# New Dark Age (2018) >[!info]- metadata >*`= this.tags`* >- Online Rating - `=this.onlineRating` | My Rating- `=this.personalRating` >- Status - `=this.status` >- Progress - `=this.currentPage` of `=this.pages` ![image|150](https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/13763474-L.jpg) ## Summary `=this.description` ## My Thoughts >[!quote]+ My Review >`= this.review` ### Highlights #### Chapter 1: Chasm - ["] This is a book about what technology is trying to tell us in an emergency. It is also a book about what we know, how we know, and what we cannot know. - Page 2 - ["] The reasons for this are complex, and the answers are complex too, not least because we ourselves are utterly enmeshed in technological systems, which shape in turn how we act and how we think. [...] We cannot stand outside them; we cannot think without them. - Page 2 - ["] learning to code is not enough, just as learning to plumb a sink is not enough to understand the complex interactions between water tables, political geography, ageing infrastructure, and social policy that define, shape and produce actual life support systems in society. - Page 3 - ["] The ability to think without claiming, or even seeking, to fully understand is key to survival in a new dark age because, as we shall see it is often impossible to understand. - Page 6 - ["] Absorbed into the cloud are many of the previously weighty edifices of the civic sphere: the places where we shop, bank, socialise, borrow books, and vote. Thus obscured, they are rendered less visible and less amenable to critique, investigation, preservation and regulation. - Page 7 - ["] The cloud shapes itself to geographies of power and influence, and it serves to reinforce them. The cloud is a power relation-ship, and most people are not on top of it. - Page 8 - ["] [[cloudy thinking|Cloudy thinking]], the embrace of unknowing, might allow us to revert from computational thinking, and it is what the network itself urges upon us. - Page 9 - #concepts - ["] The greatest carrier wave of progress for the last few centuries has been the central idea of the Enlightenment itself: that more knowledge —more information—leads to better decisions. - Chapter 1, Page 10 - ["] And so we find ourselves today connected to vast repositories of knowledge, and yet we have not learned to think. In fact, the opposite is true: that which was intended to enlighten the world in practice darkens it. The abundance of information and the plurality of worldviews now accessible to us through the Internet are not producing a coherent consensus reality, but one riven by fundamentalist insistence on simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories. and post-factual politics. - Page 10 - ["] it refers to both the nature and the opportunity of the present crisis: an apparent inability to see clearly what is in front of us, and to act meaningfully, with agency and justice, in the world - and, through acknowledging this darkness, to seek new ways of seeing by another light. - Page 11 - ["] When one has a hammer, goes the saying, everything looks like a nail. But this is to not think the hammer. The hammer, properly conceived, has many uses. - Page 13 - ["] We must re-enchant our hammers —all our tools—so they are less like the carpenter's, and more like Thor's.- Page 13 - ["] We have much to learn about unknowing. Uncertainty can be productive, even sublime. -Page 15 #### Chapter 2: Computation - ["] Thinking through machines predates the machines them-selves. The existence of calculus proves that some problems may be tractable before it is possible to solve them practically. History, viewed as such a problem, might thus be transformed into a mathematical equation that, when solved, would produce the future. Page 20 - ["] By conflating approximation with simulation, the high priests of computational thinking replace the world with flawed models of itself; and in doing so, as the modellers, they assume control of the world. Page 34 - ["] GPS enables the blue dot in the centre of the map that folds the entire planet around the individual. page 36 - ["] Code/spaces describe the interweaving of computation with the built environment and daily experience to a very specific extent: rather than merely overlaying and augmenting them, computation becomes a crucial component of them, such that the environment and the experience of it actually ceases to function in the absence of code. Page 37 - ["] Reading a book, listening to music, researching and learning: these and many other activities are increasingly governed by algorithmic logics and policed by opaque and hidden computational processes. Culture is itself a code/space. page 39 - ["] That which computation sets out to map and model it eventually takes over. Google set out to index all human knowledge and became the source and arbiter of that knowledge: it became what people actually think. Facebook set out to map the connections between people - the social graph - and became the platform for those connections, irrevocably reshaping societal relationships. Like an