New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

by James Bridle

But the opposite is occurring: our sources of data are slipping away, and with them the structures by which we have structured the world. The melting of the permafrost is both danger sign and metaphor: an accelerating collapse of both our environmental and our cognitive infrastructure. The certainties of the present are founded on the assumption of ever-increasing, ever-crystallising geologies of knowledge; it is reassuring to imagine a cooling earth, coming into shape, manifesting in distinct and solid forms. But, as in Siberia, the sponging of the Greenlandic landscape reiterates a return to the fluid: the marshy and boggy, the undifferentiated and gaseous. A new dark age will demand more liquid forms of knowing than can be derived from the libraries of the past alone.