My apologies to anyone familiar with the Middle Ages. The term, “Dark Age” is somewhat of a put-down to medieval society. We can’t fault those living at the time for the state of human sophistication at the time. But we living today don’t have that excuse.

In that sense, we are in far darker times—having the world of ideas at our fingertips, yet failing to lift our collective finger toward insight—even mere fact. Or just lifting a finger toward fulfilling the American motto of “e pluribus unum” (out of many, one). Instead we have sunk to a low point of division and tribalism. (In all fairness, tribalism may aid in the lifting of the middle finger.)

The blog’s name is not a claim of gloom and doom. The world may go downhill sometimes, but over time the world is continually getting better. The name’s just a gimmick. And gimmicks, often disguised as innovation, are what make up a large portion of our collective hunger for novelty and new things under the sun.

About the blog title—

If you Google the term, “digital dark age,” you’ll find the conventional meaning referring to an imaginary dystopian future that is plausible, but seems a bit contrived. The term, as it was coined, is a counterfeit—because it cannot be a thing in itself, but only a result of a larger, more ominous circumstance.

Until the standard definition comes to pass, it remains science fiction. And as Mark Twain said, fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn’t. And by extension I would say, neither is the future obliged to stick to the possibilities we are able to imagine. As the world becomes more implausible, we struggle to understand and explain the phenomena. Nevertheless, you will see that there are some remarkable parallels between the digital age and “the dark ages.”