HILLINGDON Hospital in Greater London is a somewhat crumbly modernist slab of a building. It is fully part of the NHS ragtime: staff shortages, some troubling past safety records for patients and workers, barely sufficient budgets.
But stand outside the gates, look to the building鈥檚 roof, and you will see giant microwave dishes mounted there. Their function? According to artist James Bridle鈥檚 investigations (his knowledge was gleaned through freedom of information requests), they boost the signals of high-frequency financial trading.
In that business, nanoseconds matter; the dishes infinitesimally accelerate transmissions between the London Stock Exchange鈥檚 data centre in Slough, and the New York Stock Exchange鈥檚 servers in Basildon.
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Staggering amounts of capital, billions and billions, surge across the hospital鈥檚 rooftops, slip through relays positioned above a tube depot in Upminster, and go skipping over a Gold鈥檚 Gym in Dagenham and high-rises in Barking and Upton Park.
Ignore the futuristic blarney, stick to the here and now, and you can locate the kit that sustains our oh-so-chromed virtual future. It is Bridle鈥檚 willingness to expend shoe leather in this practice that makes his book much more than the techno-sceptic jeremiad its title would suggest.
At one point, he hangs around Farnborough Airport, pointing his camera at the sky to capture twin turboprop aircraft 鈥� which he identifies as security-service 鈥渟igints鈥�, monitoring the activity of London鈥檚 mobile phone networks.
Elsewhere, Bridle jumps down a digital rabbit hole to report on the eerie world of algorithm-generated children鈥檚 TV on YouTube 鈥� shows with titles like Wrong Heads Disney Wrong Ears Wrong Legs Kids Learn Colors Finger Family 2017 Nursery Rhymes. Feedback loops assemble and reassemble the heads and body parts of various cartoon icons. Toddlers love it; the BBC series Teletubbies was derived from the same child psychology. Now human performers are beginning to copy these uncanny machine-generated montages, from the US to Thailand, under channels with names like Toy Freaks and Freak Family.
Bridle expresses moral distaste at the excesses and cruelties of digital culture, with its devastating access to our rawest selves, and its historical links to war and imperialism.
But he also possesses a near-Buddhist acceptance of how inescapably we are caught up in it. Perhaps this is why he writes so approvingly of initiatives like 鈥渃entaur鈥� chess, in which humans team up with AIs so that together they can beat the most advanced programmes.
鈥淪tick to the here and now, and you can locate the kit that sustains our oh-so-chromed virtual future鈥�
The 鈥渄arkness鈥� in Bridle鈥檚 title is generated by the unthinkable density of our information worlds, and the growing inscrutability of the machine intelligences that tend them. We can鈥檛 afford to be overwhelmed by all this, he says. Global warming鈥檚 knowledge explosion, for example, compels all good citizens to be amateur statisticians. But we should understand the scale and intractability of the problem: 鈥淐omplexity is not a condition to be tamed,鈥� Bridle cautions, 鈥渂ut a lesson to be learned.鈥�
The book derives its title from an essay by a founding father of horror fiction, H.P. Lovecraft. 鈥淪ome day,鈥� wrote Lovecraft, 鈥渢he piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.鈥�
In this original and provocative book, Bridle asks us to observe our concrete social surroundings closely, and be ready for strange forces to step out of the current techno-cultural murk.
Pray that they aren鈥檛 monsters 鈥� though what else can they possibly be?
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This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淭hrough a screen, darkly鈥�
