Automating Domination: A Review of James Bridle’s New Dark Age

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future
James Bridle
Verso, 2018

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. (39–40)

There is a long-standing tradition of some of the most thorough and excellent critiques of technology carrying within them a grandiose deflation: the inevitable defeat that the machine is here to stay. So let’s get it out of the way here: “Nothing here is an argument against technology: to do so would be to argue against ourselves.”

That proclamation on page 12 of James Bridle’s otherwise exceptional New Dark Age is pretty quickly rendered obsolete two pages later: our relationship with technology, “properly understood, is also a realization of technology’s inherent instability; its temporal and temporary alignment or resonance with certain other uncertain properties of materials and animals that are subject to change.” (14)

Bridle, both a journalist and an artist, strides between two worlds that permit him to give an artist’s glimpse of unintended consequences, but back it up with journalistic integrity. The end result is technology as envisioned from the perspective of failure. Something tech gurus and start up pitches want to own, but, not surprisingly, fail to inherently understand. He seeks to expose that “the real history of computation” includes “a litany of failures to distinguish between simulation and reality; a chronic failure to identify the conceptual chasm at the heart of computational thinking.” (34)

If there is one takeaway from this book — and it would be hard to imagine readers taking away only one — it is that concept: computational thinking. The torch of Lewis Mumford is perhaps passed on here. Computational thinking, also called solutionism, is “the belief that any given problem can be solved by the application of computation.” (4)

Hubris, by any other name.

A history of contemporary technology, through this lens, gives us the ability to realize that the great misses and should-be flops of technological development have less to do with the construction of a truly intelligent or autonomous machine, but the degradation of our imagination. Computational thinking isn’t about learning to function alongside machines so much as it is about calibrating our expectations to a machine-friendly world.

Cue up the tech gurus. Tap in Kurzweil, Kelly, and Pinker. If they were to say that there have been mistakes and missteps in the history of technological dependency and adaptation, it is, as they would put it, in user error.

Kurzweil’s predictions for the age of “intelligent” machines actually builds in the idea that our safety valve against a finite world — one quickly being overrun with the trash and contamination of civilization — could be solved by a computer smarter than us to figure it out. Eventually. Continue building, have no fear: it will all make sense in the end.

With that early disclaimer aside, Bridle’s work here should leave little question that Kurzweil’s fantasy is a dystopian nightmare. And it is one that we are endemically entwined with. The utter irony exhibited throughout the book is that the problems technology has been least adept to deal with are those they rapidly create.

Namely, climate change.

Instability, global warming, rising sea levels, parched regions: “The cloud doesn’t just have a shadow; it has a footprint.” (7) As much as the cloud is built — and intentionally so — around the concept of being otherworldly, it is infrastructure. It is a quickly expanding and resource-devouring infrastructure at that. The cloud attains a mythical and mystical quality because it is too vast for any of us to really see. “The aggregation of complex systems in contemporary networked applications means that no single person ever sees the whole picture.” (40)

Because no one is capable of seeing the whole picture, it becomes easier for prophets of the machine like Kurzweil to speak with indifference to reality. Each realm of the computational era is filled with hyper-specialized programmers and directors, ensuring that large problems necessarily become smaller. Here is that solutionism: programming, like complex mathematics, can become theoretical. It’s a dance between mastering the machine and reducing expectations to become mathematical problems. The algorithmization of our world.

When you pull back for the bigger picture, the reality is that the future technology breeds is more Trojan horse of trophic cascades than it is the knight in shining armor. Because for all the things that Kurzweil got right about computational ability, it is the exponential rate of energy consumption that he got wrong.

Brindle catches the irony: “What has changed is not the dimensionality of the future, but its predictability.” (72) The cloud is tethered by data centers spread across the planet, hidden in plain sight in places ill-equipped to deal with rising temperatures. It is relayed through fiber optic cables that cross the oceans and shorelines, which rising sea levels will soon bury and quickly erode. All the things that a computational world requires to understand have been and will be displaced by its practice.

