New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future
James Bridle
Verso
This is a landmark work. Impressive in both scope and detail, artist and tech writer James Bridle has produced a book that assesses accelerating developments in climate, machines, the internet, and the surveillance apparatus of the security state. With great clarity, he sifts through these intersecting sites and concludes that each, in their own manner, is heralding forth an unprecedented crisis in human knowledge.
We have historically sustained ourselves, Bridle argues, with an understanding of the distinct patterns of climate. But such patterns are dissolving. For example, our infrastructure is dependent on the internet, a system acutely vulnerable to climate change. Higher temperatures curb the effectiveness of the electromagnetic pulses that much online communication uses. How will we cope with a gradient that offers less, not more internet? Grappling with the unanswerable nature of such questions forms the crux of Bridle’s book: our systems of knowledge are poised to fall into an era of ever greater uncertainty. What confronts us now is the prospect of living in a world becoming increasingly less illuminated by our methods of perception.
Despite the gloomy subject matter, Bridle has written no alarmist manifesto. Instead, we have a thoughtful and nuanced book that urges new methods of perception, communication and being as requisites for slogging ever onwards.
New Dark Age is essential ballast for embarking into uncharted waters.
Words – Darragh Deighan Gregory
