New Dark Age: James Bridle and Ben Vickers on Technology and the End of the Future

The Verso Podcast

What is technology trying to tell us in an emergency? James Bridle, in conversation with Serpentine Galleries CTO Ben Vickers, discusses 'New Dark Age' and the dark clouds that gather over our dreams of the digital sublime. As the world around us increases in technological complexity, our understanding of it diminishes. What is needed is not new technology, but new metaphors: a metalanguage for describing the world that complex systems have wrought. We don’t and cannot understand everything, but we are capable of thinking it. Technology can help us in this thinking: computers are not here to give us answers, but are tools for asking questions. Understanding a technology deeply and systemically allows us to remake metaphors in the service of other ways of thinking – without claiming, or even seeking to fully understand – and to ask the right questions to guide us through this new dark age. The discussion, presented in collaboration with Serpentine Galleries and the Goethe-Institut, also featured a performance by artist and writer Erica Scourti and a screening of We Help Each Other Grow (2017) by They Are Here, a collaborative practice steered by Helen Walker and Harun Morrison.