In greatly simplified terms, the Dark Ages were the centuries following the fall of Rome circa 500 AD, during which the accumulated Greek and Roman learning of the previous millennium was lost to all but a few monks and scholars. The breakdown of continental stability maintained from the imperial capital left a patchwork of feudal kingdoms from the North Atlantic across the European plain, sporadically warring with each other and invaders from the north and east, while ordinary serfs lived under omnipresent shadows of plague, scarcity, and superstition.

Most contemporary historians prefer the terms “Middle Ages” or “Medieval Era” to “Dark Ages,” but in any case, the designation has become a shorthand for a lengthy period of stagnation and ignorance. A potential recurrence of this crisis has often been invoked in modern times, notably during Winston Churchill’s address to the British parliament in June 1940, as Britain faced the prospect of becoming a vassal state of the rampant Nazi Germany: “But if we fail,” he warned, “then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.” 

More recently, books such as Jane Jacobs’s Dark Age Ahead (2004), Morris Berman’s Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire (2011), and James Kirchick’s The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age (2017) have projected declines from present-day conditions, while James Bridle’s 2018 title New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, offers its own warning:

The abundance of information and the plurality of worldviews now accessible to us through the internet are not producing a coherent consensus reality, but one riven by fundamentalist insistence on simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics. It is on this contradiction that the idea of a new dark age turns: an age in which the value we have placed on knowledge is destroyed by the abundance of that profitable commodity, and in which we look about ourselves in search of new ways to understand the world.

Although they differ in their specifics, forecasts that our civilisation’s rich heritage of wisdom and achievement is at risk of being neglected and forgotten remain pertinent today. Even the relatively new global “monoculture” of the last hundred-odd years may now be fading into the distance, as an increasingly atomised planetary society no longer speaks a shared language of Hollywood movies, jazz and rock music, and other pop idioms. 

Consider the diminished stature of the Academy Awards, inaugurated in 1927, now that industry impact and audience interest appear to be in a terminal downturn. Or the precipitous drop in the circulation and influence of Time magazine, first published in 1923 and once a ubiquitous weekly guide to world events. And while broadcast-news anchors were once national wise men, they are now anonymous talking heads. “Legacy media is dead,” Elon Musk declared after the 2024 US election. Which legacies might be next to go?

Legacy governance, perhaps? Many systems of social organisation, under which billions of people currently live, originated in the 18th and 19th centuries: the principles of elected legislatures, adult suffrage, secret ballots, independent judiciaries and civil services, constitutional safeguards, and codified rights of citizenship are all at least a hundred years old and in many cases date back to the Age of Enlightenment. Made for slower eras of printed records and formal arguments, the parliaments, diets, and national assemblies of the world’s democracies were built to foster deliberation—for example, the “sober second thought” meant to occupy Canada’s Senate—that is now, with the immediacy of digital likes and shares, almost unthinkable. 

Because liberal democracies have not consistently delivered security and prosperity to all, works like Why Liberalism Failed (2018) and Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (2023) by Patrick Deneen are now questioning their value. More cautious writers like Anne Applebaum (The Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, 2020), Francis Fukuyama (Liberalism and Its Discontents, 2022), and Peter Turchin (End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, 2023) are also acknowledging deep uncertainty about the traditional order. This uncertainty is unlikely to abate soon. It’s one thing when Time and the annual Oscars telecast become irrelevant after a few decades of popularity, it’s quite another when the rule of law and peaceful transfers of power, in place since 1689 or 1789, appear to be headed in the same direction.   

The main driver of this irrelevance isn’t hard to identify. If a new dark age does begin, it is likely to arise from technology—the “lights of perverted science” feared by Churchill—not from war, plague, or ideology. Dystopias like Brave New World (set in 2540 AD), The Matrix (set some time after 2090), and The Terminator (which imagines 2029) depict societies in which people are subservient to machines, or imperilled by them. In December 2024, Geoffrey Hinton—the Nobel Prize-winning scientist known as “the godfather of Artificial Intelligence”—posited a “ten percent to twenty percent” likelihood that AI would wipe out the human race in coming decades. An earlier report commissioned by the US State Department presented a worst-case scenario in which AI might “pose an extinction-level threat to the human species.” In these futures, the advanced tools hitherto considered symbols of civilisational advance have morphed into agents of civilisational collapse. 

But Artificial Intelligence is only the latest technological menace, so far more speculative than confirmed. Theorists of mass communications have long produced evidence for the debilitating impacts of television and computers on our minds and souls: for example, Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) and Technopoly (1993), Theodore Roszak’s The Cult of Information (1994), and Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (2010) and Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart (2025). And we’re already suffering through the verifiable damage social media has wrought on entire generations. The endless distraction by trivia; the surrender of personal privacy and autonomy to our devices; the addictive instantaneity of emotional response, pushed by algorithms; the ongoing amplification of dispute and discord across networked communities; the sheer time consumed by doom-scrolling and angertainment: here, surely, is one version of the dark age manifest.  

