📑 Clouds and networks: reflections on James Bridle’s New Dark Age

Bryan Alexander provides a breakdown of James Bridle’s New Dark Age. He summarises some of the arguments and makes case with a few of the flaws:

There are also some curiously too-quick dismissals. Bridle slams geoengineering and new developments in material science in less than a sentence, without citation (64). Hollywood is paranoid, but it’s not clear what that means (130). The charge that tech companies “are still predominantly white” (143-4) manages to ignore the large numbers of Asians in those firms, disproportionate to their representation in the general population. An early chapter makes good use of an 1884 Ruskin lecture, but then mistakingly sees it describing, rather than anticipating, World War I’s battlefields, a generation later (195).