New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

by James Bridle

But such a position seems to ignore the fact that the complexity of contemporary technologies is itself a driver of inequality, and that the logic that drives technological deployment might be tainted at the source. It concentrates power into the hands of an ever-smaller number of people who grasp and control these technologies, while failing to acknowledge the fundamental problem with computational knowledge: its reliance on a Promethean extraction of information from the world in order to smelt the one true solution, the answer to rule them all. The result of this wholesale investment in computational processing – of data, of goods, of people – is the elevation of efficiency above all other objectives; what sociologist Deborah Cowen calls ‘the tyranny of techne’.