James Bridle (1) (1980–)
Author of New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future
For other authors named James Bridle, see the disambiguation page.
About the Author
Image credit: from verso books
Works by James Bridle
Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence (2019) 314 copies, 2 reviews
Tagged
Common Knowledge
Members
Reviews
This is a fascinating and frightening read. James Bridle has written a book that is intellectually stimulating and emotionally draining. Bridle highlights the destructive consequences of technological networks. With the proliferation of information we have become less informed. With the spread of communication networks we have become less connected. With the increase in technological choices we have become less free. Bridle vividly portrays the dangers facing humanity. He does not present a show more plan for rescuing our future. Nor does he advocate that we retreat to some past era. Rather, he urges us to become aware in the present of how technology shapes our perceptions of reality. We are not powerless if we have the courage to think. Reading Bridle’s book is a good place for all of us to start thinking about creating a more equitable and sustainable future for all life on this planet. show less
I can’t recall how I heard about James Bridle’s new book, but somehow I became aware of it and wrote to its publisher, Verso, and they obliged me with an advanced reader copy. I thought I might make a start on it when I had a short-haul plane trip, but by the time I got home the next day, I had very nearly finished it. It’s dense, demanding, and totally compelling, though if I only had the title to go by, I might have passed it up. I’m wary of books that have the words “future” show more in them, or “the end of” and have read too many dyspeptic critiques of technology that are full of sound and fury but are more incensed nostalgia for a fabled golden past than insightful critique. So if you’re like me, don’t be put off by the title, New Dark Age: Technology, Knowledge and the End of the Future. It’s very good.
Bridle is both a visual artist and a writer who grapples with the meaning of technology and how its reins seem to have slipped from our grasp, taking us to unexpected and eerie places. In this book James Bridle - New Dark Agehe explores those places, from the ways computation has made us doubt our senses, to the ways we use it to forecast the weather (but increasingly can’t because our predictions depend on a past that was, uh, predictable), how high frequency trading can obscure the workings of markets and create high-speed and senseless crashes, the rise of machine learning, mass surveillance, and the conditions that make conspiracy theories thrive. Above all, it’s about a present in which we’ve simply lost any way of knowing for sure because we have too much information. “The cloud” is full of data yet totally obscure.
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: “it is ultimately impossible to tell who is doing what, or what their motives and intentions are . . . Nobody decided that this is how the world should evolve – nobody wanted the new dark age – but we built in anyway, and now we are going to have to live in it” (p. 239).
(That bit of the title, by the way, isn’t some technophobes invocation of the fall of the Roman empire; it’s the last words of the first paragraph of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulu” published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1926. Seems appropriate.)
Among the underlined tidbits, I noted this: “Data is the new oil” was apparently coined a little over a decade ago by the owner of Tesco, a ubiquitous chain store in the UK, when describing the value of its supermarket rewards card – give up a bit of information about your shopping habits for a discount and, if lots of people do it, Tesco gets masses of valuable information about buying patterns. But people tend to forget what he really was saying: data isn’t useful until it’s refined and turned into something. Now it’s just one wildcat strike after another, so we're struggling through a vast slick of information that’s churning up things we don’t even recognize, that have used technology to turn information into something that is the opposite of knowledge.
Some try to rescue themselves from the constant barrage of information by grabbing hold of stories that seem to make sense – conspiracy theories are one response to having a great deal of information about events and little sense we can do anything in response: “The resulting sense of helplessness, rather than giving us pause to reconsider our assumptions, seems to be driving us deeper and deeper into paranoia and social disintegration” (p. 186) Or it drives us to capitalize on the network by creating nonsense content – YouTube videos that mash up keywords and brands to take advantage of out-of-control algorithmic exploitation in “industrialized nightmare production” (228). Yeah, think twice before you pacify your toddler with your phone. There's an ocean of deeply disturbing content out there turning nursery rhymes into ad-generating spookiness. And YouTube doesn't have a clue what to do about it. None of us do.
