You know who also nailed it, far before anyone else? Rudolf Steiner
He similarly, intuitively understood and communicated knowledge of an alien lifeform, a malignant spiritual consciousness that would one day come to consume humanity, uprooting us from our anchoring in the spiritual and pulling us into an artificial reality in which everything was a degraded, inferior copy of itself. He called this malevolent consciousness Ahriman, and the Internet is a near perfect embodiment of the reality Steiner so prophetically described.
For those interested, look into it. It will enrich your understanding of reality 👍
Try disconnecting more and more from internet, your phone&computer&media apps, gradually, gently.. be very careful because it can kill you... and feel what happens to you each time you pull away a bit more... Me, I am shocked by the empty shell I've become.. busy feeding on others'thoughts, addicted to some topics like to fast food.. But also amazed with how immediately Life, Love, Contemplation and the longing for Wisdom flow back in... Discernment, connection, introspection, verbalisation of diffuse feelings, integration takes ages but is -to me- the only thing which brings spiritual evolution .. Internet coupled to AI is a beast which sucks all of this out of us.
I read something a couple of years ago (can't remember who) talking about how all technology is really just an extension of the body. The wheel is an extension of our feet, the telescope is an extension of our eyes, etc. The Internet, he said, is an extension of our brains, allowing it to reach out to all the other brains. Sounds great, until you realize there are a lot of bad brains out there...
Important to note that Bowie had a poetic mind, meaning that the meaning of words for him was always manifold & multifaceted, never a one-to-one affair, thus placing a great deal of agency with the listener/audience. The use of the term Alien, then, has its obvious lay attribution, connoting outer-space origins, but that is not the operative idea here, not the essence of what he is saying, hence his wry smile in the utterance.
Alien is a legal and technological term as well, meaning "without lien," or "without claim or understanding." An alien technology is any technology 'classified' under military or trade-secret auspices. Or any technology the effects about which we remain ignorant, in the manner that McLuhan discussed, through a failure to study the sensorial formality of particular media. Bowie was well familiar with McLuhan, and the confused interviewer clearly unfamiliar.
On the legal side, when Jefferson warned against rescinding the Alienage Act(?), he was concerned that the European banking dynasties could simply re-conquer the USA by quietly purchasing one property at a time as legalized foreign investors hidden in shell contracts. That is, by granting Lien to Aliens the free nation could be bought at discount prices by hidden buyers in cycles of boom & bust. A sort of Alien Invasion. The SuperPACs of Citizens United may be the apotheosis that confirms Jeffersons prophetic warning in the age of cyberspace & invisibly engineered political outcomes.
These two meanings, legal and technological, of course, are easily obscured by propagandists when they instrumentalize this word, alien, which overwhelmingly invokes images of little green men in flying saucers, lending to their mind-corralling efforts a great deal of advantage over clear thinking among their target audiences, whose undisciplined and reactive minds can't resist the fanciful cartoonish reduction. (Goading trigger hysterics over economic competition from illegal cheap foreign labor in discussing 'illegal aliens' adds race-baiting fear to possible interpretations, distracting from salient understanding, extending the propogandists' powers further.) And the ambiguity allows astute prognosticators like Bowie a cloak to disguise their deep criticism of form (or society's foolish ignorance of form) as hokey or playful superstition, a matter of his artifice from Space Oddity onwards in his case, to avoid persecution from would-be thought-police culture patrols & pundits gracefully, and to avoid alienating his/their audiences with lofty jargon or pointed attack, so easily dismissed.
In the realm of metaphor - such being the language of poetic minds (and the true meaning of language) - the full meaning of any statement is contained in all of its possible interpretations. A strong or good or robust or true poetic statement is one for which the theme remains roughly the same (true as a mason's plumb-bob) in all possible lights and from all angles.
Bowie here is talking about the conquest of humanity through the internet's fragmenting effect, alienating every individual from every other in disparate, granular, tailored images of the world. What was not yet clear was the internet's second act, or the establishment response to the power of fragmentation, which we are coming to find, is a coagulating hive-ification, aspiring to a psychic monoculture. Both of these arrive not from without (as one might impulsively construe from 'alien'), but entirely from within our own occluded human milieu. The alien within, whether Jung's shadow or Allen Dulles' army of spooks animated by invisible foreign and elite interest, is the very earthly driver of this madness. As such Mars is an analogue for our interior war-making, insecure conquering impulse within psyche and between societies.
What we are finding today is that one's failure of imagination (and this recognition of the inherent shadow) can be a microcosm of the whole of humanity's undoing, as evidenced by Fauci's army of zombie conformists, unwilling to onboard intelligence for themselves & hellbent to take refuge in the hive at all costs. The nation divided is alien to itself.
I knew David Bowie from being among the crowd at the Marquee Club in 1966/8, when it was a shabby small space in Wardour Street. He was an egotistic poser who fancied himself better, artier and more talented than anyone else. He was horribly phoney and stayed that way all his life. I don't believe a word he ever said and especially not the 'death'.
As for 'alien life form', didn't you see him sneering and laughing when he said that?
He says what he thinks will shock you but he has no originality. Sorry but why you would think this clip is remarkable is quite beyond me.
Genius… the Metaverse will take over in probably 5 years. Bowie was no dummy, plus he was very well informed and understood the power of media since he was expert at self-promotion through the media himself! Fascinating clip.
