New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

by James Bridle

In the fourteenth century, an unknown author of Christian mysticism wrote of ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’ that hangs between mankind and the Godhead: the embodiment of goodness, justice, and right action. This cloud cannot be pierced by thought, but by the letting-go of thought, and through the insistence upon the here and now – not the predicted, computed future – as the domain of agency. ‘Go after experience rather than knowledge,’ the author urges us. ‘On account of pride, knowledge may often deceive you, but this gentle, loving affection will not deceive you. Knowledge tends to breed conceit, but love builds. Knowledge is full of labor, but love, full of rest.’1 It is this cloud that we have sought to conquer with computation, but that is continually undone by the reality of what we are attempting. Cloudy thinking, the embrace of unknowing, might allow us to revert from computational thinking, and it is what the network itself urges upon us.