New Dark Age

Over the last century, technological acceleration has transformed our planet, our societies, and ourselves, but it has failed to transform our understanding of these things.

In what could be taken as the founding statement of computational thought, he wrote: ‘All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control.’14

This meant that atmospheric conditions could affect the sound produced, altering the output. Bell wrote excitedly to his father, ‘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.’4

We cannot fail each other now.

Our technologies are extensions of ourselves, codified in machines and infrastructures, in frameworks of knowledge and action; truly thought, they offer a model of a truer world.

Technology is also not made entirely – ex nihilo – by humans. It depends, as does our own living (bacteria, food crops, building materials, clothes and companion species), on the affordances of nonhuman things.

Technology is not mere tool making and tool use: it is the making of metaphors.

ceremonies and why should we take part in them? What are these professions and why should we make money out of them? Where in short is it leading us, the procession of the sons of educated men?6
The class and social conflicts, the historical hierarchies and injustices, that Woolf alludes to in her processions and ceremonies have in no measure abated today, but some of the places to think them may have changed. The crowds that in 1938 lined London’s Lord Mayor’s and coronation parades are now distributed through the network, and the galleries and places of worship have likewise migrated into data centres and undersea cables. We cannot unthink the network; we can only think through and within it. And we can listen to it, when it tries to speak to us in an emergency.

It’s an extraordinary declaration, asserting that the unknown need not be turned into the known through false divination, or the projection of grim political or ideological narratives; it’s a celebration of darkness, willing – as that “I think” indicates – to be uncertain even about its own assertion.’4

The greatest signifying quality of the network is its lack of single, solid intent.