This 1999 David Bowie interview where he predicts the internet is so cool, you’ve probably seen it before. One thing Bowie says in it is that if he had been born at a different time, he might not have been a musician, he only went into music because that was where the energy was in the second half the 20th century.
He speculates that he might’ve been a Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs kind of figure he he was coming of age in the late 90s. I think about this interview a lot and his insight here. The question for me now is: who would Bowie be if he were coming of age today?
Another old interview I’ve been watching lately is this interview with Trump on Terry Wogan in 1988. He is presented as an extremely rich man, this is at a time where, as we learnt from the recent Adam Curtis doc ‘Shifty’ – wealth was still accumulated by people who seemed and looked like they were wealthy. The Queen was the richest person in Britain and the Duke of Westminster was the second richest.
Trump tells Wogan that his wife, Ivana, would manage his new hotel in New York. What struck me about it is how alien that sounds now. The idea that running a hotel is something creative, valuable and even aspirational in the modern world.
Today, the crude cultural assumption is the opposite. Managing a hotel is seen as a solved problem. There’s a playbook. You hire the right people, follow the model, invest £5M. It’s procedural. Clinical. Like the modern appeal to “there is no evidence,” (around covid masks, origin, transmission and vaccines) we’ve collectively decided certain domains are closed, figured out, optimised and no longer requiring imagination.
In the new Louis Theroux documentary about the Manosphere, Louis asks if 23 year old alpha ‘HSTikkyTokky’ is being hypocritical by making money from porn, when he at the same time declares it as disgusting to his followers. Louis compares it owning a gym and waving a tray of donuts in front of members as they come in.
HSTikkyTokky, understanding the world we’re living in simply replies that that’s fine because ‘he owns the donut shop’.
He doesn’t run one, he doesn’t have any expertise in the donut industry, he owns it. He’s showing his fluency in the modern world: ownership is the point of everything. It probably always was the point, its just now the truth is cracked open.
Today, Bowie wouldn’t be Ziggy Stardust. He’d have a portfolio. He’d be trading narratives, speculating on markets, maybe crypto. Everything revered in the world has been displaced by positioning — by accumulating wealth.
And isn’t this disregard and disrespect for substance everywhere – Armando Iannucci made a point on his lovely podcast yesterday about politics: modern politicians care about the headline, not the copy. They understand that their audience doesn’t have the time, or the appetite, for detail. Everything is instant, disposable, replaced by the next thing before it can be interrogated.
There’s so much noise and so little signal that exaggeration is constantly required. Conan O’Brien opened the Oscars claiming a billion people were watching. The real number was closer to 35 million. That’s the difference between four pence and ten pounds. You will notice this exaggeration of numbers everywhere. A million is now an embarrassingly small amount of anything (viewers, money, whatever), not worthy of attention.
A billion, now that’s something!
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