air control system mistaking a flock of birds for a fleet of bombers, software is unable to distinguish between its model of the world and reality - and, once conditioned, neither are we. - [[New Dark Age (2018)]], Page 39 ^6678f0 - ["] Faith in the machine is a prerequisite for its employment, and this backs up other cognitive biases that see automated responses as inherently more trustworthy than nonautomated ones.page 40 - ["] Automation bias means that technology doesn't even have to malfunction for it to be a threat to our lives - and GPS is again a familiar culprit. page 42 - ["] Confronted with complex problems, particularly under time pressure - and who among us is not under time pressure, all the time? - people try to engage in the least amount of cognitive work they can get away with, preferring strategies that are both easy to follow and easy to justify. 43 - ["] Computation, at every scale, is a cognitive hack, offloading both the decision process and the responsibility onto the machine. 43 - ["] As computation and its products increasingly surround us, are assigned power and the ability to generate truth, and step in to take over more and more cognitive tasks, so reality itself takes on the appearance of a computer; and our modes of thought follow suit. 43 - ["] In this way, computation does not merely govern our actions in the present, but constructs a future that best fits its parameters. That which is possible becomes that which is computable. That which is hard to quantify and difficult to model, that which has not been seen before or which does not map onto established patterns, that which is uncertain or ambiguous, is excluded from the field of possible futures. 44 - ["] Computational thinking has triumphed because it has fint seduced us with its power, then befuddled us with its complexity, and finally settled into our cortexes as self-evident. [[New Dark Age (2018)]], Page 44 - Never heard a truer statement with respect to “data driven x” or attribution. Something about reification in the idea of computation. #### Chapter 4: Calculation - ["] Put simply, overflow is the opposite of scarcity: it is the boundless upwelling of information. […] In studies of the economics of attention, overflow addresses how people choose which subjects to prioritise when they have too little time and too much information. As the authors of one study note, it also evokes the image of a mess that needs to be dealt with, or waste that needs to be removed. Pg 92 - ["] But what if the problem of overflow isn't limited to science's outputs, but to its inputs too? As de Solla Price feared, science has continued in its trajectory of assembling ever-vaster and more-complex datasets. When it was announced in 1990, the human genome project was regarded as the greatest single data-gathering project in history, but the plunging cost of DNA sequencing means that multiples of its data are now churned out every year. This data is increasing rapidly and is widely distributed, making it impossible to study all of it comprehensively. The Large Hadron Collider generates too much data to even store on site, meaning that only certain kinds of events can be stored, leading to criticisms that once the Higgs boson particle was discovered, the data was unsuitable for discovering anything else. All science is becoming the science of big data. Pg 93 - ["] While low-hanging fruit' suggests that there are no easy targets remaining, 'better than the Beatles' implies that the fruit already picked lessens the value of what remains on the tree. pg 94 - ["] They necessitate thinking clearly about what it means to live at all times among complex and interrelated systems, in states of doubt and uncertainty that may be beyond reconciliation. Admitting to the indescribable is one facet of a new dark age: an admission that the human mind has limits to what it can conceptualise. - Page 101 #### Chapter 5: Complexity - ["] Companies are deploying these lessons, and their effects, at the level of indi-viduals, passing costs onto their employees and demanding that they submit their bodies to the efficiencies of the machine. - Page 117 - ["] To the capitalist ideology of maximum profit has been added the possibilities of technological opacity, with which naked greed can be clothed in the inhuman logic of the machine. - Page 118 - ["] Page 120 - Technology extends power and understanding; but when applied unevenly it also concentrates power and understanding. […] the concentration of understanding in fewer heads. ^454b42 - ["] Page 122 - One technique that was identified in the market data was high-frequency trading programmes sending large numbers of 'non-executable' orders to the exchanges - that is, orders to buy or sell stocks so far outside of their usual prices that they would be ignored. The purpose of such orders is not to actually communicate or make money, but to deliberately cloud the system, and to test its latency, so that other, more valuable trades could be executed in the confusion. - ["] Page 123, Automation obfuscates - ... while the Bank of