David Bowie, an Internet pioneer | Hacker News Reader

David Bowie, an Internet pioneer

bbc.co.uk

140 pointsmcdowall33 comments

Bowie: I don't think we've even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the Internet is going to do to society—both good and bad—is unimaginable. I think we're on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.
Interviewer: It's just a tool, though, isn't it?

Bowie: No, it's not... no, it's an alien life form [laughs]. It's just arrived from Mars.

1998?

2000, in fact.

I very much doubt that he thought the Internet was invented by Gore in 1997. Expand your time scale to the level of the point he's making, and yes it did just arrive.

I was not faulting him for possibly not knowing the full history of the internet.

Pre-1997, the internet and the web were both very confidential. It started to become a thing in the public mind around that time, and seeing it, in 2000 (apparently the proper date of the interview) as an alien life form is very insightful.

I don't disagree that characterizing it as an "alien" would not have been out of place at the time.

However, it was not "confidential" in 1996. That is simply a ridiculous statement.

s/confidential/not broadly known/ ?

I'm a tech head (learned programming in elementary school in the 80's) that grew up in a non technical family, and I discovered the internet, as most people, around 1996, when the TV news started talking about "the information highways".

It's only ridiculous if you willfully overlooking the context of the interview... which is not history of arpanet 101.

From the perspective of the Time magazine reading consumer middle class, yes, the internet just arrived fully formed, with only Compuserve and its ilk as hobbyist forerunners with hardly more uptake than CB or ham radio.

I don't think that timescale is correct, at least for my youth (in The Netherlands). 1997 was about the year that we started to get always-on Internet access at home (with cable and adsl). Dial-up was already well-established by then.

Me and my classmates were well-aware of the Internet before that. I remember browsing for FastTracker 2 samples my second year in highschool (1995 that must've been).

TIL I had access to confidential records when browsing the internet on windows 3.11

'Just' is not in reference to a time frame. This statement is more in the feel of 'it just came from nowhere'.

The interview is gold. (I shared it earlier but it didn't garner enough attention https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10883028)

He perfectly summarized the relationship between the art and the internet: "That gray space in the middle (between the artist and the audience) is what the 21st century is about"

Also it is fascinating how certain he was that new mediums will emerge and how different they will be from what we knew back then. When we were pioneering current style of social media with Jaiku back in 2006, many smart people failed to understood how powerful social broadcast media could be. But Bowie was already in 2000 understanding the power of it.

Did he bank on it in any way? I've never noticed Bowie doing anything particular social media, youtube exclusive, pay what you want or other similar new media age kind of things.

As far as I know, he did news paper and TV intervews, released albums, played live shows and acted in movies. Doesn't seem very "social broadcast media" to me.

I read yesterday he started his own ISP (BowieNet I think).

Hats what this article is about...

Bank on it... in a way, yes. He sold the rights to his albums. People gave him ready money in exchange for the future income from his albums.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebrity_bond

Given his interest in technology it's a bit surprising to me that he didn't get involved much in social media or YouTube.

As for banking on it, he hasn't had to worry about money for a very long time - he's been one of the richest artists/musicians in the world for at least the last two decades.

It's scary to think about how ephemeral some of these early internet experiments are. Wayback Machine is great for static sites, but I'm amazed that enough of this interactive media/software was captured to even report on. I hope that the Bowie camp has some smart archivists who will preserve this unique material.

Right? It's interesting to see data "rust", if you will, over time just like a physical thing. How looking at stuff in the Wayback Machine, some decorative images might not load, some link might lead nowhere and in a way, it's no different from a book's pages falling apart.

There's so much data today, everything is stored and categorized, but I still believe that, say, 20 years from now, a lot will be lost nevertheless. No matter how easy it is to store stuff today.

Really, not only the data needs to be stored, but virtual machines needed to see the content need to be stored as well.

I worked on BowieNet in around 2000. He was really very involved in the site and content. The biggest draw was the members-only concert.

