David Bowie, in a 1999 interview,
said of the Internet, “I think we are on the cusp of something exhilarating and
terrifying,” before disagreeing with his interviewer who described the emerging
system of information gathering and distribution as ‘just a tool.’
“No. It’s an
alien life form,” said Bowie with a wheezy laugh.
When David Bowie died, two days after releasing his
final album, Lazarus, a reference to the legend of the man Jesus raised from
the dead, he scripted the last line in a life of poetry that he crafted from a
metamodern ethos still in its cocoon.
Bowie lived and died before his time, and in both his life and death, he
gave us a glimpse of the good that can come of our emergent
techno-society. That is if we are as
deliberate as he was in crafting poetics, in the classical sense, out of our on-line
lives.
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