England was quick to blame the human programmers behind the automated trades, such subtleties do not help us understand the real situation any better. - ["] Page 124 - The act of writing, of generating information, becomes part of a mesh of data and data generation, read as well as written by machines. - ["] Page 126 - The artist and theorist Hito Steyerl calls such systems 'artificial stupidity', evoking a world of unseen, poorly designed and ill-adapted 'intelligent' systems wreaking havoc on markets, email inboxes, search results - and, ultimately, culture and political systems. - ["] Page 131, it seems to me this is the big question - Where does all this data go, who owns it, and when might it come out? Data on our dreams, our night terrors and early morning sweating jags, the very substance of our unconscious selves, turned into more fuel for systems both pitiless and inscrutable. - ["] Page 132, on “AI for good” - Acceleration itself is one of the bywords of the age. In the last couple of decades, a variety of theorists have put forward versions of accelerationist thought, advocating that technological processes perceived to be damaging society should not be opposed, but should be sped up - either to be commandeered and repurposed for socially beneficial ends, or simply to destroy the current order. - ["] Page 134 - This power and artfulness - the Greek tekhnē, from which we derive technology - is thus in humankind the result of a double fault: forgetfulness and theft. #### Chapter 6, Cognition - ["] Page 136 - The story of the tanks encodes a fundamental realisation, and one of increasing importance: whatever artificial intelligence might come to be, it will be fundamentally different, and ultimately inscrutable, to us. - ["] Page 138 - The idea that underlay the Perceptron was connectionism: the belief that intelligence was an emergent property of the connections between neurons, and that by imitating the winding pathways of the brain, machines might be induced to think. - ["] Page 142 - In their response, they double down on this assertion: 'Like most technologies, machine learning is neutral. They insist that if machine learning can be used to reinforce human biases in social computing problems, as some argued, then it can also be used to detect and correct human biases.' Knowingly or not, such a response relies upon our ability to optimise not only our machines, but also ourselves. - ["] Page 143 - But the technology of the Nikon Coolpix and the HP Pavilion masks a more modern, and more insidious, racism: it's not that their designers set out to create a racist machine, or that it was ever employed for racial profiling; rather, it seems likely that these machines reveal the systemic inequalities still present within today's technological workforce, where those developing and testing the systems are still predominately white […] It also reveals, as never before, the historic prejudices deeply encoded in our data sets, which are the frameworks on which we build contemporary knowledge and decision making. - ["] Page 144 - Walter Benjamin, writing in 1940, phrased the problem even more fiercely: 'There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. To train these nascent intelligences on the remnants of prior knowledge is thus to encode such barbarism into our future. - ["] Page 146 - Whenever Predpol is taken up by a city's police department, as has happened in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Seattle, and hundreds of other US jurisdictions, the last few years of local data - the time, type, and location of each crime - are analysed using ETAS. The resulting model, constantly updated with new crimes as they occur, is used to produce shift-by-shift heat maps of potential trouble spots. Cruisers are dispatched to the site of potential tremors; police officers are assigned to shaky corners. In this manner, crime becomes a physical force: a wave passing through the strata of urban life. Prediction becomes the justification for stops and searches, tickets, and arrests. The aftershocks of a century-old earthquake rumble through contemporary streets. - ["] Page 150 - Capable of simulating entire universes within their imaginations, some Minds retreat forever into Infinite Fun Space, a realm of meta-mathematical possibility, accessible only to superhuman artificial intelligences. And the rest of us, if we spurn the arcade, are left with Finite Fun, fruitlessly analysing the decisions of machines beyond our comprehension. - ["] Page 152 - At lunch one day, his father had held the button down on his iPhone a little long, resulting in a burst of images of the same scene. Smith uploaded two of them, to see which his wife preferred. In one, he was smiling, but his wife was not; in the other, his wife was smiling, but he was not. From these two images, taken seconds apart, Google's photo-sorting algorithms had conjured a third: a composite in which both subjects were smiling their 'best'. The algorithm was part of a package called AutoAwesome (since renamed, simply, 'Assistant), which performed a range of tweaks on uploaded images to make therformed a range applying nostalgic filters, turning them into charming animations, and so forth. **But in this case, the result was a photograph of a moment that had never happened: a false memory, a rewriting of history.