New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

by James Bridle

Reliance on the computational logics of surveillance to derive truth about the world leaves us in a fundamentally precarious and paradoxical position. Computational knowing requires surveillance, because it can only produce its truth from the data available to it directly. In turn, all knowing is reduced to that which is computationally knowable, so all knowing becomes a form of surveillance. Thus computational logic denies our ability to think the situation, and to act rationally in the absence of certainty.

Many conspiracy theories, then, might be a kind of folk knowing: an unconscious augury of the conditions, produced by those with a deep, even hidden, awareness of current conditions and no way to articulate them in scientifically acceptable terms. But a world that has no way of admitting such differently articulated accounts is in danger of falling prey to far worse stories – from antiscientific public panics to blood libels – and of failing to hear voices of genuine and necessary warning.