This episode of The Dig is brought to you by our listeners who support us at Patreon.com

and by Verso Books, which has loads of great left-wing titles, perfect for dig listeners like you.

When that you might like is New Dark Age, Technology in the End of the Future by James Bridal. As the world around us increases in technological complexity, our understanding of it diminishes.

Underlying this trend is a single idea.

The belief that our existence is understandable through computation, and that more data is

data is enough to help us build a better world.

In reality, we are lost in a sea of information,

increasingly divided by fundamentalism, simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics.

Meanwhile, those in power use our lack of understanding to further their own interests.

Despite the apparent accessibility of information,

we're living in a new dark age, from rogue financial systems to shopping algorithms from artificial intelligence to

state secrecy. We no longer understand how our world is governed or presented to

us. The media is filled with unverifiable speculation, much of it generated by anonymous software,

while companies dominate their employees through surveillance and the threat of automation. In his brilliant new work, leading artist and writer

James Bridal surveys the history of art, technology, and information systems and

reveals the dark clouds that gather over our dreams of the digital sublime.

New Dark Age, technology in the end of the future, by James Bridal,

out now from Verso Books. Welcome to the Digg, a podcast from Jacobin magazine. My name is Daniel Denver and I'm

broadcasting from Providence, Rhode Island. I've been meaning to do a show on the

Civil War in Syria for quite a long time and

one reason that I haven't I think is because it's hard to know precisely what to think

about such a bloody disaster that the US and the Assad regime and

...