Any time I opened social media last month I had to confront a torrent of 2016 photos. Almost everyone I know socially and parasocially welcomed the year in by digging through their camera roll and presenting their findings on Instagram—mostly just to say “look how [insert verb] I was ten years ago.” Like any viral trend, it quickly reached a fever pitch and became annoying.
It was also a rose-tinted-goggles situation. Clouded by a nostalgia for what felt like simpler times, few ventured to remember that 2016 was the year that the UK decided to disastrously eject itself from the EU. It was the year that Trump won his first presidential election and, among other uncomfortable TV moments, danced to ‘Hotline Bling’ on SNL. Many, many mass shootings and terror attacks took place. There were multiple climate-related emergencies—drought in California, flooding in Texas, and snow in the Sahara Desert. It marked a dark shift in politics and in the nature of the internet. Plenty of bad movies were released, and it was a big year for celebrity deaths—Carrie Fisher, Alan Rickman, Muhammad Ali, Leonard Cohen, Prince. Perhaps most notably, it was the year that David Bowie died from liver cancer at the age of 69.
Remembering David Bowie in the days after his death, the Puerto Rican guitarist Carlos Alomar told The Guardian: “David was like a comet, blazing brightly into the sky. That comet travelled too fast for us to see it and take it all in at once.” Alomar played on more of Bowie’s albums than anyone else besides, of course, the White Duke himself. They were collaborators and friends, and it’s striking to know that Bowie was just as bright close up as he was from afar. Alomar’s words resonate strongly now, a decade after Bowie’s passing, because it’s still hard to know how to take him in, even though he’s been gone for a while. How do we even begin to remember someone who reinvented himself so many times? How can we process his influence? Where do we start? And how do we shake the feeling, to quote Gary Oldman’s adage, that the world has gone to shit since he died?
Public mourning was re-activated in a major way for the 10th anniversary of his death. News networks, media platforms and radio stations across the world were engaging with Bowie’s music, life and legacy. In the U.K., Channel 4 released a feature-length documentary—‘Bowie: The Final Act’—which explored how he turned his impending death into Blackstar, his 26th studio album and final masterpiece. As his producer Tony Visconti said at the time, “his death was no different from his life—a work of art.”
But one of the most interesting clips from Bowie’s life, which also features briefly in the documentary, is the 1999 Newsnight interview where he predicts the internet-induced chaos we’re living with now. When presenter Jeremy Paxman asks if some of the claims being made about the internet are exaggerated, Bowie replies: “I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think we’re on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.” Paxman retorts: “But it’s just a tool though, isn’t it?” and Bowie, with a twinkle in his eye, says “No. It’s an alien life form…Is there life on Mars? Yes, it just landed here.”
Exhilarating and terrifying indeed—and the minacious nerds at the heart of the technology agreed. The same year the Paxman interview took place, Eric Schmidt, who was Google’s CEO at the time, told Internet World Trade Show listeners: “The internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.”
The fact that one popstar oddity was on the same pathway of thinking as this guy is incredible. Not only was he part of the avant garde net culture movements of the time, he also channeled their thinking deeply in his art and its distribution. He was the first major artist to release a new song—“Telling Lies”—as an online-only download, and had even arranged a live ‘cybercast’ of a concert he did in Boston in 1997. He was a true cultural provocateur, channeling the future’s messages, it seemed, for the rest of us. And this is what we miss most.
The iceberg Bowie tipped off is revealing itself, and it is uglier than we realized. In Cyberphunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet (2012), Julian Assange wrote: “The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.” Three years later, Lady Gaga plainly told CNN: “The internet is a toilet. It is.”
We can finally see how both of these things are true. With the advent and aggressive integration of AI into what feels like every online platform on the planet, the internet is feeling like more of an alien life form than ever. It is scary and full of slop, and we’re in the midst of figuring out what it means for us and what it means for art. We want to know what Bowie would think of all this, what he would do.