James Bridle Concepts

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

by James Bridle · 18 Jun 2018 · 301pp · 85,263 words

New Dark Age New Dark Age Technology and the End of the Future James Bridle First published by Verso 2018 © James Bridle 2018 All rights reserved The moral rights of the author have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Verso UK:

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is the Euronext Data Center, the European outpost of the New York Stock Exchange, whose operations are likewise obscure and virtual. Photograph: James Bridle. LD4 Data Center, Slough. Photograph: James Bridle. NYSE Euronext Data Center, Basildon. Connecting these two locations is an almost invisible line of microwave transmissions: narrow beams of information that bounce

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without miners, steel workers and those who cultivate the land.’ Today, those changers and brokers perch atop the very infrastructure Bevan laboured to construct. Photograph: James Bridle. Microwave dishes mounted on Hillingdon Hospital, December 2014. In the introduction to Flash Boys, his 2014 investigation into high-frequency trading, the financial journalist Michael

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Critique of Urban Geography’, Les Lèvres Nues 6 (1955), available at library.nothingness.org. 2.James Bridle, The Nor, essay series, 2014–15, available at shorttermmemoryloss.com. 3.Jame Bridle, ‘All Cameras are Police Cameras’, The Nor, November 2014. 4.James Bridle, ‘Living in the Electromagnetic Spectrum’, The Nor, December 2014. 5.Christopher Steiner, ‘Wall Street

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to Ground Over iPhone’, YouTube video, username: Storyful News, May 6, 2016. 8Conspiracy 1.Joseph Heller, Catch-22, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961. 2.See James Bridle, ‘Planespotting’, blog post, December 18, 2013, booktwo.org, and other reports by the author. 3.For a good overview of the trial, see: Kevin Hall

Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence

by James Bridle · 6 Apr 2022 · 502pp · 132,062 words

James Bridle * * * WAYS OF BEING Beyond Human Intelligence Contents List of Illustrations Introduction: More than Human 1 Thinking Otherwise 2 Wood Wide Webs 3 The Thicket of

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-Binary Machines 7 Getting Random 8 Solidarity 9 The Internet of Animals Conclusion: Down on the Metal Farm Notes Bibliography Acknowledgements Index About the Author James Bridle is a writer and artist. Their writing on art, politics, culture and technology has appeared in magazines and newspapers including the Guardian and the Observer

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album H’art Songs by Moondog, 1978 List of Illustrations 1. Visualizations of a neural network’s way of seeing. Image: James Bridle. 2. Autonomous Trap 001, Mount Parnassus, 2017. Image: James Bridle. 3. Illustration from Benjamin B. Beck, ‘A Study of Problem Solving by Gibbons’, Behaviour, 28 (1/2), 1967, p. 95 Reproduced

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Penny Patterson, 3 March 1978. Bettmann / Getty Images. 7. The Divje Babe flute. Photo: Divje Babe National Park. 8. The megaliths of Göbekli Tepe. Image: James Bridle. 9. An X-ray ‘fingerprint’ of ribosomal RNA, annotated by Carl Woese. Norman R. Pace, Jan Sapp and Nigel Goldenfeld, ‘Phylogeny and Beyond: Scientific, Historical

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in Norfolk. Latitude 52 45” by Robert Marsham, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, vol. 79 (1789). © The Royal Society. 12. 115cm Bamboo Rod. Image: James Bridle. 13. Two figures from Charles and Francis Darwin’s The Power of Movement in Plants, tracing the movement of a cabbage over forty-eight hours

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in Basilicata, Southern Italy’, iForest – Biogeosciences and Forestry, 7(2), pp. 75–84, April 2014, © 2014 SISEF. 19. Giovanni Forte taking a phone call. Image: James Bridle. 20. Large scale research platform proposed for Dolphin Embassy by Ant Farm, 1974. Drawing by Curtis Schreier. 21. Grey Walter with one of his tortoises

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. 274–84. https://doi.org/10.2307/146678. 33. An ostrakon calling for the exile of Themistocles (480s–470s BCE), Ancient Agora Museum, Athens. Image: James Bridle. 34. ERNIE 1, 1957. Reproduced with permission of National Savings and Investments (NS&I). 35. ERNIE 3, 1988. Reproduced with permission of National Savings and

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of Ecology, 83(2), April 1995, p. 321; DOI:10.2307/2261570. 7. For more on the Marsham Record, phenology, caribou and technological time, see James Bridle, ‘Phenological Mismatch’, e-flux journal, June 2019; https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/becoming-digital/273079/phenological-mismatch/. 8. This calculation is taken from S

