New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

by James Bridle

Today the cloud is the central metaphor of the internet: a global system of great power and energy that nevertheless retains the aura of something noumenal and numinous, something almost impossible to grasp. We connect to the cloud; we work in it; we store and retrieve stuff from it; we think through it. We pay for it and only notice it when it breaks. It is something we experience all the time without really understanding what it is or how it works. It is something we are training ourselves to rely upon with only the haziest of notions about what is being entrusted, and what it is being entrusted to.

The cloud is a new kind of industry, and a hungry one. The cloud doesn’t just have a shadow; it has a footprint. Absorbed into the cloud are many of the previously weighty edifices of the civic sphere: the places where we shop, bank, socialise, borrow books, and vote. Thus obscured, they are rendered less visible and less amenable to critique, investigation, preservation and regulation. Another criticism is that this lack of understanding is deliberate.

The greatest carrier wave of progress for the last few centuries has been the central idea of the Enlightenment itself: that more knowledge – more information – leads to better decisions. For which one can, of course, substitute any concept of ‘better’ that one chooses. Despite the assaults of modernity and postmodernity, this core tenet has come to define not merely what is implemented, but what is even considered possible from new technologies. The internet, in its youth, was often referred to as an ‘information superhighway’, a conduit of knowledge that, in the flickering light of fibre-optic cables, enlightens the world. Any fact, any quantum of information, is available at the tap of a keyboard – or so we have led ourselves to believe. And so we find ourselves today connected to vast repositories of knowledge, and yet we have not learned to think. In fact, the opposite is true: that which was intended to enlighten the world in practice darkens it. The abundance of information and the plurality of worldviews now accessible to us through the internet are not producing a coherent consensus reality, but one riven by fundamentalist insistence on simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics.

We have been conditioned to believe that computers render the world clearer and more efficient, that they reduce complexity and facilitate better solutions to the problems that beset us, and that they expand our agency to address an ever-widening domain of experience. But what if this is not true at all? A close reading of computer history reveals an ever-increasing opacity allied to a concentration of power, and the retreat of that power into ever more narrow domains of experience. By reifying the concerns of the present in unquestionable architectures, computation freezes the problems of the immediate moment into abstract, intractable dilemmas; obsessing over the inherent limitations of a small class of mathematical and material conundrums rather than the broader questions of a truly democratic and egalitarian society.

An airport is a canonical example of what geographers call ‘code/space’.30 Code/spaces describe the interweaving of computation with the built environment and daily experience to a very specific extent: rather than merely overlaying and augmenting them, computation becomes a crucial component of them, such that the environment and the experience of it actually ceases to function in the absence of code. In the case of the airport, code both facilitates and coproduces the environment. Prior to visiting an airport, passengers engage with an electronic booking system – such as SABRE – that registers their data, identifies them, and makes them visible to other systems, such as check-in desks and passport control. If, when they find themselves at the airport, the system becomes unavailable, it is not a mere inconvenience. Modern security procedures have removed the possibility of paper identification or processing: software is the only accepted arbiter of the process.

As a result, a software crash revokes the building’s status as an airport, transforming it into a huge shed filled with angry people. This is how largely invisible computation coproduces our environment – its critical necessity revealed only in moments of failure, like a kind of brain injury.

Reading a book, listening to music, researching and learning: these and many other activities are increasingly governed by algorithmic logics and policed by opaque and hidden computational processes. Culture is itself a code/space.

Like an air control system mistaking a flock of birds for a fleet of bombers, software is unable to distinguish between its model of the world and reality – and, once conditioned, neither are we. This conditioning occurs for two reasons: because the combination of opacity and complexity renders much of the computational process illegible; and because computation itself is perceived to be politically and emotionally neutral.

Faith in the machine is a prerequisite for its employment, and this backs up other cognitive biases that see automated responses as inherently more trustworthy than nonautomated ones.

