Future by design

Carpo’s future has us return to a tradition of orality and gesture, where these forms of communication will need no reduction or compression. Our machines will be able to record, notate, transmit, process and search them, making all earlier cultural technologies developed to handle these tasks (schools, libraries, written language itself)  “equally unnecessary”. This will be neither advance nor regression. Evolution, remember, is maddeningly valueless.

Reviewing Mario Carpo’s The Second Digital Turn: Design beyond intelligence (MIT Press) for New Scientist, 22 November 2017