As the world around us increases in technological complexity, our understanding of it diminishes. As we have more accessibility to information, we are lost in a sea of data, too overwhelmed
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overwhelmed:
abrumados
to act. This state of paradox gave rise to the book New Dark Age in which artist and writer James Bridle surveys the history of art, technology and information systems from a fascinating perspective. Trained
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to train:
formarse, estudiar
in computing, Bridle still believes that technology is full of possibilities; it’s just, he says, that most of us have either lost control over it or never had it in the first place. From financial systems to shopping algorithms, artificial intelligence to state secrecy, we no longer understand how our world is governed or presented to us. So how do we access this proactive space of experimentation and possibility, online and in real life?
OBSCURE MATTER The title of Bridle’s book is, of course, a reference to the ‘old’ Dark Age, a term applied in retrospect to medieval times by the 14th century Italian scholar Francesco Petrarch. Petrarch believed that ancient Greek and Roman cultures were highly advanced, but the medieval period regressed as a result of religion and superstition, leading to a period of stagnation
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stagnation:
estancamiento
. Petrarch’s idea was very influential, though highly generalised, condescending and totally subjective.Bridle offers his definition of what a ‘new dark age’ is, more inspired by the words of the early 20th century English author, Virginia Woolf.
James Bridle (English accent): A new dark age is not a thing in which nothing happens. It is not a time in which things are not possible. Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary in the early 1920s that she felt we were entering a dark age and she thought that might be a good thing, because the darkness was a good place to think. That it doesn’t need to be a frightening place it can be a place of extraordinary possibility.
CLIMATE CHAOS The subheading
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subheading:
subtítulo
of the book is Technology and the End of the Future . Bridle explains what he means by this.
James Bridle : I read an article by someone who runs
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to run:
administrar, gestionar
the American Weather Corporation, which is one of the largest US-based weather forecasts
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weather forecasts:
pronóstico del tiempo
in the world, and one that pioneered the use of vast amounts of data to feed
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to feed:
alimentar
ever more
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ever more:
cada vez más
powerful computer programs in order to be able to predict the weather. But what’s increasingly apparent
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apparent:
evidente
is that our ability to predict the weather is starting to falter
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to falter:
flaquear, tambalearse
. Climate change and the increased instability of the planet means that our models aren’t working as well anymore and we’re getting more and more freak weather events, things are more complicated than we’re capable of modelling.
DAY BY DAY As a result, says Bridle, all our long-term forecasting is getting worse.
James Bridle : All our long-term forecasting and so much of our technologized society is entirely dependent on our attempt to predict the future in various ways, whether that’s moving goods
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goods:
mercancías
around, sowing
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to sow:
sembrar
and crops reaping
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to reap:
recoger
— any of these things. The ability to predict the future is something that we’ve based contemporary society entirely upon. The end of the future means we’re not going to be able to think so much in terms of what we’re going to be doing in a week’s time.
LOST IN DATA While life becomes less predictable, information overload
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overload:
saturación
blocks us. Take surveillance and climate change, big issues that we know all about but that no one is acting on, says Bridle.
James Bridle : Climate change has poisoned our ability to have nice conversations about the weather: we actively reject thinking about it. Maybe the ‘darkness’ is a response to that. Nothing is gained by knowing all of these facts. We have to be aware
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aware:
conscientes
of something else that’s off-kilter
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off-kilter:
descentrado, desequilibrado
in our very way of thinking about the world. And it’s in that sense that I invoke this idea of ‘unknowing’, of a wilful
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wilful:
deliberada
rejection of that form of Western empirical knowing because it’s not helping us address
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to address:
abordar
these issues at all.
MAGICAL TIMES One effect of this has been a rise in alternative ways of thinking. In recent years, there has been a notable rise in mysticism. Bridle sees it as a productive attempt to reassert
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to reassert:
reafirmar
agency over things that we don’t understand.
James Bridle : How do we live amongst vast and dangerous systems that we don’t understand? Because the whole idea was that we were taming
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to tame:
domesticar
everything; we were making it all safe and good and now we’re inviting things into our homes and into our pockets that we don’t understand and that may contain all kinds of strange dangers, and we need some way of balancing that and so mystical practices have always been a way of asserting agency and I think that’s a really productive way to think about it.
LISTEN TO ELDERS And given our lack of productivity on climate change, we should resist trying to give scientific reasons for observations that we assume are superstitious. Take the viewpoint of certain First Nations people, for example.
James Bridle : Certain First Nations people
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SPEAK UP EXPLAINS
Esta expresión se refiere a las comunidades indígenas que han poblado la región de América del Norte que ahora conocemos como Canadá durante miles de años, mucho antes de la llegada de los colonizadores europeos. Esta denominación no incluye a los inuits ni a los métis, pueblos indígenas de un origen algo distinto. En otras partes del mundo se utilizan términos diferentes para referirse a los pueblos indígenas. Por ejemplo, en Estados Unidos, se usan términos como "Native Americans", mientras que en Australia se usan "Aboriginal Australians" o "Aboriginal People".
, they’ve been saying that the Earth is “off its axis
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off its axis:
fuera de su eje
”, because the Sun is setting
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to set:
ponerse
in a different place, the land has changed to a radical degree. That something is afoot
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something is afoot:
algo está pasando
on the planet, and this was how they rendered
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to render:
representar
it. I think it’s really essential to resist going like, “Oh, but they mean this when we say it in scientific terms”. To actually engage
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to engage:
implicarse
with this stuff thoughtfully
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thoughtfully:
cuidadosamente
and critically, it’s really necessary to hold both those ways of talking about what’s happening with equal value, because it’s quite clear from our inability to act on climate change that our dominant ways of talking about it are radically insufficient.
ANOTHER WAY
If we can’t think too far ahead into the future, how we behave
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to behave:
comportarse
right now is everything, says Bridle. That is why a more democratised approach to technology and our understanding of it is required.
James Bridle : We see the ways in which the technologies we’re dependent upon, the ways in which they’ve been developed, so whether they’ve been developed originally as military systems and brought into civilian life, whether they’ve been developed as industrial corporate systems... what logics have put this particular configuration of technologies in place. And given that we’re not going to step back from making stuff, do we make stuff in ways that is at least is not the way we’ve been doing it thus far
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thus far:
hasta ahora
. How do we open up wider participation, freeing up more and more people’s agency to be part of that process?