The prophets of the era of data want to believe that they have reinvented the wheel, but they have only reinvigorated it: “Our thirst for data, like our thirst for oil, is historically imperialist and colonialist, and tightly tied to capitalist networks for exploitation.” The map of the cloud, the one we are supposed to pretend doesn’t exist, is an old one. “The same empires first occupied, then exploited, the natural reserves of their possessions, and the networks they created live on in the digital infrastructures of the present day; the information superhighway follows the networks of telegraph cables laid down to control old empires.” (246)

Fiber optic cables follow the lines left behind from the slave trade. Imperial nations run infrastructure through plots of old colonies that were tightly held for later repurposing. While a world flooded with data and access is said to liberate, technology has always served the opposite end: “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 hands.” (120)

It is the tech gurus and those that embraced their advances who spearhead the tipping of the scales of inequality, to the point where wealth has never been as hyper-consolidated and disproportionate as it is right now.

Our ability to conceive a created problem that is rapidly worsening is eroded too by the consequences of our energy consumption. There are no signs of slowing carbon emissions; even the most optimistic plans do little to deter them. And these days even optimistic plans feel dismally far off. If civilization continues, by the end of the century, carbon dioxide emissions could reach 1,000 parts per million. And at that point, “human cognitive ability drops by 21 percent.” (74)

That should be alarming, but even more alarm should be had over the precedent set here. Our knowledge of declining cognitive ability comes from our own reality. As always, it is the children who suffer our oversights: “substantial numbers of schools in California and Texas measured in 2012 breached 2,000 ppm.” (75)

At the same time that we reduce our expectations of the world into computable terms, we offset our understanding of it. As the abysmal future of unthinking we’ve created sets in, we’ll increasingly rely on machines to order us around.

Perhaps this is no more apparent in places than in Amazon’s warehouses. From fast fashion to just-in-time manufacturing, the immediate and fleeting world of hyper-paced and delivered consumption can be replicated only by attempting to turn human actions into living algorithms. “Arranging the world from the perspective of the machine renders it computationally efficient, but make it completely incomprehensible to humans. And moreover, it accelerates their oppression.” (116)

Workers in the Amazon warehouses have been making the news over the past few years as the algorithms literally run them into the ground. Workers carry hand-held devices that bark orders and pace their flesh-and-blood counterparts into an orchestrated, yet distinctly inhuman, rhythm. Reduced to essential movements: “They are intended to act like robots, impersonating machines while remaining, for now, slightly cheaper than them.” (116)

Or perhaps it is all much closer than that.

For Bridle, it is not in the outing of the NSA scandals and leaked reports touching on the extent that data collection is being done — on both corporate and governmental levels — that is shocking, but the speed at which outrage over the news died. Outrage hit that limit of the imagination: “Much like climate change, mass surveillance has proved to be too vast and destabilizing an idea for society to really get its head around.” But perhaps our ability to acquiesce to the machine is due to the fact that 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.” (179)

The reality is that we accept the machine because we’re being programmed to interact with it, on its terms, in a world in which thinking is more vice than virtue. The consequences of those engagements become only increasingly prevalent.

From the way that algorithms determine what content we receive, what gets boosted by bot farms and programs, what gets suppressed by the learned biases of projecting values from the unrequited errors of our past, from skies that become more turbulent due to rising carbon emissions to political climates boiling over; we cede to the machine continually in an unprofessed and anticlimactic ritual of domination. This is the world that we’ve inherited. And if we pull back from the hyper-specialized insistence on the idea that it does work, we quickly begin to see the eroding foundations on which it all depends. The eroding foundation on which civilization and its technological infrastructure has always been dependent.

So perhaps it is the failure of the imagination that led Bridle to his early qualifier in the book that it is not against technology. Perhaps even more the asinine presumption that arguing against technology, a historical creation that arises only in hierarchy and ends in decimation, is arguing against ourselves.

As the book makes clear, it is in its failures that the reality of technology can be best understood and on its own terms. But those terms still are bound to our world. That is a world with consequences and limitations. If we refuse to accept that, then we welcome a world of Amazon warehouses, automated Ubers, endemic inequality, and electronically moderated and determined subservience.

Take one step further back and the picture becomes far clearer: the dystopian future we feared is here. And it is equal parts underwhelming and over-indulgent. Oversight is its weakness and its downfall.

If we start to embrace our unpredictable and incomputable sides, then we might start find a lot of more creative ways to help erode and destroy that infrastructure before we let this charade play itself out.