For rangers in Death Valley National Park, such occurrences have become so common that they have a term for it: ‘Death by GPS’, which describes what happens when travellers, unfamiliar with the area, follow the instructions and not their senses.

At the foundation of automation bias is a deeper bias, firmly rooted not in technology, but in the brain itself. Confronted with complex problems, particularly under time pressure – and who among us is not under time pressure, all the time? – people try to engage in the least amount of cognitive work they can get away with, preferring strategies that are both easy to follow and easy to justify.

Computation projects a future that is like the past – which makes it, in turn, incapable of dealing with the reality of the present, which is never stable.

When I was visiting south Greenland in the nineteen-eighties, I was able to jump down in trenches guys had left open from the fifties and sixties, and sticking out the sides you could see hair, feathers, wool, and incredibly well-preserved animal bones. We’re losing everything. Basically, we have the equivalent of the Library of Alexandria in the ground, and it’s on fire.

Computation is both a victim of and a contributor to climate change. As of 2015, the world’s data centres, where exabytes of digital information are stored and processed, consumed about 3 per cent of the world’s electricity – and accounted for 2 per cent of total global emissions. This is about the same carbon footprint as the airline industry. The 416.2 terawatt hours of electricity consumed by global data centres in 2015 exceeded that of the whole United Kingdom, at 300 terawatt hours.18 This consumption is projected to escalate massively, as a result of both the growth of digital infrastructure and the positive feedback from rising global temperatures. In response to vast increases in data storage and computational capacity in the last decade, the amount of energy used by data centres has doubled every four years, and is expected to triple in the next ten years.

A 2013 report, ‘The Cloud Begins with Coal – Big Data, Big Networks, Big Infrastructure, and Big Power’, calculates that ‘charging up a single tablet or smart phone requires a negligible amount of electricity; using either to watch an hour of video weekly consumes annually more electricity in the remote networks than two new refrigerators use in a year.’

The philosopher Timothy Morton calls global warming a ‘hyperobject’: a thing that surrounds us, envelops and entangles us, but that is literally too big to see in its entirety. Mostly, we perceive hyperobjects through their influence on other things – a melting ice sheet, a dying sea, the buffeting of a transatlantic flight.

by this time, he was at university, studying physics; after that, he worked on typesetting for digital printers, before joining CERN, where he developed the idea for hypertext – previously expounded by Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart, and others. And because of where he was working and the need of researchers to share interlinked information, he tied this invention to the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the domain name systems that underpin the emerging internet and – ta-da! – the World Wide Web just happened, as naturally and obviously as if it were meant to be. This, of course, is only one way of telling the story, but it tickles our senses because it makes sense: the rising arc of invention – the graph that always goes up and to the right – coupled to a personal history that leads to myriad interconnections and the spark of insight at the right moment, the right place in time. The Web happened because of the history of microprocessors and telecommunications and wartime industry and commercial requirements, and a bunch of different discoveries and patents and corporate research funds and academic papers and TBL’s own family history; but it also happened because it was Web Time: for a brief moment, the dispositions of culture and technology converged on an invention that, in hindsight, was predicted by everything from ancient Chinese encyclopaedias to microfilm retrieval to the stories of Jorge Luis Borges. The Web was necessary, and so it appeared – in this time...

Chargaff said, ‘a pall of monotony has descended on what used to be the liveliest and most attractive of all scientific professions’. Such sentiments are hardly original, echoing every critique of technological intervention in human perception from television to video games, with the difference that computational pharmacology is creating an empirical body of data about its own failure: the machine is chronicling its own inefficiency, in its own language.

‘Because instruments determine what can be done, they also determine to some extent what can be thought.’