This new dark age even has its own barbarians. Consider how the biggest tycoons of our era—Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and others whose combined wealth reaches into trillions of dollars—derive their fortunes not from banking, manufacturing, or energy (as with the plutocrats of yesteryear like Cornelius Vanderbilt, Meyer Rothschild, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, et al), but from attention. Meta, Amazon, X—and their holdings, which include both electronic and legacy platforms like Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitch, MGM Studios, and the Washington Post—command vast scopes of the public eye and hence huge portions of public awareness. 

In the New York Times, Ezra Klein recently observed, “Attention, not money, is now the fuel of American politics. … As absurdly concentrated as wealth is in America, attention is even more so.” While movie moguls and press barons wielded immense power throughout the last century, they never came as close to the governing classes—or were as directly involved in government itself—as their latter-day equivalents. William Randolph Hearst did not get a seat at Franklin Roosevelt’s 1940 inauguration, and Walt Disney did not serve in Dwight Eisenhower’s cabinet.

Paradoxically, attention may also be the key to staving off—or at least surviving—the dark age by withholding it from its biggest profiteers. In a culture where traditional sources of knowledge and established institutions of the state have lost their purchase with the public imagination, a strange blend of show business and politics has filled the void. As early as 1998, Kurt Andersen wrote an essay for the New Yorker describing US President Bill Clinton as only the nation’s “Entertainer-In-Chief,” whose continued personal scandals were more interesting than any legislation he might pass or war he might launch. 

Almost thirty eventful years on, this tendency has accelerated to a point where leaders in many nations now function as celebrities as much as elected officials, and coverage of their performance emphasises the devotion or outrage they generate (according to the audience) over how they fulfil their mandated responsibilities. Their clout is more in their visibility than their formal authority. It’s not totally theatre, but nor is it purely civics, either. It’s not all spectacle—government and laws still matter—but it’s not news as we’ve known it. And if that is the case, the most constructive response the average person can offer may be no response at all.

Political scientists have always extolled the ideal of the informed voter, but information has become a cacophony, and the most influential political actors may not even be on the ballot—indeed, by now, they’re the ones who’ve made the cacophony as deafening as it is. Democracy is less vox populi than fodder for the services that relay the vox. Like videos, music, memes, and tweets, any conversation about public affairs, or any update about world events, is just content to be delivered. Even before Meta, X, and Amazon, televised panel shows were governed by an identical imperative, summed up by Andrew Potter in 2010’s The Authenticity Hoax:

What television thrives on is conflict, and it is important to understand that when political programs invite a liberal and conservative to debate the issues of the day, the producers have no desire or expectation that there will be any agreement or even concessions by either side. The conflict is the message.

Thus, today’s genuinely engaged citizen may be the one who’s disengaged from the conflict, the spin, and the noise: the one who no longer follows stories about people he’ll never meet and things he can’t do anything to change. If attention has become the fuel of a neo-barbaric politics, the fuel supply can still be choked off.

Now, not everyone is a news junkie. Most people already have little time for the politics, gossip, and punditry that dominate the media. But the public still has the untapped potential to overturn that dominance, through exercising its own collective will: deleting Facebook and X accounts; shopping locally, not online; boycotting Spotify and TikTok; patronising libraries, rather than Amazon or Netflix. These are not forces of nature; they are private commercial services. We don’t have to turn the clock back to 1999, but if we are alarmed by the influence of the chieftains of attention, we would do well to remember that their influence has been amassed through billions of consumers’ individual choices, and that those choices can be changed. Want to take down the Zuckerbergs and the Musks? Log off.

For this project, we have numerous models to follow, including the shorthand history of the original Dark Ages, which tells us that precious Greek and Latin manuscripts were preserved by scattered monastic orders until they could be rediscovered with the intellectual flowering of the Renaissance. Perhaps a parallel preservation will recur in our new dark age, except not of data, or even of “legacy media,” but of quiet, disconnected reflection. Rolf Dobelli’s 2019 book Stop Reading the News: A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer, and Wiser Life hints at a way forward:

The freedom to choose for ourselves what’s relevant is fundamental to a good life. More fundamental even than the freedom to express our opinions. An individual has the right not to be sent crazy by things that are clamorously pretending to be new and important. Our brains are full. We’ve got to cleanse them, detoxify them, free them of junk—not continually chuck in more. 

In other words, freedom of speech is meaningless without freedom from speech.

Older voices support this case. In 2025, we increasingly hear counsels to “tend your own garden” after a line in Voltaire’s Candide (1759), “il faut cultiver notre jardin.” This is intended to mean, “Focus on your own life, and don’t worry about saving the world.” William Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800) outlines his aim of composing poetry to counteract “the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies.” Henry David Thoreau, in Walden (1854), likewise reminded us that:

We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. … I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.

In other words, the new dark age—the age of cacophonous technology, of information overload, of toxic clamour and attention-fuelled barbarism—may end when we retreat into silence. George Orwell’s 1946 essay, “Some Thoughts On the Common Toad,” concludes:

I have always suspected that if our economic and political problems are ever really solved, life will become simpler instead of more complex, and that the sort of pleasure one gets from finding the first primrose will loom larger than the sort of pleasure one gets from eating an ice to the tune of a Wurlitzer. ... The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are still prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going around the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.