Is there anything to be done? Well, we can try to see the shape of things that are all around us, yet somehow hidden, not just how these technologies work but “how things came to be, and how they continue to function in the world in ways that are often invisible and interwoven. What is required is not understanding, but literacy” (3) – and by that he doesn’t mean increasing digital skills, though that doesn’t hurt, but being able to think about where systems came from and what the consequences are. He urges us to consider “guardianship” that is “based on the principles of doing the least harm in the present and of our responsibility to future generations. Our understanding of "systems and their ramifications, and of the conscious choices we make in their design, in the here and now, remain entirely within our capabilities” (251-2). Well, that’s a relief. It’s also a tall order. Reading this book is a good start.
Reposted from Inside Higher Ed show less
Bridle is both a visual artist and a writer who grapples with the meaning of technology and how its reins seem to have slipped from our grasp, taking us to unexpected and eerie places. In this book James Bridle - New Dark Agehe explores those places, from the ways computation has made us doubt our senses, to the ways we use it to forecast the weather (but increasingly can’t because our predictions depend on a past that was, uh, predictable), how high frequency trading can obscure the workings of markets and create high-speed and senseless crashes, the rise of machine learning, mass surveillance, and the conditions that make conspiracy theories thrive. Above all, it’s about a present in which we’ve simply lost any way of knowing for sure because we have too much information. “The cloud” is full of data yet totally obscure.
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: “it is ultimately impossible to tell who is doing what, or what their motives and intentions are . . . Nobody decided that this is how the world should evolve – nobody wanted the new dark age – but we built in anyway, and now we are going to have to live in it” (p. 239).
(That bit of the title, by the way, isn’t some technophobes invocation of the fall of the Roman empire; it’s the last words of the first paragraph of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulu” published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1926. Seems appropriate.)
Among the underlined tidbits, I noted this: “Data is the new oil” was apparently coined a little over a decade ago by the owner of Tesco, a ubiquitous chain store in the UK, when describing the value of its supermarket rewards card – give up a bit of information about your shopping habits for a discount and, if lots of people do it, Tesco gets masses of valuable information about buying patterns. But people tend to forget what he really was saying: data isn’t useful until it’s refined and turned into something. Now it’s just one wildcat strike after another, so we're struggling through a vast slick of information that’s churning up things we don’t even recognize, that have used technology to turn information into something that is the opposite of knowledge.
Some try to rescue themselves from the constant barrage of information by grabbing hold of stories that seem to make sense – conspiracy theories are one response to having a great deal of information about events and little sense we can do anything in response: “The resulting sense of helplessness, rather than giving us pause to reconsider our assumptions, seems to be driving us deeper and deeper into paranoia and social disintegration” (p. 186) Or it drives us to capitalize on the network by creating nonsense content – YouTube videos that mash up keywords and brands to take advantage of out-of-control algorithmic exploitation in “industrialized nightmare production” (228). Yeah, think twice before you pacify your toddler with your phone. There's an ocean of deeply disturbing content out there turning nursery rhymes into ad-generating spookiness. And YouTube doesn't have a clue what to do about it. None of us do.
"Our thirst for data, like our thirst for oil, is historically imperialist and colonialist, and tightly tied to capitalist networks of exploitation . . . Empire has mostly rescinded territory, only to continue its operation at the level of infrastructure, maintaining its power in the form of the network. Data-driven regimes repeat the racist, sexist, and oppressive policies of their antecedents because these biases and attitudes have been encoded into them at the root.
