New Dark Age Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus New Dark Age

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Zusammenfassung von New Dark Age

Name: New Dark Age
Rating: 4 (83 reviews)
Author: James Bridle

James Bridle

Technology and the End of the Future

4 (83 Bewertungen)

28 Min.

Themen

Sozialismus & Kapitalismuskritik Kultur Big Data Das Internet Digitale Transformation Klimawandel

Inhaltsübersicht

New Dark Age
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What’s in it for me? Learn how to see our new dark age in a different light.

From social media addiction to fake news to mass surveillance, new technologies have changed our lives, our societies, and even our planet – often, in ways we hadn’t initially anticipated.

Once hailed as the harbingers of a new enlightenment, the internet and other important tools of our networked world seem to have engendered new genres of social and political division, violence and abuse, misinformation and conspiracy theory. Amidst a sea of information, we seem to be plunging into a new dark age: a period where we are able to gather more and more data on our complex world, and yet seem to understand less and less of it.

Now more than ever, we need to learn to think critically through all the uncertainty. We need to investigate the technologies that shape our world and our thinking, and examine where they came from, how they function, and who they serve. These blinks will lay bare some of the vast and unexpected ways that new technologies affect us – and why and how they came to do so.

In these blinks, you learn about

the military project that spawned the computation age;
the rationale behind conspiracy theories; and
the seedy underbelly of YouTube children’s entertainment.

Modern computation originated in military attempts to control the weather.

What do computers have to do with the weather, and what does the weather have to do with the military?

Well, everything. For decades, devising methods to predict and control the weather was a chief concern for Western armies – and in that project lies the origin of modern computation.

The first person to make calculations on atmospheric conditions in order to predict the weather was mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson. This was during World War I, when he was volunteering as a first responder on the Western Front.

Richardson even came up with a thought experiment that could be conceived as the first description of a "computer": he envisioned a pantheon made up of thousands of human mathematicians, each calculating the weather conditions for a particular square of the world, and communicating the results between one another to make further calculations. Such a machine, Richardson dreamed, would be able to accurately predict the weather anywhere, at any moment in time.

His futuristic idea didn’t come into view again until World War II, when big military research spending spurred the advent of machine computation. The Manhattan Project, a US military research project that led to the creation of the atomic bomb, is closely linked to the development of the first computers. Many of these first computers, such as the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) from 1946, were used to perform automated calculations to simulate the impact of different bombs and missiles under certain weather conditions.

Often, however, the military origins and purposes of the computers were concealed.

In 1948, for example, IBM installed its Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC) in full view of the public in a shop window in New York. But while the public was told the computer was calculating astronomical positions, it was actually working on a secret program called Hippo – carrying out calculations to simulate hydrogen bomb explosions.

From the beginning, the complex, hidden workings of computers provided a convenient cloak for obfuscating their actual functions.

Most of the time, though, they didn’t even carry out their actual functions all that well. The history of computation is full of anecdotes that illustrate how computers’ oversimplified view of the world, their inability to distinguish between reality and simulation, and bad data can have serious consequences for their human users. For example, the US computer network SAGE, which was used to integrate atmospheric and military data during the Cold War, is infamous for its near-fatal bloopers, such as mistaking a flock of migrating birds for an incoming Soviet bomber fleet.

New technologies and climate change are inextricably linked.

Climate change is what philosopher Timothy Morton calls a hyperobject: like the internet, it’s so vast and pervasive a thing that we simply cannot think of it in a meaningful way. Instead, we just witness its imprints on the world around us.

One such dramatic imprint is the Syrian conflict of recent years, described by many observers as the first climate war in history. Due to rising global temperatures, between 2006 and 2011, the Syrian countryside suffered massive, unprecedented droughts. Huge swathes of farmland became unusable, and nearly 85 percent of livestock died. The resulting demographic pressure of farmers fleeing to the cities, and built-up resentment about President Bashar al-Assad’s handling of the situation, finally resulted in the armed conflict that became palpable to the West as the refugee crisis.

The big data fallacy has plunged scientific research into crisis.

If you’re a little familiar with the world of computation, you’ll have heard of Moore’s law: the idea that the raw computing power of our devices doubles every two years. Since its first formulation in 1965, this law has held approximately true. But as you can probably attest from casual observation, the fact that technology is getting ever smaller and faster doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s making our lives any easier.

