fact attempting to communicate the state of reality. Complexity is not a condition to be tamed, but a lesson to be learned." There's that cloud again. Technology manipulates. Surely you aren't naive to think that savvy technologists are not manipulating the "free" market? Giant drops in a stock exchange erased in seconds?

Facial recognition builds in biases; police "Minority Report" crime predictive softwares are inherently biased; algorithms that feed us "news", shopping, "answers" are all manipulative and we let them because we have no choice. Snowden shows us that we're spied upon, too late - the damage is done. Uber manipulates its employees to resist unionization/organization. Amazon's brutal employee relationships are hidden to the public because we want the benefits of technology: on my doorstep tomorrow? Sweet!

And then there are the conspiracy theorists who may be on to something, if in a completely lunatic way, that technology is the devil. "Conspiracy theories are the extreme resort of the powerless, imagining what it would be to be powerful. This theme was taken up by Fredric Jameson, when he wrote that conspiracy ‘is the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age; it is the degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to represent the latter’s system, whose failure is marked by its slippage into sheer theme and content’. [...] the individual, however outraged, resorts to ever more simplistic narratives in order to regain some control over the situation." People buy into crap because they don't want to, or can't, do the heavy thinking.So technology wins by forfeit.
Russia didn't start with us - "In trying to support Putin’s party in Russia, and to smear opponents in countries like Ukraine, the troll farms quickly learned that no matter how many posts and comments they produced, it was pretty hard to convince people to change their minds on any given subject." They just got better when it really mattered:

And so they started doing the next best thing: clouding the argument. In the US election, Russian trolls posted in support of Clinton, Sanders, Romney, and Trump, just as Russian security agencies seem to have had a hand in leaks against both sides. The result is that first the internet, and then the wider political discourse, becomes tainted and polarised. As one Russian activist described it, ‘The point is to spoil it, to create the atmosphere of hate, to make it so stinky that normal people won’t want to touch it.’

Overload the data. Cloud the system.

Then the proponents, like Google’s own CEO Eric Schmidt said "‘I think we’re missing something,’ he said, ‘maybe because of the way our politics works, maybe because of the way the media works. We’re not optimistic enough … The nature of innovation, the things that are going on both at Google and globally are pretty positive for humankind and we should be much more optimistic about what’s going to happen going forward.’" So, for them that control, technology is good, right?

The dystopias of Ghost in the Machine, Blade Runner/Electric Sheep, Gibson's Neuromancer are closer than we think.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

There’s no doubt about it. The internet age has arrived and digital technology has taken over our lives whether we like it or not. Instead of ushering in a new age of enlightenment, James Bridle in New Dark Age examines the ways in which our technology is taking us into a renewed medieval era of ignorance and corruption. If you think it’s too soon to become pessimistic about the effects of the internet, you���d be surprised at how much evidence Bridle has collected to demonstrating its detriment ro our world.

This book does not get off to a great start. The introductory essay introduces several themes that carry through the entire book. The main theme is the metaphor of the Dark Cloud of Unknowing, a phrase introduced by a medieval theologian who claimed there is such a cloud fixed between humanity and God, making it impossible for people to understand the deity and his ways. Bridle introduces this metaphor to explain how the computer screens that are usually in front of our faces are a dark cloud that prevents us from seeing what digital technology is doing. The device that is closest to us is the one that prevents us from seeing beyond our own noses. While the introduction isn’t necessarily a poor piece of writing, Bridle could have emphasized this Dark Cloud metaphor a little more as it is the thread that ties all the chapters together. Or at least it’s supposed to. This doesn’t become clear until about three chapters or so into the book.

The opening chapters give a brief history of computing and its relation to technology. Your average person seems to think that a computer is something you use to watch videos of cute animals, look up free pornography, or argue with people who don’t know what they’re talking about over things they don’t understand. The vast majority of those arguments are about politics and if you’re arguing about them on the internet, it’s a strong sign that you haven’t got a clue as to what’s really going on. But I digress. The point is that most people don’t understand that “computation” means to do math. So a computer is a machine that does math, or at least that’s what they were a century ago. Computers were designed by the military to compute probabilities of weather conditions. If the military could predict the weather, then they could more effectively conduct combat operations. Later, technicians realized they could use computers to analyze data about things like traffic, human behavior, and other scientific things. From the beginning, computing technology was developed for the purposes of predicting the future and asserting control over it. Despite what you may believe, those are still the primary purposes of computer technology today. That’s what data mining is all about, the surveillance of you to make predictions and subtly nudge you in the direction the technocrats in Silicon Valley want you to go in.

These historical chapters are somewhat interesting even if they are a bit incomplete. But it isn’t obvious from the start how they fit into the scheme of the book. This starts to become more clear in the chapter on the environment and how the permafrost in Svalbard is melting. As the permafrost melts, we begin to see how different parts of nature work together to form a network of interdependent entities that rely on each other for the stability of the planet. Then Bridle takes a risky narrative leap into comparing this natural network, now under severe threat from global warming, to the vast neural network we call the internet. From there he demonstrates how internet usage is driving an exponential increase in energy consumption, increasing the burning of fossil fuels for electricity, and becoming the leading cause of global warming in our times. Your cell phone and laptop are leaving a bigger carbon footprint than your car. Now the Dark Cloud of Unknowing metaphor emerges into clarity.

