New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

by James Bridle

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.