Whatever one might think of the morals of executives at Uber, Amazon, and many, many companies like them, few set out to actively create such conditions for their workers. Nor is this a simple return to the robber barons and industrial tyrants of the nineteenth century. To the capitalist ideology of maximum profit has been added the possibilities of technological opacity, with which naked greed can be clothed in the inhuman logic of the machine. Both Amazon and Uber wield technological obscurity as a weapon. Behind a few pixels on Amazon’s homepage are hidden the labour of thousands of exploited workers: every time the buy button is pressed, electronic signals direct a real human to set off in motion, to perform their efficient duty. The app is a remote control device for other people, but one whose real-world effects are almost impossible to see.

The history of automation and computational knowledge, from cotton mills to microprocessors, is not merely one of upskilled machines slowly taking the place of human workers. It is also a story of the concentration of power in fewer hands, and the concentration of understanding in fewer heads.

While a few brave souls are still trying to sell their custom-designed artisan wares on the platform, it really belongs to vendors like LifeSphere, whose 10,257 products range from postcards of crawfish to bumper stickers featuring a piece of cheese. LifeSphere’s entire product range is a result of feeding some obscure database of natural images into Zazzle’s product creator and waiting to see what sticks. Somewhere out there is a customer looking for a skateboard deck depicting the ruined Cathedral of St Andrew in Fife, and LifeSphere is ready for them.

Technology, while it often appears as opaque complexity, is in fact attempting to communicate the state of reality. Complexity is not a condition to be tamed, but a lesson to be learned.

We will not solve the problems of the present with the tools of the past. As the artist and critical geographer Trevor Paglen has pointed out, the rise of artificial intelligence amplifies these concerns, because of its utter reliance on historical information as training data: ‘The past is a very racist place. And we only have data from the past to train Artificial Intelligence.’

The doctoring of photographs is an activity as old as the medium itself, but in this case the operation was being performed automatically and invisibly on the artefacts of personal memory. And yet, perhaps there is something to learn from this too: the delayed revelation that images are always false, artificial snapshots of moments that have never existed as singularities, forced from the multidimensional flow of time itself. Unreliable documents; composites of camera and attention. They are artefacts not of the world and of experience, but of the recording process – which, as a false mechanism, can never approach reality itself. It is only when these processes of capture and storage are reified in technology that we are able to perceive their falsity, their alienation from reality. This is the lesson that we might draw from the dreams of machines: not that they are rewriting history, but that history is not something that can be reliably narrativised; and thus, neither can the future.

Since Deep Blue, many computer programmes have been developed that can beat any human with ease and efficiency: increases in data storage and processing power mean that supercomputers are no longer required for the task. But even the most powerful contemporary programme can be defeated by a skilled player with access to their own computer – even one less powerful than their opponent. Cooperation between human and machine turns out to be a more potent strategy than the most powerful computer alone. This is the Optometrist Algorithm applied to games, an approach which draws on the respective skills of humans and machines as required, rather than pitting one against the other.

Ultimately, the public appetite for confronting the insane, insatiable demands of the intelligence agencies was never there and, having briefly surfaced in 2013, has fallen off, wearied by the drip-drip of revelation and the sheer existential horror of it all. We never really wanted to know what was in those secret rooms, those windowless buildings in the centre of the city, because the answer was always going to be bad. Much like climate change, mass surveillance has proved to be too vast and destabilising an idea for society to really get its head around.

Prometheus also promoted haruspicy, the examination of birds’ entrails for omens – a kind of primitive hacking. Today’s haruspex is the obsessive online investigator, spending hours picking over the traces of events, gutting them and splaying out their innards, poking at their joints and picking out fragments of steel, plastic, and black carbon.

Subsequent studies have found that across the continent, even when income inequality, ethnic fractionalisation and geography are taken into account, increases in cell phone coverage are associated with higher levels of violence.13 None of this is to argue that the satellite or the smartphone themselves create violence. Rather, it is the uncritical, unthinking belief in their amoral utility that perpetuates our inability to rethink our dealings with the world. Every unchallenged assertion of the neutral goodness of technology supports and sustains the status quo.