Regarding the content. There was another company that did the design work, a bunch of it in flash; but also in HTML for the message boards and stuff that we integrated into our PHP forum that had all the actual messages stored in MySQL. I'm not sure what would have happened to any of that when VillageWorld (the company that did the backend at least initially) went bust in 2004; or if it was migrated away or shut down before that.

The live chats were either IRC with a Java web client or we also had an NPH script that we could of used, but I don't remember which ended up being "real" at this point. There were definitely some that were organized and others that were not.

Live chats with Bowie?

Care to give more details, stories, etc? BowieNet sounds fascinating to me.

Omikron (1999) was a great game. It was one of the first open world games with real 3D graphics. You could ride a taxi around the city, enter buildings, etc. Of course GTA3 (2001) took it to the next level, but in 1999 GTA still was 2D: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_2 .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omikron:_The_Nomad_Soul

$10 DRM Free on GOG: http://www.gog.com/game/omikron_the_nomad_soul

$10 on Steam as well: http://store.steampowered.com/app/243000/

One of my favorite games, however I recommend playing it on Dreamcast if that's an option, as the PC controls are a little painful to work with.

A non-Flash version of the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiK7s_0tGsg

The interviewer's perspective was no less prophetic about the current reality. The internet is mostly a tool to spread the same old media type of content, just more and faster. A lot more America's Favorite Home videos and niche channels than were possible before. A lot more spam, gossip and passing notes, which is not very alien.

Engelbart also thought we would get somewhere alien. He underestimated the power of the mainstream.

For anyone trying to find the website on the WaybackMachine:

The BowieNet domain was davidbowie.com, not bowie.net (as noted under the screenshot in the article).

Some very ignorant remarks and assumptions of people who did not watch the full live BBC video interview relating to him, music & the internet and are taking snippets - of course the internet was estsblished before 1998!!! Some folks do not have a command of the english language and think they are computer boffins. He was not talking "Microsoft" for example - relative to music , him and people (audience) ... Very smart man - also get the interviewer's question to comprehend his response ... People who were born in the middle 70s & after, unless savy and forward thinking do not get: "David Bowie, an internet pioneer" YES, most definitely I concur; he was & is ... You're programmed already & not an individual (thinking tech facts blah) nor creative as he was & he was the 1st "Personality" to offer himself as an ISP - #Fact RIP Mr. JONES

I don't remember BowieNet at all, and I was definitely cheerfully using dialup in the UK, with Demon Internet, in the late nineties ('97 onwards I'd say). Was it really a big deal? I can't find out much information about it other than a bunch of news sites this week all regurgitating variants of the same material.

At 98 those predictions were already old hat.

"For a monthly fee, members got an @davidbowie.com-ending email address"

Isn't it the same thing Trump gets ridiculed for? ;)

No, it isn't the same thing, and you took it out of context to make it seem it is:

"BowieNet also operated as a full internet service provider (ISP) in the US and UK, competing with AOL, Claranet and others. For a monthly fee, members got an @davidbowie.com-ending email address and exclusive access to audio recordings, music videos and chat rooms, which the singer participated in himself."

I found these, which give a better idea what the service actually promised:

BowieNet VPN Account: For $19.95/month subscribers can obtain full Internet Service Access via a Virtual Private Network (VPN) arrangement with Concentric Networks. Instead of dialing into AOL or your local ISP, you dial a Concentric Networks number and gain full Internet access (web browsing, email, chat, news, FTP) on the back of Concentric's worldwide network. $19.95/month accounts also get an exclusive BowieNet CD-ROM which includes all the software necessary to get you on the Internet together with two video tracks and a newly recorded audio track called Fun.

Premium Content: For $5.95/month subscribers who want to retain their current Internet provider can sign up to obtain a username and password to access the premium content of BowieNet. That includes everything on the web as in the BowieNet VPN account, but doesn't include the CD-ROM with the exclusive tracks.

From a contemporary review: http://www.teenagewildlife.com/Othermedia/BowieNet/review.ht...

How does this change anything? I just meant the manner of using one's name for businesses, services etc.

Also note the mysterious ";)" at the end of my comment. It indicates I wasn't being serious

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