"In the present, the extraction, refinement, and use of data/oil poisons the ground and air. It leaches into everything. It gets into the ground water of our social relationships and it poisons them. It enforces computational thinking upon us, driving the deep divisions in society caused by misbegotten classification, fundamentalism and populism, and accelerating inequality. It sustains and nourishes uneven power relationships: in most of our interactions with power, data is not something freely given but forcibly extracted – or impelled in moments of panic, like a stressed cuttlefish attempting to protect itself from a predator." (246-7)
Is there anything to be done? Well, we can try to see the shape of things that are all around us, yet somehow hidden, not just how these technologies work but “how things came to be, and how they continue to function in the world in ways that are often invisible and interwoven. What is required is not understanding, but literacy” (3) – and by that he doesn’t mean increasing digital skills, though that doesn’t hurt, but being able to think about where systems came from and what the consequences are. He urges us to consider “guardianship” that is “based on the principles of doing the least harm in the present and of our responsibility to future generations. Our understanding of "systems and their ramifications, and of the conscious choices we make in their design, in the here and now, remain entirely within our capabilities” (251-2). Well, that’s a relief. It’s also a tall order. Reading this book is a good start.
Reposted from Inside Higher Ed show less
This book is very descriptive, with Bridle offering a survey of what he considers to be eminent problems, and where they originated. Descriptive because there are points where Bridle attempts to be prescriptive, but it never really goes beyond a plea to "think more." He wants us to do a lot of thinking. I don't think this is wrong, but asking humans to think and act collectively is usually a bold strategy. And while I wasn't expecting a chapter of highly prescriptive, economically informed show more advice for how exactly to navigate these crises, ending it with "we just need to think" is very weak, and seems almost like a punchline given everything the book just explored in detail.
Technology, especially powerful and expansive technology, is usually assimilated into government agencies and programs before it sees a consumer market. Or technology develops in the confines of somewhere like Silicon Valley, where Google campuses are about as confidential as government agencies. While it'd be nice if every time a novel or innovative technology emerged on the market (GPS, image recognition, deepfakes, etc.), the public was allowed to chew on its societal & political consequences before giving it the greenlight, that just doesn't happen. The most influential technologies are developed, released and integrated without any consumer consent. Data warehouses are built all the time, I have no idea where or when. Fiber-optic cables are constructed all the time, I have no idea where or when. I have next to no influence on this infrastructure, just like I have next to no influence on whether apps track my data (which could be my face, my voice, my location, my habits, etc.).
Bridle's main argument is that the integration of these various technologies have yielded a unique form of thinking: "computational thinking." It's the cousin of solutionism; however, where solutionism believes there is a (frequently market-based) solution to every problem, computational thinking believes every problem is computable. If the problem is apparent but the solution unknown, computational thinking presumes gathering immense data on the problem will naturally reveal its solution. There is one reassuring portion of this constant data harvest: while the NSA does track almost every predictable datum of my life, there's almost nothing substantial to be done with it. Like Synecdoche, New York, where the playwright seeks to reflect every minute aspect of life & struggle, the performance becomes so maximalist as to be impossible to watch. There's so much concurrent information, one would need to be a god to truly witness and make use of it. So while the NSA collects inconceivably large amounts of data, there is no human interpreting and acting on it. Most of our data are likely never even seen except by a machine. However, this is where it becomes scary again. If ever we decide to leverage a machine to interpret these data, we allow the human faculties for ambiguity, uncertainty and nuance to be shoved aside in favor of "efficient" and "unbiased" computational justice.
This is one solution Bridle offers that has more material basis in reality. He uses the Google Optometrist as a paragon for how we can use computers to process prodigious data, while retaining our role as the arbiter for its application. Essentially, there is an AI known as the Optometrist, because it processes multiple reactions and combinations of data, then presents the outcomes to a human viewer, who can decide on its validity or utility. Like an eye doctor, "Which looks better? One, or two?" The doctor does not tyrannically decide for you, and send you scurrying out the door with a bad prescription. While the consumer will maybe never have an opportunity to play arbiter, those working in technology can, and this is partially what Bridle means when he claims we must think more.