Although it takes a while to get going, this book takes on greater meaning as it progresses. The rest of it examines different ways in which the internet causes people to exist in a state of ignorance. One problem he brings up is science. New scientific discoveries are on the decline and there has also been a sharp increase in retracted scientific studies. One reason Bridle cites is that researchers have almost entirely abandoned the use of using models for studies. Instead they use large data sets as a substitute. This method has proven to be faulty, especially because data technicians do not actually understand what computer codes do once they are set to use. Algorithms can be written, but once set into motion, nobody really knows what they do or how they arrive at conclusions. The result has been less effective scientific studies that are riddled with errors, miscalculations, and misinformation. We suffer from this because in the real world this means lower quality medical care and the inability to solve complex problems related to things like global warming.

Other problems addressed by Bridle include the tendency people have to believe anything they see on a computer screen thereby causing them to disbelieve information they encounter offline, stock market flash crashes that result from bots being used to trade on the stock market, internet surveillance and data mining, the massive accumulation of junk data that is useless in large data sets, and the spread of disinformation and fake news coming from troll farms in Eastern Europe and Russia. The book ends with a chapter on ElsaGate, a term coined after the publication of this book. This is a scandal that happened when YouTube Kids became infected with disturbing violent and sexual content disguised as children’s entertainment that resulted in advertisers removing their ads from YouTube in protest after a public outcry. Although the ElsaGate content was inherently disturbing, Bridle makes the case that what is even worse is never knowing who or what is on the other side of the screen. The internet is so anonymous that we can never know who is posting these things or what their true intentions are. This is the menacing Great Cloud of Unknowing that we face every time we look at our screens.

James Bridle lays out his case clearly and precisely. He doesn’t leave much room for interpretation in these straight forward essays. To his credit, the writing is never pedantic or dry. Despite getting off to a weak start, it finishes by being accessible, clear, and thought provoking without sacrificing depth or nuance. Although New Dark Age is a thoroughly grim assessment of how the internet is harming our world, it isn’t entirely without hope. If we are entering into a new medieval period of history, just remember that the Middle Ages were followed by the Enlightenment and the Renaissance. Providing the human race survives long enough to get through these wicked times, there may be cause for celebration in the distant future.

[Adrian Buck · Rating 3 out of 5]

Each chapter starts with a c-word; Chasm, Computation, Climate etc. Sometimes the c-word seemed an appropriate label, sometimes another c-word would have been better; Capital instead of Complexity, Covert ops instead of Complicity. Sometimes the c-word seems to have no connection with the chapter at all: Concurrency was largely about the doleful effects of abandoning toddlers in front of Youtube (perhaps something the busy parent and writer is occassionally forced to do). I wondered if the c-words were a joke, that Bridle had submitted his chapters to an AI system which 'read' them and selected a c-word for the chapter name. It would be an ironic example of abandoning his own agency to an algorithm. Ha-ha, what a c-word.

I have another c-word - Compendium - which summarises what is good and bad about this book. It is a compendium of tech related 'horror' stories, techtrasophes, instances where technology facilitates human folly and cruelty. In this compendium you will find nothing positive for human life that is a consequence of the integration of computation and communications technology. However, all the instances of IT horror here are interesting, diversely sourced, well presented, and occassionally lit with dark humour.

But there is, disappointly, no argument that technology is leading us into a new dark age. It's not even clear what the nature of this new dark age is, apart from Bridle's relentless focus on the negative. He seems to be saying, the technology is here; it has these bad effects; it will get worse. Early on, he seemed to be suggesting that the technology had some sort of malign agency of its own. Later he seems to settle down to the more reasonable notion that the ill effects are the unintended consequences of unguarded deployment of these technologies. Here I can agree with him, because this been a recurrent historical feature of the deployment of any technology. The invention of writing led to a decline in the massive inventories humans used to carry in their memories, ask any Papua New Guinean. But Bridle's take on history is that it travels in straight lines towards catastrophre - economic exploitation, genocide, child abuse and climate collapse - there is no feedback, there is no reflexivity.

I've been a teacher for the duration of this technological revolution. It's never been easier for me to put together media and information rich lessons which engage and are responsive to my students. This is my good day-to-day experience of Bridle's bad technology. I appreciate that for example, this technology may have been exploited to undermine the debate over Brexit, an outcome which is very negative for me as an EU resident UKer. But this outcome seems to be a result of a demographic crisis as much as a technological one. I remain confident that the generation to be raised on this technology will be inherently more circumspect in its use, as the earlier one that was raised on mainstream television now suspects that technology. We can't go back to edited and compiled information from trusted sources, we have to learn to edit and compile for ourselves, and we have to decide what and why we trust. This is not a new dark age, but a new learning curve.