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A review by jung
New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle
dark
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
3.25
a pretty interesting dive into the harmful effects of our data driven world, and the ways in which our biases towards data sets actually reduce what we are able to parse from our current environment. Probably if you're not familiar with data rights, algorithms, etc., please read this!, this is a good book.
Bridle at one point goes into conspiracy theories (particularly chemtrails) and posits that they are an understanding of the world that theorists latch onto due to their inability to describe what is deeply wrong with the modern condition and their inability to fix it. I've heard this theory before, and generally prescribe to it, but I think that this sense is a pretty good descriptor of Bridle's book as a whole. That is to say, a lot of what Bridle goes into are things that lie just beyond the comprehensible, but we know that there's something deeply wrong. For instance, the sense that we are being spied on, or that algorithms are ruining us, etc. are concepts that I think most media literate people can parse, but we can't explain exactly how or why these things affect us the way they do, and why this is a bad thing. Bridle does a good job giving concrete examples of ways in which or bias towards algorithms have society-changing ("ruining", one might say), implications.
That being said, I was very exposed to this kind of stuff during my time at UCSB (media theory classes!), so perhaps this book was not as shocking as it would be to others. Similar to my experience reading Qualityland by Marc Uwe-Kling: I frankly did not need any more persuading that we need to rethink how we use data, and have heard a lot of similar examples in general reading. Data rights, are a cultural zeitgeist for activists of both political leanings and for good reason.
Probably the most interesting points were where Bridle returned to the thesis, which is perhaps a novel way of viewing our use of data-driven methods (that we are actually losing knowledge through our reliance, that the age of discovery is over, etc.) This was definitely where he had my attention the most. Not to say that the whole book was not prescient, but I just felt like I've heard a lot of this stuff before.
Bridle at one point goes into conspiracy theories (particularly chemtrails) and posits that they are an understanding of the world that theorists latch onto due to their inability to describe what is deeply wrong with the modern condition and their inability to fix it. I've heard this theory before, and generally prescribe to it, but I think that this sense is a pretty good descriptor of Bridle's book as a whole. That is to say, a lot of what Bridle goes into are things that lie just beyond the comprehensible, but we know that there's something deeply wrong. For instance, the sense that we are being spied on, or that algorithms are ruining us, etc. are concepts that I think most media literate people can parse, but we can't explain exactly how or why these things affect us the way they do, and why this is a bad thing. Bridle does a good job giving concrete examples of ways in which or bias towards algorithms have society-changing ("ruining", one might say), implications.
That being said, I was very exposed to this kind of stuff during my time at UCSB (media theory classes!), so perhaps this book was not as shocking as it would be to others. Similar to my experience reading Qualityland by Marc Uwe-Kling: I frankly did not need any more persuading that we need to rethink how we use data, and have heard a lot of similar examples in general reading. Data rights, are a cultural zeitgeist for activists of both political leanings and for good reason.
Probably the most interesting points were where Bridle returned to the thesis, which is perhaps a novel way of viewing our use of data-driven methods (that we are actually losing knowledge through our reliance, that the age of discovery is over, etc.) This was definitely where he had my attention the most. Not to say that the whole book was not prescient, but I just felt like I've heard a lot of this stuff before.