Did David Bowie Say This in 1999 About the Internet? - Snopes.com

David Bowie: Cultural icon, euphony legend, and — clairvoyant? 

Bowie gave a celebrated interview connected BBC Newsnight successful 1999, and made immoderate remarks astir the internet, which was astatine that clip a burgeoning technology. His remarks seemed to foretell immoderate of the societal fragmentation and chaos catalyzed by the net successful the 2010s and aboriginal 2020s:

At the time, Bowie told BBC interviewer Jeremy Paxman that the net seemed subversive to him, due to the fact that society's wielders of powerfulness and power didn't yet person a monopoly implicit it.

I don't deliberation we've adjacent seen the extremity of the iceberg. I deliberation the imaginable of what the Internet is going to bash to society, some bully and bad, is unimaginable. I deliberation we're really connected the cusp of thing exhilarating and terrifying.

[...]

I'm talking astir the existent discourse and the authorities of contented is going to beryllium truthful antithetic to thing that we tin truly envisage astatine the infinitesimal wherever the interplay betwixt the idiosyncratic and the supplier volition beryllium truthful successful simpatico that it is going to crush our ideas of what mediums are each about.

The supra punctuation from Bowie is real, but successful January 2022, a parody of this interrogation went viral successful which comedian Michael Spicer embellished Bowie's 1999 comments with a hindsight-is-20/20 spiel astir the authorities of exertion and its deleterious effects connected nine and people's idiosyncratic clip management:

"In the future, we'll beryllium wasting hours and hours of our lives conscionable watching videos of cats and dogs being adorable," Spicer said, earlier helium launched into a critique of however far-right governmental figures exploited immigration to drum up anti-immigrant sentiment arsenic a vector to presume power.

Sources:

Evon, Dan. "Did David Bowie Predict Social Media successful 'Newsnight' 1999 Clip?" Snopes, 10 Jan. 2022, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/david-bowie-newsnight-1999/.

"Mainstreaming Hate: The Anti-Immigrant Movement successful the U.S." Anti-Defamation League, 28 Nov. 2018, https://www.adl.org/the-anti-immigrant-movement-in-the-us. Accessed 17 Nov. 2022.

Bethania Palma is simply a writer from the Los Angeles country who has been moving successful the quality manufacture since 2006.