“If only technology could invent some way to get in touch with you during an emergency.”
The book opens with the image of the author watching an episode of the TV show The West Wing. ON the episode, Pres. Bartlett pokes fun at a member of his staff who has decided to give up his AA meetings because he has missed an emergency situation. In the actual episode, Bartlett punctuates this ponderous statement by ironically reaching into the staff member’s pocket and bringing out his phone. But in the author’s recounting, he is watching the show on his computer and at that moment, a crash occurs which causes a glitch in which the video continues forward, but the audio has frozen in a constant repetition of Bartlett’s line. This experience becomes the opening of the book because it is a metaphor for the ways in which technology can sometimes be in the process of announcing an emergency situation while simultaneously failing to deliver that warning in way capable of being understood.
“Weather is the key paradox of our time. Weather that is nice is often weather that is wrong. The nice is occurring in the immediate and individual and the wrong is occurring system-wide.”
Horn is an artist specializing in unique studies of nature, including one titled You are the Weather. Her fascination with weather, climate and geography extends beyond artistic works and includes this observation which should be immediately explained to all climate change deniers. What Horn is essentially pointing out here is the difference between weather and climate. While an unusually cold break in the middle of warm summer weather may seem to defy all evidence of “global warming” it is in reality just an example of fluctuations in weather rather than any significant intrusion in the overall pattern of climate. A reading of short-term weather as indicative of long-term climate is concrete example of dark age thinking.
We know more and more about the world, while being less and less able to do anything about it.
This assertion is the driving force behind the movement toward a new dark age. It is a movement based on fear and confusion that stands in direct paradoxical relation to what might be expected. The accumulation of knowledge resulting from an explosion in the ability to access that knowledge should by all rights herald movement into a new age of enlightenment. The author’s premise is constructed upon the reverse: faced with an overload of too much information, masses of the population are driven by fear and confusion and the resulting sense of helplessness to grasp toward an even firmer hold on existing assumptions and prejudices even in the face of evidence that they are outmoded, outdated or insubstantial.
Once-fictional possibilities for technological violence are being realized by the internet of things.
One of the aspects of the growth of intelligence around us that we are unable to control which facilitates this feeling of confusion and helplessness is the ways in which computerized components capable of being hacked have moved from the relative isolation of the computer itself into potentially every device upon which humans rely. The author illuminates this disconnect between what is known and the inability to do anything about it through real life example using familiar products like Philips’ light bulbs and Google Home. Taking these actual products that are being used daily by billions, the author draws parallels to fictional episodes in literature and film which pretty much the same technological means to accomplish much more malevolent ends. These possibilities are in turn driving more and more people into Luddite-level rejection of technology, creating a response which further adds to the population retreating into a new kind of dark age.
