NEW DARK AGE: TECHNOLOGY AND THE END OF THE FUTURE, JAMES BRIDLE BOOK TOUR
NEW DARK AGE: TECHNOLOGY AND THE END OF THE FUTURE, JAMES BRIDLE BOOK TOUR
OCTOBER 4TH
7 – 9PM
Watch the live stream!
Eyebeam alum, James Bridle, will speak about his latest book New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, with current Journalism R&D Resident, Ingrid Burrington.
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, and 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
PRESS
New Dark Age by James Bridle review – technology and the end of the future | The Guardian
James Bridle on why technology is creating a new dark age | The Verge
PRAISE
“A masterful study of all the things approaching out of the future’s night. Compelling and essential.”
– Warren Ellis, author of Normal and Transmetropolitan
“Technology is not the answer. Nor is it a solution. James Bridle’s lucid and fearless writing instead insists on technology as an open question and urgent problem—which nevertheless needs to be confronted in order to think the present and free the future from false algorithmic certainties.”
– Hito Steyerl, author of Duty Free Art
“One image that I cannot get out of my head reading James Bridle extraordinary new book is that even as we can access vast tech capabilities we may actually know less and less.”
– Saskia Sassen, author of Expulsions
“Computation brings humanity more darkness than enlightenment: a goblin horde of digital superstitions, invented and unleashed in just half a century. Yet James Bridle is fearless in our gloomy post-truth predicament; he’s a theorist, artist, technical visionary and even a moralist. Has he foreseen the worst?”
– Bruce Sterling, author of Pirate Utopia
“James Bridle, one of our surest guides, here offers us a widely informed, deeply felt, and occasionally terrifying course on living in and with the enveloping darkness of our time. It’s a must-read for anyone who’s ever wondered how we might come to terms with technological complexity, and emerge with our humanity intact.”
– Adam Greenfield, author of Radical Technologies
“An extraordinary, perceptive analysis of the various ways in which the rise of information technology has obscured, rather than illuminated, the operations of power in the world, and diminished our capacity to improve it. Brilliant and bracing.”
– Mark O’Connell, author of To Be a Machine (Guardian Best Summer Reads 2018)
James Bridle is an artist and writer working across technologies and disciplines. His artworks have been commissioned by galleries and institutions and exhibited worldwide and on the internet. His writing on literature, culture and networks has appeared in magazines and newspapers including Wired, Domus, Cabinet, the Atlantic, the New Statesman, the Guardian, the Observer and many others, in print and online. He lectures regularly at conferences, universities, and other events. “New Dark Age”, his book about technology, knowledge, and the end of the future, was published by Verso (UK & US) in 2018. His work can be found at http://jamesbridle.com.
