New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

Bridle, James

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1786635488 ISBN 13: 9781786635488

Casa editrice: Verso Books, 2019

“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

As the world around us increases in technological complexity, our understanding of it diminishes. Underlying this trend is a single idea: 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.

Recensione:

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 --Wired, Best Books of 2018

L'autore:

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