Without cataclysmic collapse, we are well beyond the point of Luddite solutions, where we joyously throw our phones into a fire and live off the land in utopian communes. Technology is so intrinsic to our most quotidian functions, its collapse would entail disaster. Banks would cease to function, GPS units would fail, contact in the event of these failures would prove incredibly difficult. This forces us into a position where we must learn to think with machines, as opposed to letting machines think and do for us.
It's very difficult to not imagine a scenario, however, where novel technology isn't swiped by hedge funds and governments to pry economic and societal schisms further and further, intentionally or not. How much liberty do lay folks have over technology beyond their comprehension, and hidden from their scrutiny? show less
Technology, especially powerful and expansive technology, is usually assimilated into government agencies and programs before it sees a consumer market. Or technology develops in the confines of somewhere like Silicon Valley, where Google campuses are about as confidential as government agencies. While it'd be nice if every time a novel or innovative technology emerged on the market (GPS, image recognition, deepfakes, etc.), the public was allowed to chew on its societal & political consequences before giving it the greenlight, that just doesn't happen. The most influential technologies are developed, released and integrated without any consumer consent. Data warehouses are built all the time, I have no idea where or when. Fiber-optic cables are constructed all the time, I have no idea where or when. I have next to no influence on this infrastructure, just like I have next to no influence on whether apps track my data (which could be my face, my voice, my location, my habits, etc.).
Bridle's main argument is that the integration of these various technologies have yielded a unique form of thinking: "computational thinking." It's the cousin of solutionism; however, where solutionism believes there is a (frequently market-based) solution to every problem, computational thinking believes every problem is computable. If the problem is apparent but the solution unknown, computational thinking presumes gathering immense data on the problem will naturally reveal its solution. There is one reassuring portion of this constant data harvest: while the NSA does track almost every predictable datum of my life, there's almost nothing substantial to be done with it. Like Synecdoche, New York, where the playwright seeks to reflect every minute aspect of life & struggle, the performance becomes so maximalist as to be impossible to watch. There's so much concurrent information, one would need to be a god to truly witness and make use of it. So while the NSA collects inconceivably large amounts of data, there is no human interpreting and acting on it. Most of our data are likely never even seen except by a machine. However, this is where it becomes scary again. If ever we decide to leverage a machine to interpret these data, we allow the human faculties for ambiguity, uncertainty and nuance to be shoved aside in favor of "efficient" and "unbiased" computational justice.
This is one solution Bridle offers that has more material basis in reality. He uses the Google Optometrist as a paragon for how we can use computers to process prodigious data, while retaining our role as the arbiter for its application. Essentially, there is an AI known as the Optometrist, because it processes multiple reactions and combinations of data, then presents the outcomes to a human viewer, who can decide on its validity or utility. Like an eye doctor, "Which looks better? One, or two?" The doctor does not tyrannically decide for you, and send you scurrying out the door with a bad prescription. While the consumer will maybe never have an opportunity to play arbiter, those working in technology can, and this is partially what Bridle means when he claims we must think more.
Without cataclysmic collapse, we are well beyond the point of Luddite solutions, where we joyously throw our phones into a fire and live off the land in utopian communes. Technology is so intrinsic to our most quotidian functions, its collapse would entail disaster. Banks would cease to function, GPS units would fail, contact in the event of these failures would prove incredibly difficult. This forces us into a position where we must learn to think with machines, as opposed to letting machines think and do for us.
It's very difficult to not imagine a scenario, however, where novel technology isn't swiped by hedge funds and governments to pry economic and societal schisms further and further, intentionally or not. How much liberty do lay folks have over technology beyond their comprehension, and hidden from their scrutiny? show less
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
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?
But, Bridle says
He observes
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:
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. show less
‘If only technology could invent some way of getting in touch with you in an emergency,’ said my computer, repeatedly.show more
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. show less
Lists
Blindpill (1)
Awards
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 2
- Members
- 833
- Popularity
- #30,660
- Rating
- 3.9
- Reviews
- 12
- ISBNs
- 33
- Languages
- 8
- Favorited
- 1