** The doctoring of photographs is an activity as old as the medium itself, but in this case the operation was being performed automatically and invisibly on the artefacts of personal memory And yet, perhaps there is something to learn from this too: **the delayed revelation that images are always false, artificial snapshots of moments that have never existed as singularities,** forced from the multidimensional flow of time itself. They are artefacts not of the world and of experience, but of the recording process - which, as a false mechanism, can never approach reality itself. […] This is the lesson that we might draw from the dreams of machines: not that they are rewriting history, but **that history is not something that can be reliably narrativised; and thus, neither can the future.** - ["] Page 156 - By visualising the architecture of the network and its vectors as splashes of colour and line, it's possible to see sentences in multiple languages clustered together. The outcome is a semantic representation evolved by, not designed into, the network. - ["] Page 157 - Over thousands of iterations, Alice and Bob learned to communicate without Eve breaking their code: they developed a private form of encryption like that used in private emails today. But crucially, in the manner of the other neural networks we've seen, we don't understand how this encryption works. Its operation is occluded by the deep layers of the network. What is hidden from Eve is also hidden from us. **The machines are learning to keep their secrets.** - ["] Page 160 - Cooperation also reduces the sting of computational opacity: through cooperative play rather than post hoc analysis, we might gain a deeper insight into the way in which complex machines make their decisions. - Acknowledging the reality of nonhuman intelligence has deep implications for how we act in the world and requires clear thinking about our own behaviours, opportunities, and limitations. While machine intelligence is rapidly outstripping human performance in many disciplines, it is not the only way of thinking, and it is in many fields catastrophically destructive. **Any strategy other than mindful, thoughtful cooperation is a form of disengagement: a retreat that cannot hold.** - We cannot reject contemporary technology any more than we can ultimately and utterly reject our neighbours in society and the world; we are all entangled.5: Complexity #### Chapter 7, Complicity - ["] To neither confirm nor deny has become an automatic response: a statement of refusal to engage in discussion or disclosure of any kind, and the default position of those from whom - Jenner perhaps aside - we expect trust. 166 - ["] The promulgation of official secrecy is deeply corrosive to the way we know and understand the world because we cannot know our own history, nor understand what we are truly capable of. 169 - ["] Much like climate change, mass surveillance has proved to be too vast and destabilising an idea for society to really get its head around. […] Thinking about climate change spoils the weather, rendering it an existential threat even when it's nice. Thinking about mass surveillance spoils phone calls, emails, cameras, and pillow talk. 179 - ["] Surveillance is done because it can be done, not because it is effective; and, like other implementations of automation, because it shifts the burden of responsibility and blame onto the machine. Collect it all, and let the machines sort it out. 180 - ["] Just as the availability of vast computational power drives the implementation of global surveillance, so its logic has come to dictate how we respond to it, and to other existential threats to our cognitive and physical well-being. The demand for some piece of evidence that will allow us to assert some hypothesis with 100 per cent certainty overrides our ability to act in the present. 184 - Silver bulleys and smoking guns - ["] Computational knowing requires surveillance, because it can only produce its truth from the data available to it directly. In turn, all knowing is reduced to that which is computationally knowable, so all knowing becomes a form of surveillance. Thus computational logic denies our ability to think the situation, and to act rationally in the absence of certainty. 185 - ["] It is a nightmarish scene, yet one that seems to embody the conditions of a new dark age. Our vision is increasingly univer-sal, but our agency is ever more reduced. We know more and more about the world, while being less and less able to do anything about it. 186 #### Chapter 8, Conspiracy - ["] Catch-22 exemplifies the dilemma of rational actors caught up within the machinations of vast, irrational systems. Within such systems, even rational responses lead to irrational outcomes. 