Of Algorithms, AI, and Agency - James Bridle's Dark Age
New Dark Age by James Bridle - Verso Books, 2018
From the Age of the Enlightenment, leaders in both the hard and social sciences have argued that more information in more people’s hands will inherently lead to greater understanding and comprehension of how the world works. Since the mid-1980’s and the desktop computer revolution, we, the people of the world, have been subjects, unwittingly perhaps, in testing that theory. We carry in our pockets more computation power than was available to the NASA engineers who put the first men on the moon. How much smarter has it made us? What if the assertion that more data equals more knowledge equals greater understanding, is not just false, but dangerously so? This is the question that haunts James Bridle. And after reading this book, I am haunted by it as well.
Bridle starts his book with a personal anecdote. He describes a glitch in his online streaming service stalling an episode of The West Wing on a single line of dialog: “If only technology could invent some way to get in touch with you in an emergency.”
The original context of the line was sarcastic: a jab at one of those annoying people who keeps their phone’s ringer off and never picks up. But as the glitch caused the line to keep repeating, Bridle began to see a deeper, more disturbing message in it.
And this is how we know, by the second page of New Dark Age, that this is the work of not just a technology critic and journalist, but an artist. It is the flexibility of Bridle’s mind, his talent for seeing patterns and shapes in the jumbled matrix of reality that makes this book a special and worthwhile read. This is neither a hyped-up collection of world-altering predictions about digital technology, nor yet another dire warning about social media and its dangers to the youth of today. Bridle has read all that and is galloping way beyond it. Neither Luddite nor technogeek, Bridle is one not for turning back the clock, but for asking serious questions about how our social, ecological, and political reality is being altered by increasingly complex systems. He contends that we are, indeed, in an emergency and our own technology is sounding the alarm.
You may have come across Bridle from an article he wrote that was published in The Medium and went viral in the fall of 2017. In Something is Wrong on the Internet, Bridle delved into the bizarre world of YouTube videos for children, analyzing how algorithms and machine learning work to automatically cue up an incomprehensible multiplicity of video content that rivets children’s attention. Many of the videos are violent, creepy, and disturbing. Some involve human actors, others are created by bots. But with the thousands out there, there is literally no way to tell. Nobody is at the helm, and parents are largely unable to monitor what their kids are watching. Videos with hashtag mashup titles like Surprise Eggs Play Doh Peppa Pig Cars Sparkle Brilho Disney Baby Bum DANCE! don’t really signify much to tired parents who are simply grateful for a cheap and easy way to keep a toddler calm for a while.
Bridle delves into the bizarre world of YouTube videos for kids
Bridle revisits this topic in his book, but his critique of YouTube’s auto-cue algorithm goes beyond where we expect it to go. “It would be a mistake,” he says, “to deal with this issue as a simple matter of ‘won’t somebody think of the children’ hand-wringing.” Bridle is not exactly calling for content controls, which he believes would inevitably lead to censorship, repression of queer content, political content, and silencing of diverse voices. Rather, he argues that parents, and all of us need to be much more technologically literate, not just about the digital platforms we use, but the larger forces that are driving the whole digital information system.
“Accompanying the [online] violence are untold levels of exploitation: not of children because they are children, but of children because they are powerless. Automated reward systems like YouTube algorithms necessitate exploitation to sustain their revenue…no controls are possible without collapsing the entire system.”
And this is where Bridle departs from the pack of digital media critics, taking us beyond a social analysis of digital media and how we use it, to urge us to acknowledge the market forces that drive these digital platforms. In this way he is like another social media critic, sociology professor Zeynep Tufekcki, who analyzed YouTube’s grownup content in a TED Talk entitled We’re Building a Dystopia Just to Make People Click on Ads. Tufekcki describes how the algorithms that decide what you’ll want to watch next inevitably lead you to more intense, extreme, and disturbing content. Because the more extreme, the more difficult it is to log off.
Bridle argues that use of digital platforms to involve human beings to serve corporate ends is robbing us of our ability to “think the world.” For at least half of the book, I found this phrase annoying, probably because I teach grammar for a living and the verb “think” simply does not take a direct object, even if it is “the world.” But in time, I began to understand how he came to adopt it. He doesn’t mean to think about the world, because this implies at a remove, in one’s leisure time, perhaps. He means that what we are losing is our ability to process, comprehend, analyze, and arrive at correct judgments about what is happening and what isn’t, what is true and what is not, in real time, as we go about working, voting, instructing our children, and other socially vital activity.
Even if the grammar doesn’t bother you, the idea that we’re losing our ability to “think the world,” might seem dramatic. But Bridle knows how to defend an argument, and does so with vigorous documentation, even with figures that are changing literally from day to day. He cites not just numbers of online video views, Google hits, and Twitter followers, but kilometers of fiber-optic cable encircling the planet, tons of carbon emissions produced by digital data storage facilities, per capita electricity consumed in downloading movies, and the numbers of websites devoted to believers in chemtrails and anti-vaccine conspiracies. The pieces of this elaborate puzzle fit together into a world where we know less and less about how to understand the systems that govern our world, as we surrender more and more of our agency to them.
