New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

by James Bridle

A simply functional understanding of systems is insufficient; one needs to be able to think about histories and consequences too. Where did these systems come from, who designed them and what for, and which of these intentions still lurk within them today?

What is needed is not new technology, but new metaphors: a metalanguage for describing the world that complex systems have wrought.

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.

By inherent, I mean the notion that they emerged, ex nihilo, from the things we created rather than involving our own actions as part of that co-creation.

Technology is not mere tool making and tool use: it is the making of metaphors.