David Bowie’s prediction about the Internet in 1999 is seriously mindblowing
We knew it!! David Bowie WAS an oracle. THAT’S WHY he always appeared in our dreams!
In the late ’90s, Bowie carved out a corner of the Internet that was essentially a predictor of things to come.
But he’d already pioneered some digital work that was exceptionally forward-thinking.
In 1994, Bowie released a CD-ROM that accompanied his track Jump, They Say. With theCD-ROM, fans could make their own music video for the song. Bowie was also one of the first major artists to release a new song exclusively on the internet. The song, 1996’s “Telling Lies,” sold 300,000 copies.
Then, in 1998, David Bowie released his own ISP, that was essentially a foreshadowing of social media sites like MySpace and Facebook.
He called it BowieNet, and he charged $19.95 a month. Users received internet access and access to a catalogue of Bowie-centric photos, videos, songs, as well as an exclusive look at his upcoming material, and invitations to web chats with the Thin White Duke himself. Subscribers also received 5 megabytes of space to create their own sites, and plugins that inserted music and video to regular webpages.
In an interview with British political pundit Jeremy Paxman for BBC Newsnight, Bowie shared his vision of the impending Internet age.
“We’re on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying,” he said.
“The actual context and the state of content is going to be so different to anything we can envisage at the moment — the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in simpatico it’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.”
Just as Bowie the artist crushed our ideas of what gender, and music, and performance are all about.
Ground Control to Major Tom… commencing countdown, engines on.