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is causing irrevocable breakdowns between species’ evolved act of attuning to historic signals of seasonality and the actual availability of fodder and other needs (see James Bridle, ‘Phenological Mismatch’, e-flux journal, June 2019). It would be intriguing, if devastating, to discover if Tuvan songs contain an aural record of climatic conditions

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(6425), 25 July 2017; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-06645-7. For more on this kind of human and learning machine cooperation, see James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (London: Verso, 2018), Chapter 4, ‘Calculation’. 36. For a full description of the Cockroach Controlled

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whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com. First published by Allen Lane in 2022 Copyright © James Bridle, 2022 The moral right of the author has been asserted Cover design by Matthew Young after James Bridle’s own Rorschmap Satellite image from the United States Geological Survey on Unsplash ISBN: 978-0-141

Money in the Metaverse: Digital Assets, Online Identities, Spatial Computing and Why Virtual Worlds Mean Real Business

by David G. W. Birch and Victoria Richardson · 28 Apr 2024 · 249pp · 74,201 words

power the economy – so must data be broken down and refined (i.e. analysed) to create value. It is a potentially useful analogy, but as James Bridle (author of The New Dark Age) points out, attention has focused solely on the first part of Humby’s insight. The important qualification that ‘unrefined

Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters

by Joanna Walsh · 22 Sep 2025 · 255pp · 80,203 words

system it houses is old. Nothing sounds older than a new aesthetic. It must have been with a sense of irony that artist/technologist/publisher James Bridle coined the phrase ‘the New Aesthetic’ in 2011. Or maybe not. The New Aesthetic was a project that gazed at the digital 54gaze. How do

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aesthetic practice marries music with visuals, sampling and riffing on US interpretations of Japanese commercial art of the 1980s. Vaporwave is so concerned with, as James Bridle said, ‘what it looks like’ that its aesthetic is spelled out aesthatically, as ‘a e s t h e t i c’ or ‘ＡＥ

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– definitely not ten. Aesthetic used to be an experience. Now it’s a look. Like vaporwave, like the New Aesthetic, online aesthetics are, to quote James Bridle, ‘simply, “what it looks like” ’. Though this looking like is not so simple. The guy’s t-shirt didn’t embody an aesthetic as a

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, paywalled Tinyletters and Substacks. They appear to lack the reach of the big platforms but this itself is aesthetics: a metaphor. Though technologist and publisher James Bridle makes the comparison, the internet is not what thinker Timothy Morton described as a 220‘hyperobject’; it only looks like one, because of its increasing

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the Amateur’ 2009 Hito Steyerl, In Defense of the Poor Image 2010 Systrom, Krieger, Instagram 2011 Macintosh Plus, Floral Shoppe 2011 Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis 2011 James Bridle, The New Aesthetic 2011 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism 2011 Marisa Olson, What Is Postinternet? 2012 Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be? 2012 Sianne Ngai

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, ‘Children of the Drone’, Vanity Fair, 12 June 2013. 2.Ian Bogost, ‘The New Aesthetic Needs To Get Weirder’, Atlantic, 13 April 2012. 235 3.James Bridle, ‘The New Aesthetic and Its Politics’, booktwo.org, 12 June 2013. 4.Jason Kottke, ‘Tumblelogs’, kottke.org, 19 October 2005. 5.Bruce Sterling, ‘An Essay

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’, russelldavies.typepad.com, 5 October 2010. 8.Ibid. 9.Phil Gyford, ‘One of today’s futures’, gyford.com, 26 May 2011. 10.James Bridle, ‘The New Aesthetic and Its Politics’. 11.James Bridle, ‘The New Aesthetic (+10)’, booktwo.org, 6 May 2021. 12.Robert Jackson, ‘The Banality of the New Aesthetic’, furtherfield.org, 15

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination

by Mark Bergen · 5 Sep 2022 · 642pp · 141,888 words

days were flagged as inappropriate, calling them “the extreme needle in the haystack.” But the earth had shaken. And two days later, an avalanche hit. James Bridle, a British author who wrote about drones and warfare, had turned their attention to kids. Bridle published a very long entry on the blogging site

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, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/media/youtube-kids-paw-patrol.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT on the blogging site Medium: James Bridle, “Something Is Wrong on the Internet,” Medium, November 6, 2017, https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better

by Clive Thompson · 11 Sep 2013 · 397pp · 110,130 words

on expertise—trust us because our authors are vetted by our experience, their credentials, or the marketplace—conversational media gains authority by revealing its mechanics. James Bridle, a British writer, artist, and publisher, made this point neatly when he took the entire text of every edit of Wikipedia’s much-disputed entry

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Weinberger points out: David Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (New York: Henry Holt, 2007), 140–47. “This is historiography”: James Bridle, “On Wikipedia, Cultural Patrimony, and Historiography,” booktwo.org, September 6, 2010, accessed March 22, 2013, booktwo.org/notebook/wikipedia-historiography/. “typographical fixity” of paper: Elizabeth

The Twittering Machine

by Richard Seymour · 20 Aug 2019 · 297pp · 83,651 words

’s term, a ‘dramaphage’. The content agnosticism of computational capitalism has political valences, but the algorithm’s effects go well beyond political content. The artist James Bridle has written of the surprisingly outré and noir YouTube content for kids, which involves erotic or violent content: Peppa Pig eating her daddy or drinking

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number of us checking our phones . . . Deloitte, ‘Global mobile consumer trends’, 2nd edition, 2017 <www2.deloitte.com>. 13. . . . violent, eroticized, animated fantasies aimed at children . . . James Bridle, ‘Something is wrong on the internet’, Medium.com, 6 November 2017. 14. This is the ‘modern calculating machine’ . . . Jacques Lacan, ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter

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engineer Guillaume Chaslot put it . . . Paul Lewis, ‘“Fiction is outperforming reality”: how YouTube’s algorithm distorts truth’, Guardian, 2 February 2018. 12. The artist James Bridle has written . . . James Bridle, ‘Something is wrong on the internet’, Medium, 6 November 2017. 13. . . . it reflected data coming from . . . Tracy McVeigh, ‘Amazon acts to halt sales of

Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI

by Madhumita Murgia · 20 Mar 2024 · 336pp · 91,806 words

$1tn. This lucrative business model that monetizes personal data is what American social psychologist and philosopher Shoshana Zuboff has called ‘surveillance capitalism’. As the artist James Bridle wrote in an essay last year, ‘These companies made their money by inserting themselves into every aspect of everyday life, including the most personal and

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our humanity – our creativity – in order to build replacements for the very people revered for it was the ultimate form of data colonialism. As artist James Bridle wrote: ‘They enclosed our imaginations in much the same manner as landlords and robber barons enclosed once-common lands . . . Instead, they are selling us back

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opt-out forms on their websites for artists who don’t want their work to help build creative AI tools that could replace them. As James Bridle put it, artists felt that these software tools were nothing but ‘expropriated labour from the many, for the enrichment and advancement of a few . . . companies

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI

by Frank Pasquale · 14 May 2020 · 1,172pp · 114,305 words

like Peppa Pig may be chatting with friends in one video, then brandishing knives and guns in a “satire” auto-played right after. As artist James Bridle has observed, this goes beyond ordinary anxieties about decency. What is worrying about the Peppa videos, Bridle argues, “is how the obvious parodies and even

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App Tracking Improperly Follows Children, Study,” QR Code Press, April 18, 2018, http://www.qrcodepress.com/android-app-tracking-improperly-follows-children-study/8534453/. 39. James Bridle, “Something Is Wrong on the Internet,” Medium, November 6, 2017, https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2. 40. Nick Statt, “YouTube

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.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/17/can-mark-zuckerberg-fix-facebook-before-it-breaks-democracy. 32. James Bridle, “Something Is Wrong on the Internet,” Medium, https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2. 33. James Bridle, New Dark Age (New York: Verso, 2018), 230. 34. Max Fisher and Amanda Taub, “On

We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves

by John Cheney-Lippold · 1 May 2017 · 420pp · 100,811 words

entities who can be reflexive in ways that might not come in the form of direct, bare-knuckled recalcitrance. Figure 3.2. A screenshot from James Bridle’s Citizen-Ex. In the case of jus algoritmi, we encounter reflexivity in the fact that we know it exists. The datafied subject relation that

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space between one’s citizenship and one’s ‘citizenship.’ For instance, upon learning that the NSA valued Internet metadata to ascertain users’ ‘foreignness,’ UK artist James Bridle and others developed a browser add-on called Citizen-Ex that, following my earlier work on jus algoritmi’s logic, made users aware of NSA

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Computational Turn: The Philosophy of Law Meets the Philosophy of Technology, ed. Mireille Hildebrandt and Katja de Vries (London: Routledge, 2013), 157. 63. Ibid. 64. James Bridle, “Citizen-Ex,” 2015, https://citizen-ex.com. 65. Marissa Moorman, “Can an Algorithm Be Racist?,” Africa Is a Country (blog), September 29, 2014, http://africasacountry