Joe: The internet was supposed to be our new Library of Alexandria, right? A tool for global enlightenment. Well, what if the opposite is true? What if the firehose of information we're drinking from is actually making us less knowledgeable, more confused, and easier to control? Lewis: Whoa. That's a heavy way to start. But it definitely hits a nerve. It feels like we have access to all the facts in the world, but we've never been more divided or uncertain about what's actually true. Joe: That's the terrifying question at the heart of New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle. Lewis: James Bridle... I've heard his name. He's not your typical tech writer, is he? He's more of an artist and technologist, right? Joe: Exactly. He has a Master's in Computer Science and Cognitive Science, but he approaches technology like an artist, trying to understand its deep cultural impact. And this book was a critical sensation, described by reviewers as one of the most 'unsettling and illuminating' books ever written about the internet. Lewis: Unsettling and illuminating. I'm already hooked. So where does he even begin to unpack such a massive idea? Joe: It all started for Bridle with a really strange, almost funny moment involving his laptop and an old TV show.

Lewis: An old TV show? Okay, you have my attention. Joe: So, it's 2016. The world feels like it's spinning out of control. Bridle is spending his days reading these apocalyptic research papers on climate change, surveillance, political instability... you know the feeling. For comfort, he starts re-watching the 90s political drama The West Wing. Lewis: Ah, a bit of wholesome, competent-government nostalgia. I get it. Joe: Precisely. He's on a plane, watching an episode where a character, Leo McGarry, is being teased by the President for missing an emergency call. And just as the President says this one line, Bridle's laptop completely crashes. It freezes, the screen goes black, but a single, tinny line of audio starts looping over and over again from the speakers. Lewis: Oh no. What was the line? Joe: "If only technology could invent some way to get in touch with you in an emergency! If only technology could invent some way to get in touch with you in an emergency!" It just kept repeating. Lewis: That's the universe sending a very, very on-the-nose message. It’s almost a prank. Joe: It’s a perfect prank! And for Bridle, it was this profound moment. Here is our technology, in a moment of crisis, not giving us answers, but just repeating our own anxieties back to us. He realized this is a metaphor for our entire age. We're surrounded by technology that's supposed to help, but its failures and complexities are actually revealing a deeper problem. Lewis: Okay, I can see how a glitchy laptop is a great metaphor. But how does that scale up to a 'New Dark Age'? That sounds a bit dramatic. Joe: Well, here's the core argument. The 'dark age' isn't about a lack of information. It's the opposite. We have an abundance of it. The problem is that the complexity of our technological systems has accelerated far beyond our ability to understand them. There's a chasm between what our technology can do and what we can comprehend. Lewis: What do you mean by comprehend? Like, I don't know how my phone's processor works, but I know how to use it. Joe: And that's exactly the distinction Bridle makes. He says what we need is not just functional understanding, but 'systemic literacy.' It's not about knowing how to code or use an app. It's about understanding the context, the history, the power structures, and the unintended consequences built into the system itself. Lewis: I see. So it’s like knowing how to drive a car versus understanding the global oil economy, traffic systems, and the environmental impact of car culture. Joe: Perfect analogy. And because most of us lack that systemic literacy, the firehose of information doesn't lead to enlightenment. It leads to chaos. The very tool that promised a shared reality—the internet—is now the primary engine for conspiracy theories, fundamentalism, and post-factual politics. The abundance of 'knowledge' is actually destroying the value of knowledge. Lewis: That's a chilling thought. The idea that the Library of Alexandria is burning, not because of a lack of books, but because there are too many, and half of them are telling you the fire isn't real. Joe: Exactly. And in that confusion, we become vulnerable. We lose our ability to act, to make sense of the world. That's the New Dark Age. It's a darkness born of too much light.

Lewis: Okay, I see the 'confusion' part. That feels very real. But you also mentioned 'control' in the intro. How does this opacity, this lack of understanding, lead to actual control? It still feels a bit abstract. Joe: It's not abstract at all. It's built in steel and fiber optics. Bridle tells this incredible story about high-frequency trading that makes it terrifyingly concrete. Lewis: I'm ready. Hit me with it. Joe: In the late 2000s, the game in finance became speed. If you could get your trade from the exchange in Chicago to the one in New Jersey a fraction of a second faster than anyone else, you could make millions. The existing fiber optic cables, which followed the old railroad lines, took about seventeen milliseconds. Lewis: Seventeen-thousandths of a second. That already seems impossibly fast. Joe: Not fast enough. So a company called Spread Networks secretly spent 300 million dollars to build a brand new, perfectly straight fiber optic cable. They had to blast through mountains in Pennsylvania and dig under rivers. They shortened the route by hundreds of miles, all to shave the travel time down from seventeen milliseconds to thirteen. Lewis: Hold on. They spent 300 million dollars... for four milliseconds? Four-thousandths of a second? That is the most cyberpunk thing I have ever heard. Joe: It gets better. A few years later, another company one-upped them by building a chain of microwave towers, because light travels faster through air than through glass. That gained them another four-millisecond advantage. It's estimated that for a big firm, a single millisecond advantage is worth about 100 million dollars a year. Lewis: Wow. So it's literally a secret, faster internet for the super-rich that the rest of us can't even see, let alone use. It's an invisible architecture of inequality. Joe: That's the point. It's a system so complex and opaque that it's essentially a private, rigged game. And Bridle's genius is connecting this modern, high-tech greed back to a much older, more noble-sounding dream. This obsession with speed and prediction didn't start with Wall Street. It started with the military's dream of controlling the weather. Lewis: The weather? How do you get from clouds to stock markets? Joe: In the early 20th century, a mathematician named Lewis Fry Richardson had this wild idea that you could predict the weather with math. He imagined a giant hall filled with thousands of human 'computers' all calculating equations simultaneously to forecast the weather faster than it was actually happening. His first attempt was a spectacular failure—it took him weeks to produce a six-hour forecast that was completely wrong. Lewis: I guess that makes sense. The weather is just too complex. Joe: For him, yes. But the dream didn't die. It was picked up by the military during the Cold War. They poured money into building the first supercomputers, like ENIAC and Whirlwind, for one primary reason: to predict and, ultimately, control the weather for military advantage. John von Neumann, one of the fathers of computing, famously said, "All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control." Lewis: That is a terrifyingly ambitious statement. Joe: It's the founding statement of what Bridle calls 'computational thinking'—the belief that any problem, from the weather to the economy to human behavior, can be solved if you just have enough data and enough processing power. That military-born ideology is what now runs our world, from the algorithms that decide if you get a loan, to the high-frequency trading that rigs the market. It's an unseen architecture of control, born from a dream of taming the sky.

