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New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

by JamesBridle (Author), James Bridle (Author)

  • Used

    Illustrated 2018

    $4.65
Synopsis

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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More Information

Format: Illustrated
 Pages: 304
 Edition: Illustrated
 Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 17 Jul 2018
ISBN 10: 178663547X
ISBN 13: 9781786635471

Media Reviews
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, Guardian 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. - Nathaniel Budzinski, Frieze Perceptive and thought-provoking book. - Will Self, Guardian 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 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 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] 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 An Orwell of the computer age. - Kirkus Review 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 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 Ed
Author Bio
James Bridle is a literary editor, technologist, writer, journalist, and visual artist. He writes for Guardian, Observer, Wired, Frieze, Atlantic, and many other publications.