Tech optimists who cite Moore’s law usually do so in the spirit of computational optimism. They believe that more computation is always better, and that the more data we collect and process of the world, the more our understanding of it increases.

As a tool of capitalism, technology drives inequality.

On the surface, Slough is a pretty unremarkable, small town some 25 miles outside of London. Unbeknownst to most, however, the many vast and anonymous warehouses that line its main road form the physical base of some of the most important parts of our digital world. For example, one of them, given the unassuming name LD4, houses the data servers of the London Stock Exchange.

The fibre optic cables that lead to and from LD4 carry financial information of almost unimaginable value, transporting and receiving it to and from other financial data centers around the world at the speed of light. This super-speedy network between companies, investors and markets has given rise to a new type of financial exchange: high-frequency trading.

Machine learning encodes the bias of our past and carries it into our future.

There’s a lore about an AI built by the US Army that illustrates the dangers and limits of machine learning, by which is meant: teaching computers how to think.

Allegedly, the army tried to train a computer to recognize camouflaged tanks in a forest. To do so, they presented it with picture after picture of forests with tanks hidden in them, and picture after picture of forests with no tank, until the AI had learned to tell the test images apart perfectly. But out in the field, the AI failed completely. It was no better than a human at guessing whether there was a tank in a particular forest or not.

Our technology and data are increasingly controlled by governments and intelligence agencies.

In a previous blink, we considered the hydrogen bomb simulation computer, SSEC, which conducted its top-secret calculations in full view of the public.

Ever since World War II, intelligence agencies such as the CIA and NSA have spent millions of dollars on developing secret technologies, the existence or true purpose of which the world only becomes privy to decades after the fact – if ever. For example, it was the CIA, not the US Army or Air Force, that developed the first drones, years before they became a staple in modern warfare.

Conspiracy theories provide the comfort of simple narratives in a complex world.

Since the beginning of history, humans have been inclined to spin complex events into simple stories to make sense of the world. In a way, our conception of history is, itself, an example of oversimplification.

Of course, none of these narratives can ever encompass the full, multidimensional truth. But in our networked, information-saturated present, many stories people tell themselves about the world seem further off the mark than ever.

Paired with financial incentive, algorithms spawn disturbing cultural products.

Have you ever fallen into a YouTube spiral? Clicking from one suggested video to the next, you find yourself in ever-weirder corners of the video platform that barely classify as human entertainment.

One reason why there are so many vloggers, self-made entertainers, and increasingly, bots vying for your attention on YouTube, is that successful videos can make a lot of money from advertising. The music video for the viral Korean pop hit “Gangnam Style,” for example, earned eight million dollars from its first billion views.

In order to live with meaning in a new dark age, we need to abandon computational optimism and embrace complexity.

At Google’s 2013 Zeitgeist conference, an annual gathering of tech elites and politicians which discusses the state and future of technology, CEO Eric Schmidt made a startling claim. If camera phones had been around in 1994, the horrifying Rwandan genocide of that year would never have happened, because people would have been able to film and share news about the atrocities taking place.

Schmidt’s idea is rooted in a belief shared by many of his peers: that making something visible automatically fixes it, and that new technologies are making the world a better, safer, and easier-to-manage place. As we’ve seen in the previous blinks, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

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Worum geht es in New Dark Age?

New Dark Age (2018) investigates the fundamental paradox of our digital age: as new technologies allow us to gather more and more data on our world, we understand less and less of it. Examining the history, politics and geography of the complex digital network we are enmeshed in, James Bridle sheds new light on the central issues of our time, from climate change to wealth inequality to post-factual politics, and explains how we can live with purpose in an era of uncertainty.

Bestes Zitat aus New Dark Age

Complexity is not a condition to be tamed, but a lesson to be learned.

—James Bridle

Wer New Dark Age lesen sollte

Tech skeptics and tech enthusiasts
Critical thinkers fascinated by the geopolitics of our networked world
Anyone interested in the silly and profound ways technology shapes our lives

Über den Autor

James Bridle is an artist, publisher, and writer on technology whose work has appeared in the Guardian, Wired, Frieze, Observer, Atlantic and many other publications. New Dark Age is his second book.

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