June 29, 2018

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Permanently Moved 🔊 | Review 📃

Episode 12:

My first attempt at a book review of sorts. A review of James Bridle’s new book New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future and the event I attended at Londons Goethe Institut last night – James was in conversation with Mr Ben Vickers.

I also quote from Jaya Klara Brekke’s newest publication: I Saw the Blockchain at the End of the World, Turned Around, and Walked Back.

An embrace of indeterminacy seems to be in the air.

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Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

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New Dark Age

From science fiction, we have terms like the Churn or the Jackpot. In spiritual terms, we could be living in the Kali Yuga or the Fourth Turning. The Anthropocene is also a popular term right now.

In his new book, the writer, journalist, technologist, and visual artist James Bridle suggests another term: New Dark Age.

Last night, I was in South Kensington for a conversation between Ben Vickers and James Bridle at the Goethe Institute—an event in collaboration with Serpentine Galleries and Verso Books for the launch of Bridle’s new book, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future.

The book is extremely good, and I would encourage you all to go out and buy it. It represents a consolidation and synthesis of much of the work James has been concerned with over the last eight to ten years of his career: from mapping microwave high-frequency trading routes across the rooftops of London, to drones, to the late-night UK government deportation flights, and, more recently, YouTube’s algorithmic churn that scares children—along with much more.

But all of these works are interwoven with a larger narrative. A narrative of technological feedback loops, conspiracies, concurrency, and complicity.

The book feels very much like horizon scanning—but not as an attempt to see beyond the horizon into the future. Rather, it aims to recognize everything that exists between the reader and the edge of that horizon. To at least feel the shape, or at least the surface, of what is occurring right now.

In the introduction, Bridle discusses the complex and vast technological systems and processes in which we find ourselves enmeshed. He writes:

“Our technologies are complicit in the greatest challenges we face today:
An out-of-control economic system that immiserates many and continues to widen the gap between rich and poor.

The collapse of political and societal consensus across the globe, resulting in increasing nationalisms, social divisions, ethnic conflicts, and shadow wars.
And a warming climate that existentially threatens us all.
Across the sciences and society, in politics and education, in warfare and commerce, New technologies do not merely augment our abilities, but actively shape and direct them—for better and for worse.

It is increasingly necessary to be able to think about new technologies in different ways, and to be critical of them, in order to meaningfully participate in that shaping.”

James does not seek to provide solutions in this book, but he does map the challenges very well.

When asked at the event last night about the subtitle—particularly The End of the Future—he explained that it doesn’t mean there will be no tomorrow. Rather, it suggests that the idea of the future is becoming smaller and shorter because of the crises we are facing.

For example, he explains in the book that we are now struggling to predict the weather. For the past hundred years, we have increased the amount of data available to refine and isolate a ten-day forecast. But because of climate change, these forecasts are becoming less and less reliable, as extreme and unpredictable weather events disrupt the patterns we once understood.

It is this shortening of the window of the future that the book’s subtitle is concerned with.

In the last chapter, Cloud, James writes:

“The present is always where we live and think—poised between the oppressive history and the unknowable future.”

At the event last night, I really felt there was a call from him to be present, be embodied, and to embrace indeterminacy.

This made me think of Jaya Klara Brekke’s newest published piece, I Saw the Blockchain at the End of the World and Turned Back, where she writes:

“But in this perpetual nowness, I would argue our eyes are frantically fixated on the future—what it will be, whether we are ready for it, whether we have sufficient skills, the required resilience, the necessary technology, and whether it will be the end of the beginning, utopia or dystopia.
So much so that the now is not given much care at all.”

She goes on to say:

“I urge you to shift your attention, when considering blockchains or any bit of techno-utopianism, to the indeterminate—the field of messy effects and possibilities—rather than determinate stories.
The clean utopias and dystopias, the ends of the world, the blank slates and new worlds that are so easily suggested.
It is the fear of indeterminacy that vomits up this need for a coming final solution—
Preferring the end of the world to acknowledging that maybe there just is no such thing as a perfect forever-after.
Only an ongoing and stunning process—
A process of folding and unfolding worlds.”

And so, for myself, I think:

To live in this New Dark Age, we need to gather around our stories, our tools, our friends, our relationships, and our wider networks.

To be present with them.

And to enjoy every moment.