In a tech environment fixated on systemic disruption, the artist and writer James Bridle (who uses they/them pronouns) has earned a reputation as a disrupter among disrupters. In their writing and artwork — and also at the glossy tech conferences where they often speak — Bridle holds forth a dark vision of where big tech has actually led us, for all its utopian claims. In their first book, “New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future,” Bridle depicted a world smothering under dark clouds both literal and figurative, a planet whose ecological and structural collapse cannot even be grasped by its people, obscured as it is in a fog of impenetrable complexity. In Bridle’s view, world culture is currently locked in a vicious and deadly cycle, endlessly insisting “on the power of images and computation to rectify a situation that is produced by our unquestioning belief in their authority.” It’s suicide by data, on a global scale.
“A heady and often astonishing survey of recent discoveries from the “more-than-human” world… Spanning millenniums, continents and academic disciplines, the scope of Bridle’s curiosity and comprehension is immense.”
-New York Times
“In this book, Bridle has created a new way of thinking about our world, about being. How would we live our lives and change our world if we embraced this thinking? If we did not place ourselves at the center of everything? Please read this important book. Read it twice. Talk about it. Tell everyone you know.”
-The Washington Post
