In 1999, David Bowie stated about the net, in component, “I think we’re actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.”
David Bowie: Cultural symbol, songs tale, as well as — clairvoyant?
Bowie provided a renowned meeting on BBC Newsnight in 1999, as well as made some statements about the net, which went to that time a blossoming modern technology. His statements appeared to forecast several of the social fragmentation as well as turmoil militarized by the net in the 2010s as well as very early 2020s:
At the time, Bowie informed BBC job interviewer Jeremy Paxman that the net appeared subversive to him, due to the fact that culture’s wielders of power as well as impact really did not yet have a syndicate over it.
I do not assume we have actually also seen the idea of the iceberg. I assume the possibility of what the Internet is mosting likely to do to culture, both excellent as well as negative, is inconceivable. I assume we’re in fact on the cusp of something exciting as well as frightening.
[…]
I’m speaking about the real context as well as the state of web content is mosting likely to be so various to anything that we can truly imagine at the minute where the interaction in between the individual as well as the company will certainly be so in simpatico that it is mosting likely to squash our concepts of what tools are everything about.
The over quote from Bowie is genuine, however in January 2022, an apology of this meeting went viral in which comic Michael Spicer ornamented Bowie’s 1999 remarks with a hindsight-is-20/ 20 chatter about the state of modern technology as well as its unhealthy results on culture as well as individuals’s individual time monitoring:
“In the future, we’ll be wasting hours and hours of our lives just watching videos of cats and dogs being adorable,” Spicer stated, prior to he released right into a review of exactly how reactionary political numbers made use of migration to attract anti-immigrant view as a vector to presume power.
Sources:
Evon,Dan “Did David Bowie Predict Social Media in ‘Newsnight’ 1999 Clip?” Snopes, 10Jan 2022,
“Mainstreaming Hate: The Anti-Immigrant Movement in the U.S.” Anti-Defamation League, 28Nov 2018, Accessed 17Nov 2022.
