David Bowie Knew the (Internet) Future in 1999

Recently, I came across an excerpt from this 1999 BBC Newsnight Interview featuring David Bowie chatting with Jeremy Paxman. I found the entire video and thoroughly enjoyed it, and I wanted to share a few thoughts:

• 1999 was 23 years ago. Yeah, 23 YEARS AGO!

• Bowie always had fantastic hair. I know it's required when you are a rock star, and he nailed it. He rocked the stilettos, too.

• There is some insightful talk about his career, creative process, sobriety, and, later, "Cool Britannia," which I had to look up.

• At 7:03, Bowie starts talking specifically about the Internet. Remember, this is the 1999 Internet; when the RIAA sued Napster, Microsoft was the tech giant, and dial-up was still the way most people connected.).

• At 7:19, Bowie says, "Forget about the Microsoft part; the monopolies don't have a monopoly." Now, social media companies (irony not lost on me that I likely saw this video initially on, I believe, Instagram) have a lot of the power, balanced by the likes of Apple and Google's app stores and their ability to de-platform an app.

• Bowie references how music and society will fragment even further than they had at this interview (he references Hip Hop and Girl Power as popular subgenres).

• At 10:46, he suggests that society hasn't yet seen the" tip of the iceberg" and says the "potential of what the internet is going to do to society is unimaginable."

Wow. So, yeah, David Bowie pretty had a good idea of what would happen to the Internet and how fragmented things could get.

I did not realize until I began researching that today is the sixth anniversary of Bowie's death. I think I'll reach out to a couple of friends who are much bigger Bowie fans than I am for some recommendations for a new playlist to celebrate his work.