Bridle’s book is organized into ten chapters, each titled with a noun beginning with the letter C: Chasm, Computation, Climate, Calculation, Complexity, etc. The first chapter lays out the thesis of his work, that the ever-increasing amount of digital data and information available to us does not necessarily lead to greater understanding or social good, yet for generations, the prevailing view has been that it does.
“Our greatest failing in thinking the network up to now was to presume that its actions were inherent and inevitable. By inherent, I mean the notion that they emerged, ex nihilo, from the things we created rather than involving our own actions as part of that co-creation. By inevitable, I mean a belief in a direct line of technological and historical progress that we are powerless to resist.”
In this passage, I experienced that rare and wonderful feeling when reading the work of a writer who put into words something I’d felt myself for years but was unable to articulate. I have always rejected and even been angered at times by the glib predictions of how technology will inevitably change our lives. For decades, I’ve been hearing that, of course paper books will disappear as everyone discards them for online reading, just as we will soon all be living in “smart houses” where we program the heat to come on 30 minutes before we walk in the door, and movie theaters will disappear because everyone will prefer watching movies on their phones while waiting for the bus over sitting in a dark theater. These predictions do more than just erase the possibility that people might just not choose the latest digital option, (as in the case with millennials, who stubbornly still prefer paper books over digital books, ten years into the Kindle revolution.) It’s more than that. There always seems to be an underlying smug assurance behind these predictions that the systems of the future are always, in every case, an evolutionary improvement over the previous form. Better in every way. So, why wouldn’t we happily embrace them?
Bridle doesn’t dichotomize technological innovation into good and bad, but rather continually asks the question, for whom is this an advancement? Because under global capitalism, there are always winners and losers.
Bridle upends the foggy notions many of us have about the neutral benevolence of digital technology. “The cloud” is not some numinous no-place where billions of us store our photos, songs, finances, secrets, and memories. It is a network of massive data storage facilities that consume vast amounts of energy just to keep their equipment from overheating. The data storage industry has a massive and growing carbon footprint, not even including our part in it: all the non-recyclable digital devices we are increasingly pressured to replace on a regular basis as the newer models come out. The life-changing convenience of online shopping, having everything from cat food to big screen TVs delivered to our homes at the touch of a button is not an evolutionary step toward a life free from pointless toil, but the actual product of the toil of box-toting warehouse workers who never see the light of day during their entire work shifts, as every move they make is monitored by supervisors who will fire them for the merest infraction of a minute spent idle. This dehumanizing labor system has extended to the delivery truck drivers that bring our packages to us. Every convenience comes at a growing cost to our earth, our humanity, our future. This is just one of the multiple ways that through this book, Bridle makes the invisible visible to us – often at cost to himself, as he half-humorously documents being arrested for hanging around and photographing data storage warehouses and fulfillment centers.
Bridle’s work is refreshing free of both snark and preachyness. He does not blame us for the passive acceptance of the way digital technologies have usurped our initiative. After all, the way it all works is, as he puts it, “fiendishly complex,” and I would add, intentionally difficult to perceive. The problem is that we do not live with technology but inside of it. As such, its workings are mysterious to most of us, and growing increasingly so. Bridle contends that the sheer volume of data being generated by analytic technologies has rendered much of our collective life unknowable. And this is the deeper issue that he wants us to grapple with. Increasingly, the systems that organize our day-to-day life are regulated, not by humans, or even by human-designed systems but by algorithms and machine learning. We do not know how Netflix decides to recommend the next movie to us, or how the stock market alters currency values, or how our GPS knows where our exit is. The problem is not our lack of expertise but the lack of thought in our willingness to play along.
The result of this collective passivity is the blurring of the distinction between fact and rumor, information and “fake news.” It helped bring about Brexit and the Trump presidency. Bridle documents the frequency of drivers getting lost and crashing their cars while following GPS, which has become a new highway hazard, in a way more insidious than texting while driving, which we know is wrong. The idea that our GPS might lead us astray, or that our Alexa might actually be gathering marketing data on our consumer habits just doesn’t occur to us. Bridle cites the term “automation bias” to describe this lack of critical thinking in our use of technology. But as always, he can’t resist taking it to a deeper level.
As an example of the way “every unchallenged assertion of the neutral goodness of technology supports the status quo,” Bridle observes that the pattern of fiber-optic networks spanning the earth mirror the old mercantile-era shipping routes. It is a network connecting exploitable resources to centers of power and empire. Only today, the exploitable resources are not gold, silver, and spices, but ourselves: our personal profiles, our buying habits, our “likes,” our political views, our age, our diet, our tastes. We are the product being bought and sold through the digital platforms we spend our lives on, that we carry in our pockets, and even to bed with us.
But just as the millennials surprised all of us by continuing to read physical books, and in fact, reading them at a rate greater than generations X and Y before them, human beings can surprise the logic of digital systems. Bridle ends his book not with optimism, but with an exhortation: “we are not powerless, not without agency, and not limited by darkness.”