technology metaphor
Technology is not mere tool making and tool use: it is the making of metaphors. In making a tool, we instantiate a certain understanding of the world that, thus reified, is capable of achieving certain effects in that world. It thus becomes another moving part of our understanding of the world - if, often, unconsciously.
New Dark Age, James Bridle
big data complexity
This is the magic of big data. You don't really need to know or understand anything about what you're studying; you can simply place all of your faith in the emergent truth of digital information. In one sense, the big data fallacy is the logical outcome of scientific reductionism: the belief that complex systems can be understood by dismantling them into their constituent pieces and studying each in isolation. And this reductionist approach would hold if it did in practice keep pace with our experiences; in reality, it is proving to be insufficient.
New Dark Age, James Bridle, p.84
language silence
language can be employed to check language, to express muteness. Mallarmé thought it was precisely the job of poetry. using words, to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things. Art must mount a full-scale attack on language itself, by means of language and its surrogates, on behalf of the standard of silence.
The aesthetics of silence, Susan Sontag
language silence
(I should argue, contrary to McLuhan, that a devaluation of the power and credibility of images has taken place that's no less profound than. and essentially similar to, that afflicting language.) And, as the prestige of language falls, that of silence rises.
The aesthetics of silence, Susan Sontag