Opaque Complexity
rising economic inequality- breakdown of the nation-state
- militarization of borders
- totalizing global surveillance
- curtailment of individual freedoms
- triumph of transnational corporations
- the rise of neurocognitive capitalism
- the rise of nativist ideologies
- the degradation of the natural environment
….all of these are the product of a general inability to perceive the wider, networked effects of individual and corporate actions accelerated by opaque, technologically augmented complexity.
The cloud is cloudy, and no amount of impenetrable computation will render it clearly. This is the nature of the world, which our most advanced technologies are not simplifying, but depicting ever more clearly, if only we would admit to the reality of their vision. The world in its totality is not something to be understood and controlled, but to be experienced in all of its violent, beautiful complexity; to be struggled and reckoned with, but never to be mastered.
Perhaps we need new myths.
— excerpts, James Bridle
James Bridle is an artist, writer and publisher based in London. Bridle coined the New Aesthetic; his work “deals with the ways in which the digital, networked world reaches into the physical, offline one.”His work has explored aspects of the western security apparatus including drones and asylum seeker deportation. Bridle has written for WIRED, ICON, Domus, Cabinet, the Atlantic and many other publications, and writes a regular column for The Observer newspaper on publishing and technology.
