There’s been a lot of ink spilled in the last thirty years, both physical and digital, explaining and exploring the phenomenon that is the Internet. From the enthusiastic optimism of such influential figures as Clay Shirky and Seth Godin, to the heavily cautious middle ground of such figures as Douglas Rushkoff, to the all-out pessimism and quasi-dystopianism of people like Evgeny Morozov, Nicholas Carr, and Jaron Lanier, opinions have run the gamut as different people have thought publicly about the Internet’s true and deep nature, its impact on human beings and human societies, and its implications for our collective future.
And although I’ve read, listened to, enjoyed, and I think benefited from the thoughts of the above-named figures and many others (and have mulled these things over repeatedly here at this blog), I firmly maintain that nobody has expressed the real heart of the matter better than David Bowie did back in 1999.
This occurred during an interview that he gave to Jeremy Paxman for BBC Newsnight. The conversation had turned toward the changing nature of the relationship between audiences and performers, and Bowie mentioned, among other things, the Internet, which he said “carries the flag for the subversive and possibly rebellious and chaotic and nihilistic.” This led to an exchange with Paxman about the real nature and implications of the Internet, which was still relatively new at the time as a society-wide phenomenon.
Bowie’s comments showed him to be, in a very real sense of the word, a prophet about the fusion of technological, psychological, and societal forces that had just been unleashed. Here amid the strange dystopian chaos of 2021, where a million genies have been released from a million lamps as the very notion of an agreed-upon reality, or even an agreed-upon set of facts, seems to have died a public death and sowed in its wake a still-ripening field of epistemological, political, societal, cultural, and psychological dysfunction and conflict, Bowie sounds almost like a clear-eyed religious visionary. What’s the one thing we can be certain of in this destabilized new age and new order of things? According to David Bowie, it’s that the very idea of certainty may have been rendered obsolete by the arrival of a new communications technology that’s so radically transformative, it’s like a visitor from another world.
The video jumps to the relevant portion, though the whole interview is well worth watching. See below for a transcript.
Paxman: But what is it specifically about the Internet? Anybody can say anything, and it all adds up to what? It seems to me thereâs nothing cohesive about it in the way that there was something cohesive about the Youth Revolution in music.
Bowie: Oh, but absolutely. And I think itâs because at the time, up until at least the mid-70s, we really felt that we were still living under the guise of a single, absolute, created society where there were known truths and known lies and there was no kind of duplicity or pluralism about the things that we believed in. That started to break down rapidly in the 70s. And the idea of a duality in the way that we liveâthere were always two, three, four, five sides to every question. The singularity disappeared. And that, I believe, has produced such a medium as the Internet, which absolutely establishes and shows us that we are living in total fragmentation.
Paxman: Youâve got to think that some of the claims being made for it are hugely exaggerated. I mean, when the telephone was invented, people made amazing claims.
Bowie: I know. The president at the time, when it was first invented, it was outrageous. He said he foresaw the day in the future when every town in America would have a telephone. How dare he claim that? Absolute bullshit. [Grins] No, you see, I donât agree. I donât think weâve even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the Internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think weâre actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.
Paxman: Itâs just a tool though, isnât it?
Bowie. No, it’s not. No. Itâs an alien life form. [Laughs] Is there life on Mars? Yes, itâs just landed here.
Paxman: But itâs simply a different delivery system. Youâre arguing about something more profound.
Bowie: Oh, yeah. Iâm talking about the actual context and the state of content is going to be so different from anything we can envisage at the moment, where the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in sympatico, itâs going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.
From “The Dice Man” by Luke Rhinehart (1971):
“‘Why have our efforts to cure neurosis been so uniformly unsuccessful? Why does civilization expand unhappiness faster than we can develop new theories about how it occurs and what we ought to do about it? Our mistake is obvious. We have carried over from the simple, unified, stable societies of the past an image of the ideal norm for man which is totally wrong for our complex, chaotic, unstable and multi-valent urban civilizations of today. We assume that “honesty” and “frankness” are of primary importance in healthy human relations, and the lie and the act are, in the anachronistic ethics of our time, considered evil.’
‘Ah, but Dr. Rhinehart, you can’t-‘ said Dr. Cobblestone.
‘No, sir. I regret to say I’m serious. Every society is based upon lies. Our society of today is based on conflicting lies. The man who lived in a simple, stable, single-lie society absorbed the single-lie system into a unified self and spouted it for the rest of his life, un-contradicted by his friends and neighbors, and unaware that ninety-eight percent of his beliefs were illusions, his values artificial and arbitrary and most of his desires comically ill-aimed.
`The man in our multi-lie society absorbs a chaos of conflicting lies and is reminded daily by his friends and neighbors that his beliefs arc not universally held, that his values are personal and arbitrary and his desires often ill-aimed. We must realize that to ask this man to be honest and true to himself, when his contradictory selves have multiple contradictory answers to most questions, is a safe and economical method of driving him insane.
On the other hand, to free him from his unending conflict we must urge him to let go, to act, to pretend, to lie. We must give him the means to develop these abilities. He must become a diceperson.'”