New Dark Age

NEW DARK AGE is a masterful study of all the things approaching out of the future’s night. Compelling and essential. – Warren Ellis, author of NORMAL and TRANSMETROPOLITANComputation brings humanity more darkness than enlightenment: a goblin horde of digital superstitions, invented and unleashed in just half a century. Yet James Bridle is fearless in our gloomy post-truth predicament; he’s a theorist, artist, technical visionary and even a moralist. Has he foreseen the worst? – Bruce Sterling, author of Pirate UtopiaHighlights the ways in which we are deliberately being kept in the dark and are sleepwalking into a future of non-stop surveillance and ‘the dark clouds [gathering] over our dreams of the digital sublime. * Financial Times [Summer Reads 2018] *An extraordinary, perceptive analysis of the various ways in which the rise of information technology has obscured, rather than illuminated, the operations of power in the world, and diminished our capacity to improve it. It’s brilliant and bracing – Mark O’Connell * Guardian *New Dark Age is among the most unsettling and illuminating books I’ve read about the Internet, which is to say that it is among the most unsettling and illuminating books I’ve read about contemporary life. – Mark O’Connell * New Yorker *[New Dark Age] is an essential read on the key subjects around AI, and the dangerous feedback loops that are currently being produced. – Ben Vickers * Dazed *New Dark Age is enlightening but frightening, a dystopian warning about the implications of the convergence of data and robotics, code and quantum computing, science and technology. – David Gorin * Financial Mail *Brilliant and beautiful. * The Australian *New Dark Age is a paradoxical work, elegiac yet futuristic, which embraces paradox and the limits of knowledge-especially the limits of knowledge that the present moment’s technological advances, political instability, and environmental chaos have conferred upon us. – Tobias Carroll * Literary Hub *An engaging, sharp, and urgent work that takes us well beyond the neo-Luddite fantasies of techno-apocalypse so prevalent in late critiques of technology. – Mari Bastashevski * Burlington Contemporary *

James Bridle is a literary editor, technologist, writer, journalist, and visual artist. He writes for Guardian, Observer, Wired, Frieze, Atlantic, and many other publications.