Put Down That iPhone!

“New Dark Age – Technology and the End of the Future,” by James Bridle, 2018

This book is a too lyrical and scattered meditation on the effect information technology and the computer ‘revolution’ is having on human society.  It challenges the techno-utopianism of Silicon Valley.  It undermines the cheery corporate commodification of information overloads, software upgrades and endless gadgets.  It challenges the idea that pure ‘computation’ will make us free.  It makes a point that humans have to use technology and not let technology or information use them.   This book will remind most computer users of the flaws in software, which we are all familiar with.  This is why computers are tools like any other, but anyone who takes them as fail-safe systems – like self-driving trucks and cars – will find out soon enough the darker consequences.

  

Medieval Times Are Back Again?

For the capitalist computer companies or many governments, they are busy using the technology of the digital age to profit and to control.  Some bourgeois tech thinkers see ‘information as the new oil.’  Bridle thinks it is the new ‘nuclear power’ – with all its radioactive dangers.

Bridle sees the internet now as a world-wide ‘mass mind’ that shows all the weaknesses and strengths of human beings - their uncontrolled lizard brains and their amazing intelligence.  This is guided by robot algorithms and corporate and government needs, which is at the root of ‘the cloud.’ In a way, he’s warning us that films like The Matrix or Terminator’s Skynet are not so unreal.   

Bridle discusses ‘computational thinking’ (which some have called cybernetics, others artificial intelligence - AI) as a danger without any analytic context.  Machine thinking substitutes for human thought as the path of least resistance.  This is his ‘dark age,’ where the positivist “Moore’s law” is a fraud. Instead pure massive data is driving propaganda, advertising, surveillance, profits and human thinking in ways that mold citizens into obedient servants, even if they think otherwise.  He grounds the history of the computer in the development of weather forecasting and nuclear weapons done by the U.S. government in the 1940s.  The weather forecasting system ultimately became SABRE, which is now used to book travel.  GPS systems came out of this, so you can now be led down a dirt road to save distance - if you are not paying attention.       

Bridle looks at how this relates to the failing climate.  Big Data actually requires enormous amounts of energy to run server farms, along with all the technology connected to them – cell phone towers, fiber optic cables, the ‘internet of things,’ satellites, internet phones and computers. Bitcoin alone is a huge user of energy, as is AI. 

Bridle touches on many software and hardware subjects, including the increasing number of retractions in scientific studies because of computer-driven ‘brute force’ data fails.  Or why more data has led to less development in capitalist drug research.  He covers the same ground Michael Lewis did in Flash Boys about the increasing speed of technology, leading to financial market crashes and extreme stock price swings.  Even technology’s relation to inequality is addressed.  Bridle says “Complexity itself is a driver of inequality.”

 

We Have Your Number...

Artificial intelligence, Friedrich Hayek, facial recognition software, Stuxnet, computer chess, government secrecy, drones and the NSA, Amazon and Uber – it’s all here.  Oddly, he comes out against whistle blowers, who he thinks feed the idea that there is a smoking-gun conspiracy secret that ‘we’ don’t know.  He continues this with a long discussion of how ‘chemtrail’ conspiracy theories are riffing off the very real 'contrails’ left by high-flying jets.  Conspiracy theories themselves are enabled by fact-free suppositions that spread on the internet.  He is shocked by the terrible quality of very popular children’s ‘entertainment’ on YouTube, much of which is moronic, repetitive, violent and probably created by robot algorithms. Even the Ashley Madison scandal shows up, as husbands looking for affairs plunked down money to talk to 70,000 AI 'bots' that seemed to be real women.

At the end of the book, if you were not familiar with the computer’s dark side, you will be.  But he never addresses the key role computers have in replacing human labor, leading to unemployment, deskilling or lower wages, which is odd.  He also does not look at the political uses of data.  The British Cambridge Analytica data used by the Trump campaign, the Russian troll farms; Facebook, YouTube and Google's banning or hiding many left-wing sites - all missing.  In all this, Bridle has no solution except to suggest that this tool be controlled.  But how?  Like an untethered air-drill jumping around an auto shop because it is stuck in the ‘on’ position, the computer itself has to come to heel.  But as long as it is controlled by capital, the computer’s dialectical dark side can prevail. 

Prior archived reviews on this subject:  “CypherPunks,” “Propaganda,” (Bernays); “Cyber-Proletariat,” “Why People Don’t Buy Books,” “Manufacturing Consent,” “In Letters of Blood and Fire,” “Creative Destruction,” “The Endless Crisis,” “Time Wars,” “Flash Boys.” Use blog search box, upper left.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

December 15, 2018