James Bridle (2018) — Computation, "New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future"

Rina Chen’s living notebook on digital craft and design.

Key Quotations

“I have heard articulate speech by sunlight! I have heard a ray of the sun laugh and cough and sing! I have been able to hear a shadow and I have even perceived by ear the passage of a cloud across the sun’s disk.” — Alexander Graham Bell

“Personified today as a digital cloud, the story of computational thinking begins with the weather.”

“All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control.” — von Neumann to Zworykin, October 1945

“Now we think of a personal computer as one you carry around with you. The ENIAC was actually one you kind of lived inside. But today, we all live inside a version of the ENIAC: a vast machinery of computation that encircles the globe and extends into outer space.” (p.29)

“Computational thinking—violent, destructive, and unimaginably costly—slipped out of view. It became unquestioned and unquestionable, and as such it has endured.” (p.32)

“As computation surrounds us, takes over cognitive tasks, and generates truth, reality itself takes on the appearance of a computer; our modes of thought follow suit.” (p.43)

“The more obsessively we attempt to compute the world, the more unknowably complex it appears.” (p.46)

Historical Context & Key Developments

Early Visions

  • Vannevar Bush (Memex): Proposed an electronic, networked computer to tackle research overload.
    • Linked telephony, data storage, photography, and stenography into a single system.
    • Prefigured hypertext and networked knowledge (p.23–24).
    • Critiqued specialization: growing knowledge silos versus shallow interdisciplinary connections.

Militarization & Black Boxes

  • ENIAC → SSEC → Whirlwind I → SAGE → SABRE: each step expanded computational power and opacity.
  • “Failures to distinguish between simulation and reality” marked early computational history (p.34).
  • Cold War surveillance and aviation systems fed into business and commercial applications.

From Simulation to Reality

  • “By conflating approximation with simulation, computational thinking replaces the world with flawed models of itself; modelers assume control of the world.” (p.34–35)
  • The God’s-eye view of satellites hides as much as it reveals: covert operations, inequalities, and unseen realities remain out of sight (p.36).

Computation as Culture & Space

  • Code/Spaces: Computation becomes inseparable from physical and cultural spaces. Environments stop functioning without it (p.37).

  • Reading, music, research, and learning increasingly mediated by hidden algorithms.

  • “That which computation sets out to map and model it eventually takes over.” Example: Google → from indexing to defining knowledge itself.

Cognitive Shifts & Automation Bias

  • Automation Bias: People trust automated information over lived experience, even when it conflicts (p.40).

  • Confirmation Bias: Reality reshaped to fit computational outputs, ignoring contradictions.

  • Automated systems speed decision-making but reduce discussion and critical thinking.

  • Computation dominates even when simpler, physical, or social methods would work.

Limits & Complexity

  • Oversimplification, bad data, and obfuscation expose the limits of computational thinking.

  • Coastline Paradox / Richardson Effect: Inspired Mandelbrot’s fractals → reality resists smooth, computable models.

  • Scientific uncertainty measures what we do know, not ignorance — yet computation often erases ambiguity from possible futures.

References & Further Reading

  • Karen Barad: Ontology, materiality, entanglement.

  • Wendy Chun: Software, control, cultural implications.

  • James Bridle: Computational culture and critique.

![[Birdle-New Dark Age pp. 17-46 AC.pdf]]