New Dark Age
Subtitle: Technology and the end of the future
By: [by] James Bridle
Publisher: Verso
Published: July 17, 2018
Place of publication: London, UK; Brooklyn, USA
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 304
ISBN-13: 9781786635471
Copyright date: 2018
Description: "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. In his brilliant new work, leading artist and writer James Bridle offers us a warning against the future in which the contemporary promise of a new technologically assisted enlightenment may just deliver its opposite: an age of complex uncertainty, predictive algorithms, surveillance, the hollowing out of empathy. Surveying the history of art, technology and information systems he reveals the dark clouds that gather over discussions of the digital sublime." --Publisher description.
Notes: Verso is the imprint of New Left Books.
Typeset in Sabon by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh.
Printed in the US by Maple Press.
Includes notes and index.
Table of contents: title: Chasm
pagenum: 1
label: 1; title: Computation
pagenum: 17
label: 2; title: Climate
pagenum: 47
label: 3; title: Calculation
pagenum: 77
label: 4; title: Complexity
pagenum: 103
label: 5; title: Cognition
pagenum: 135
label: 6; title: Complicity
pagenum: 161
label: 7; title: Conspiracy
pagenum: 187
label: 8; title: Concurrency
pagenum: 215
label: 9; title: Cloud
pagenum: 241
label: 10; pagenum: 255
title: Acknowledgements; pagenum: 257
title: Notes; pagenum: 281
title: Index