Lewis: This is all feeling pretty bleak, Joe. We're confused by information overload, we're being controlled by invisible systems built for military-grade prediction... Is the answer just to unplug and go live in a cabin? Joe: It's a tempting thought, but Bridle argues that's the wrong move. The solution isn't to reject technology, but to change how we think about it. And it starts with the most common, and most misleading, metaphor we use every single day: 'The Cloud'. Lewis: The Cloud. Right. My photos, my documents, they're all in the cloud. It sounds so light and fluffy. Joe: And that's the problem! It's a terrible metaphor. It makes us think our data is floating in some ethereal, weightless, digital heaven. But Bridle insists we see it for what it is: a vast, heavy, power-hungry, physical infrastructure. Lewis: What do you mean, physical? Joe: The cloud is made of millions of miles of fiber optic cables snaking across ocean floors. It's made of colossal, windowless warehouses full of computers, called data centers, that are deliberately built in places with cheap electricity and low taxes, like Scandinavia or Ireland. It shapes geopolitics—governments hold onto disputed islands like Diego Garcia because that's where the cloud's cables touch down. Bridle has this killer line: "The cloud doesn’t just have a shadow; it has a footprint." A massive, carbon-belching, political footprint. Lewis: Wow. So when I upload a photo to 'the cloud,' I'm not sending it to some digital heaven. I'm sending it to a physical building in, like, rural Oregon, that's shaping global politics and burning incredible amounts of energy. Joe: Exactly. And once you see that, you can't unsee it. You've started to develop systemic literacy. And this leads to Bridle's proposed solution. Instead of 'computational thinking'—that flawed belief that every problem has a neat, data-driven answer—he proposes we adopt 'cloudy thinking.' Lewis: Cloudy thinking? That sounds... fuzzy. Unfocused. Joe: It is! And that's the point. Cloudy thinking is about embracing uncertainty and complexity. It's about acknowledging that most of the world's important problems—justice, love, society—are not computable. They can't be solved by an algorithm. It's about learning to act with agency and moral clarity even when we don't have all the answers. Lewis: So it's a kind of humility. Admitting we don't know, and that's okay. Joe: It's more than okay, it's essential. The belief that we can know everything is what leads to the hubris of mass surveillance and predictive control. Cloudy thinking is the antidote. It's about accepting that the world is messy, contradictory, and beautiful in its complexity. Computers are not here to give us answers; they are tools for asking better questions.

Lewis: That's a huge mental shift. So what's the one big takeaway here? If we're not unplugging, how do we actually practice 'cloudy thinking' in our daily lives? Joe: I think it's about shifting our goal. The goal isn't to achieve perfect knowledge or a perfectly optimized life. The goal is to develop that 'systemic literacy' we talked about. It's to constantly ask questions. When you use an app, ask: What is the business model? Where is the data going? What history does this technology come from? It's about questioning the metaphors, like 'the cloud,' and seeing the real-world systems they obscure. Lewis: So it's about being a more critical, conscious user of technology, rather than a passive consumer. Joe: Exactly. And that brings us back to the title. Bridle ends on a surprisingly hopeful note. He quotes Virginia Woolf, who once wrote: "The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think." Lewis: The future is dark... and that's a good thing? How? Joe: Because a future that is fully illuminated, fully predicted, and fully known is a future without freedom. It's a cage. The darkness, the uncertainty, is not an absence of hope. It's the space of possibility. It's the space where we can still choose, where we can still act, where we can still build something better without the arrogant pretense that we have all the answers. Lewis: That's a powerful thought. It makes you look at the 'loading' icon on your screen a little differently. It's not just a delay; it's a little pocket of unknowing. We'd love to hear what systems you are starting to see more clearly after this. Find us on our socials and share your thoughts. Joe: This is Aibrary, signing off.