New dark age

The past couple weeks I’ve been reading the book New Dark Age by James Bridle, and inadvertently my project focus and hypothesis about technology has slowly begun to evolve. The realization that pretty much everything we consider our modern world of technology is rooted in the ripple effects of the Second World War was so eye-opening; it wasn’t a mere turn of fate that we made such strides in discovery and innovation, but rather a concerted and forceful effort to pour money into militaristic research … and although those efforts eventually poured into all these other industries that envelop our lives, it appears as if computational thought might ultimately be doomed by its utterly violent origin story.

In my first semester at Parsons, I chose to focus on the phenomenon of ‘entanglement’ that was perpetually occurring between technology and ourselves, our minds, our nervous systems, and our internal landscape. The last few decades have seen such a rapid and pervasive influx of technology into virtually every crevice of the human experience, and there was never really a chance for us to truly consider how that influences us, as in humanity, and our future as humans. Marshall McLuhan said it decades in advance — technologies are “not simply inventions which people employ but are the means by which people are re-invented.”

Technology and digital media have become not only extensions of our minds but rather fully embodied, with the power to shape our sense of identity, relationships, time, memories, and the intrinsic meaning of being human. For my last Major Studio project, I hypothesized that a first step in awareness of this was to bring intentionality and thought into the tools we use, and to no longer rely on them mindlessly.

In New Dark Age, Bridle “[surveys] the history of art, technology and information systems [in order to] reveal the dark clouds that gather over discussions of the digital sublime.” As is evident in my previous posts, I don’t consider myself prone to pessimism about technology in general, yet these themes felt very compelling to me, directly related to my original MS1 focus last semester, and also quite relevant to our semester’s focus on utopias and dystopias.