New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future - James Bridle

The opening and closing chapters describe the book’s themes the clearest - computational thinking, that is thinking like machines, is not enough to solve our contemporary problems. We are allured by the capability of systems, to make clear or enumerable decisions, but this capability, especially in the area of Machine Learning, depends on data and knowledge stemming from it.

Compared to how systems are deployed currently, in a specific domain; a closed-off area, we humans operate in an infinitely open world. Mapping this world into concrete figures should in theory help us understand more of it, and should leave us wiser for it. But this only reveals to us its real complexity, full of vagueness and contradictions that are increasingly hard to act upon and befriend.

This approach of gathering as much data as possible and a scientific manner to come to an undisputable conclusion has some clear fallbacks. Even though we would like to think it helps us make better decisions or prevent the undesirable and objectively horrible. As we have seen, and was presented in the book, more data does not always make decision-making easier (as we require correspondingly more certainty) or does not converge into a singular truth (for instance, opinions on the Internet are increasingly polarizing). What is more, we can feel how more information can overwhelm us or even make us paranoid.

This feeling of paranoia is to a degree justified. Corporations monitor all they can about their customers, to sell more and gather more, in a never-ending loop of the unchecked environment of the free market capitalism. And countries monitor their citizens to establish a false sense of security. In this, they are aided by the infrastructures built thanks to their colonist history.

We would like to think that knowing more is enough, but not always it is. The problems of today do not stem from not knowing, but not doing.

Motivation to pick-up the book // Motivation to (not) read

New Dark Age, from James Bridle, has been a book on my to-read list for far too long, mainly because I have confused it with another Verso Books publication - Radical Technologies from Adam Greenfield, and thus I cannot escape comparisons between these two.

Both books take quite a critical stance towards recently emerging and progressing technologies, but take a different approach in doing so. Radical Technologies look one by one at different areas (smartphones, AR/VR, blockchain, etc.). In a very non-fiction manner, each chapter introduces the technology, looks at its potential and the ways in which it can be or already is being misused.

In contrast, this book - New Dark Age, has a harder to follow narrative. I believe both authors had similar intentions, in outlining dangers of technological optimism and increasing dependence on networks, data and services we as individuals do not control. In my eyes mainly due to a running narrative in each chapter, reading New Dark Age has felt like a series of episodes of “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver”. In terms of covering important and relevant, but loosely-connected topics. There are general themes running through the book, but also due to the vague chapter names, they are that much harder to follow. Essentially forming a collection of essays.