A Metaphor about Metaphor
Early in the text, the author offers a definition of technology through metaphor that is itself a metaphor:
“Technology is not mere toolmaking and tool use; it is the making of metaphors.”
The Anti-Metaphor
Elsewhere, the author attacks the validity of a universally recognized computing metaphor known as “the cloud.” Literally, “the cloud” is, of course, storage space no located any hardware connected directly to a user’s computer. The author undermines the appropriateness of calling this space “a cloud” by pointing out that “it is not weightless; it is not amorphous or even invisible” and that far from being some magical place disconnected from the reality of hardware, the cloud is very much a “physical infrastructure.”
Viewers and Gamers
The film industry and the video game industry are examined for the ways in which viewers and gamers are studied and data accumulated in order to produce new movies and games that give viewers and gamers more of exactly what they want in a process metaphorically situated as one in which:
“Entire cultural industries become feedback loops for an increasingly dominant narrative of fear and violence.”
“Hewlett-Packard computers are racist.”
Here is an interesting use of metaphor. The quote is attributed to a black man who uploaded a video to YouTube which reveals that the facial recognition capability on an HP computer worked for his white co-worker, but not for him. Obviously, a computer itself cannot be racist so the use of “Hewlett-Package” is a metaphor for those who designed the technology. But that also proved to be misplaced as the problem was eventually identified as one related to lighting rather than skin pigmentation. So, in effect, this statement becomes a metaphor having nothing to do with technology, but for the built-in assumption or presumption or suspicion of inherently sinister motivations on the part of oppressed minorities. This is a metaphor about historical consequences rather than technological failures.
The New Dark Age Defined
The fundamental structure of what the author terms the new dark age is constructed upon a metaphorical paradox. It is:
“an age in which the value we have placed upon knowledge is destroyed by the abundance of that profitable commodity.”