187 - ["] Faced with the roiling tide of information, we attempt to gain some kind of control over the world by telling stories about it: we attempt to master it through narratives. 187 - ["] Conspiracy theory, nevertheless, serves a vital and necessary function, by bringing into view objects and discourses otherwise ignored - the edge cases of the problem space. 195 - ["] Today's haruspex is the obsessive online investigator, spending hours picking over the traces of events, gutting them and splaying out their innards, poking at their joints and picking out fragments of steel, plastic, and black carbon. 198 - ["] Scientific and political knowledges cannot escape the horizon of their own experience any more than embodied ones can, but it doesn't mean they're not looking at the same thing and seeking ways to articulate it. 200 - ["] Roni Horn's paradox of the weather: 'The nice is occurring in the immediate and individual, and the wrong is occurring systemwide.’ 201 - ["] The eruption of Eyjafjallaökull provided an opportunity to lay certain misconceptions about volcanic carbon dioxide to rest. The volcano was estimated to have emitted between 150,000 and 300,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a day;» by contrast the grounding of the European air fleet prevented the emission of some 2.8 million tonnes in just eight days, a figure greater than the total global annual emissions from all of the volcanoes in the world. 202 - ["] the anthro-pocene starts with mass genocide, with planetary violence on such a scale that it registers in ice cores and the pollination of crops. It is the hallmark of the anthropocene that, unlike those epochs that started with a meteor strike or sustained volcanic eruptions, its origins are cloudy and uncertain. And its effects, which are happening right now, are even more so. 203 - ["] after 9/11, the tickers never went away. The crisis became a daily, ongoing event, merging seamlessly into the war on terror, fears of dirty bombs, stock market collapses and occupations. 204 - ["] The endless circulation of undated, unattributed information in news tickers and digital streams shredded our ability to tell coherent stories about the world. 204 - ["] Conspiracy theories are the extreme resort of the powerless, imagining what it would be to be powerful. 205 - ["] As the technologically augmented and accelerated world trends toward the opposite of simplicity, as it becomes more - and more visibly - complex, conspiracy must of necessity become more bizarre, intricate, and violent to accommodate it. 205 - ["] Man-made clouds don't need to be seeded in the stratosphere; they can be inserted as code into the networks of information that have come to replace our direct perception of the world. 207 - reification - ["] This is what troubles the clinical definition of a delusion, which makes an exemption for beliefs 'accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture.’ Those that the psychiatric establishment would have classified as delusional can 'cure' themselves of their delusions by seeking out and joining an online community of like minds. Any opposition to this worldview can be dismissed as a cover-up of the truth of their experience, supported by fellow Targeted Individuals. 210 - ["] What they reveal is what the chemtrailers show directly: that our ability to describe the world is a product of the tools at our disposal. We're all looking at the same world and seeing radically different things. And we have built ourselves a system that reinforces that effect, an automated populism that gives people what they want, all of the time. 211 - ["] If you're searching for support for your views online, you will find it. And moreover, you will be fed a constant stream of validation: more and more information, of a more and more extreme and polarising nature. 213 - ["] It is a world of limited knowability and existential doubt, horrifying to the extremist and the conspiracy theorist alike. 214 - ["] The gray zone allows us to make peace with the otherwise-irreconcilable, conflicting worldviews that prevent us from taking meaningful action in the present. 214 #### Chapter 9, Concurrency - ["] The arms race between bot makers and Google's machine learning algorithms is one that Google lost a long time ago across most of its properties. 222 - Dead internet - ["] This is what content production looks like in the age of algorithmic discovery: even if you're a human, you end up impersonating the machine. 223 - ["] What starts to become apparent is that the scale and logic of the system is complicit in these outputs, and compels us to think through their implications. These outcomes entrain the wider social effects of previous examples, such as racial and gender bias in big data and machine intelligence-driven systems, and in the same manner they have no easy, or even preferable, solutions. 224 - The cost of automation - ["] Automated reward systems like YouTube algorithms necessitate exploitation to sustain their revenue, encoding the worst aspects of rapacious, free market capitalism. 