New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

New Dark Age (London: Verso), published in 2018, is a daunting and revealing book about technology, knowledge, art and the end of the future. In it, James Bridle reveals the sinister sides of digitisation and makes us mindful of a future in which a technologically driven “enlightenment” could bring about the opposite: a time that is ultimately composed of uncertainties, predictive algorithms and surveillance systems. In Bridle’s own words: “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.”