229 - ["] This is a deeply dark time, in which the structures we have built to expand the sphere of our communications and discourses are being used against us - all of us - in systematic and automated ways. 231 - ["] In such a climate, is it any surprise that the young people of Veles should take wholeheartedly to a programme of disinformation, particularly when it is rewarded by the very systems of modernity they have been told are the future? Fake news is not a product of the internet. Rather, it is the manipulation of new technologies by the same interests that have always sought to manipulate information to their own ends. It is the democratisation of propaganda, in that ever more actors can now play the role of propagandist. 234 - Bag culture nihilism - ["] In the US election, Russian trolls posted in support of Clinton, Sanders, Romney, and Trump, just as Russian security agencies seem to have had a hand in leaks against both sides. The result is that first the internet, and then the wider political discourse, becomes tainted and polarised. As one Russian activist described it, The point is to spoil it, to create the atmosphere of hate, to make it so stinky that normal people won't want to touch it." 235 - the death of moderate politics - ["] According to other accounts, one-fifth of all online debate around the 2016 US election campaign was automated, and the actions of the bots measurably shifted public opinion. ° Something is rotten in democracy when huge numbers of those participating in its debates are unaccountable and untraceable, when we cannot know who or even what they are. 237 - Dead internet - ["] Some men spent thousands of dollars on the site - and some even had affairs in the end. But the vast majority simply spent years having explicit and fruitless conversations with pieces of software. 238 - ["] What is common to the Brexit campaign, the US election, and the disturbing depths of YouTube is that, despite multiple suspicions, it is ultimately impossible to tell who is doing what, or what their motives and intentions are. 239 - ["] This confusion certainly serves the manipulations of Kremlin spooks and child abusers alike, but it's also broader and deeper than the concerns of any one group: it is how the world actually is. Nobody decided that this is how the world should evolve - nobody wanted the new dark age - but we built it anyway, and now we are going to have to live in it. 239 #### Chapter 10, Cloud - ["] Schmidt's - and Google's - worldview is one that is entirely predicated on the belief that making something visible make it better, and that technology is the tool to make things visible. This view, which has come to dominate the world, is not only fundamentally wrong; it is actively dangerous, both globally and in the specific instance that Schmidt states. 242 - ["] In all of these cases, surveillance reveals itself as a wholly retroactive enterprise, incapable of acting in the present and entirely subservient to the established and utterly compromised interests of power. What was missing in Rwanda and Srebrenica was not evidence of an atrocity, but the willingness to act upon it. 243 - ["] Subsequent studies have found that across the continent, even when income inequality, ethnic fractionalisation and geography are taken into account, increases in cell phone coverage are associated with higher levels of violence. 245 - ["] it is the uncritical, unthinking belief in their amoral utility that perpetuates our inability to rethink our dealings with the world. Every unchallenged assertion of the neutral goodness of technology supports and sustains the status quo. 245 - ["] data resembled oil because 'it's valuable, but if unrefined it cannot really be used. 246 - ["] The emphasis on the work required to make information useful has been lost over the years, aided by processing power and machine intelligence, to be replaced by pure speculation. 246 - ["] Just as we spent forty-five years locked in a Cold War perpetuated by the spectre of mutually assured destruction, we find ourselves in an intellectual, ontological dead end today The primary method we have for evaluating the world - more data - is faltering. It's failing to account for complex, human-driven systems, and its failure is becoming obvious - not least because we've built a vast, planet-spanning information sharing system for making it obvious to us. 248 - ["] Ultimately, any strategy for living in the new dark age depends upon attention to the here and now, and not to the illusory promises of computational prediction, surveillance, ideology and representation. The present is always where we live and think, poised between an oppressive history and an unknowable future. The technologies that so inform and shape our present perceptions of reality are not going to go away, and in many cases we should not wish them to. Our current life support systems on a planet of 7.5 billion and rising utterly depend upon them. Our understanding of those systems and their ramifications, and of the conscious choices we make in their design, in the here and now, remain entirely within our capabilities.