Thanks Celia, he was always a man before his time.I wonder what he would have thought of all this? I’m hoping he would have seen through the bullshit being a Diamond Dog and all
Although it is possible to use the internet as a tool and divorce ourselves from the rank manipulation engendered there it won’t be possible in the long run. Bowie and others were correct and it has already destroyed or compromised many. It is the real epidemic. Important to learn how to communicate one the internet and possibly current telephones, mail, even telegraphs no longer possible. Short wave radio? Pony Express? SMOKE SIGNALS?
I think he was a lightweight. Doom has been predicted caused b y every new tool that comes along. Sure, quite a few use the tool wrong and hurt themselves, but that is no argument against new tools.
You know who also nailed it, far before anyone else? Rudolf Steiner
He similarly, intuitively understood and communicated knowledge of an alien lifeform, a malignant spiritual consciousness that would one day come to consume humanity, uprooting us from our anchoring in the spiritual and pulling us into an artificial reality in which everything was a degraded, inferior copy of itself. He called this malevolent consciousness Ahriman, and the Internet is a near perfect embodiment of the reality Steiner so prophetically described.
For those interested, look into it. It will enrich your understanding of reality 👍
Try disconnecting more and more from internet, your phone&computer&media apps, gradually, gently.. be very careful because it can kill you... and feel what happens to you each time you pull away a bit more... Me, I am shocked by the empty shell I've become.. busy feeding on others'thoughts, addicted to some topics like to fast food.. But also amazed with how immediately Life, Love, Contemplation and the longing for Wisdom flow back in... Discernment, connection, introspection, verbalisation of diffuse feelings, integration takes ages but is -to me- the only thing which brings spiritual evolution .. Internet coupled to AI is a beast which sucks all of this out of us.
"Exhilarating and terrifying"—NAILED IT!!!
Nice find, Celia. Boy, was he right.
I read something a couple of years ago (can't remember who) talking about how all technology is really just an extension of the body. The wheel is an extension of our feet, the telescope is an extension of our eyes, etc. The Internet, he said, is an extension of our brains, allowing it to reach out to all the other brains. Sounds great, until you realize there are a lot of bad brains out there...
Important to note that Bowie had a poetic mind, meaning that the meaning of words for him was always manifold & multifaceted, never a one-to-one affair, thus placing a great deal of agency with the listener/audience. The use of the term Alien, then, has its obvious lay attribution, connoting outer-space origins, but that is not the operative idea here, not the essence of what he is saying, hence his wry smile in the utterance.
Alien is a legal and technological term as well, meaning "without lien," or "without claim or understanding." An alien technology is any technology 'classified' under military or trade-secret auspices. Or any technology the effects about which we remain ignorant, in the manner that McLuhan discussed, through a failure to study the sensorial formality of particular media. Bowie was well familiar with McLuhan, and the confused interviewer clearly unfamiliar.
On the legal side, when Jefferson warned against rescinding the Alienage Act(?), he was concerned that the European banking dynasties could simply re-conquer the USA by quietly purchasing one property at a time as legalized foreign investors hidden in shell contracts. That is, by granting Lien to Aliens the free nation could be bought at discount prices by hidden buyers in cycles of boom & bust. A sort of Alien Invasion. The SuperPACs of Citizens United may be the apotheosis that confirms Jeffersons prophetic warning in the age of cyberspace & invisibly engineered political outcomes.
These two meanings, legal and technological, of course, are easily obscured by propagandists when they instrumentalize this word, alien, which overwhelmingly invokes images of little green men in flying saucers, lending to their mind-corralling efforts a great deal of advantage over clear thinking among their target audiences, whose undisciplined and reactive minds can't resist the fanciful cartoonish reduction. (Goading trigger hysterics over economic competition from illegal cheap foreign labor in discussing 'illegal aliens' adds race-baiting fear to possible interpretations, distracting from salient understanding, extending the propogandists' powers further.) And the ambiguity allows astute prognosticators like Bowie a cloak to disguise their deep criticism of form (or society's foolish ignorance of form) as hokey or playful superstition, a matter of his artifice from Space Oddity onwards in his case, to avoid persecution from would-be thought-police culture patrols & pundits gracefully, and to avoid alienating his/their audiences with lofty jargon or pointed attack, so easily dismissed.
In the realm of metaphor - such being the language of poetic minds (and the true meaning of language) - the full meaning of any statement is contained in all of its possible interpretations. A strong or good or robust or true poetic statement is one for which the theme remains roughly the same (true as a mason's plumb-bob) in all possible lights and from all angles.
Bowie here is talking about the conquest of humanity through the internet's fragmenting effect, alienating every individual from every other in disparate, granular, tailored images of the world. What was not yet clear was the internet's second act, or the establishment response to the power of fragmentation, which we are coming to find, is a coagulating hive-ification, aspiring to a psychic monoculture. Both of these arrive not from without (as one might impulsively construe from 'alien'), but entirely from within our own occluded human milieu. The alien within, whether Jung's shadow or Allen Dulles' army of spooks animated by invisible foreign and elite interest, is the very earthly driver of this madness. As such Mars is an analogue for our interior war-making, insecure conquering impulse within psyche and between societies.
What we are finding today is that one's failure of imagination (and this recognition of the inherent shadow) can be a microcosm of the whole of humanity's undoing, as evidenced by Fauci's army of zombie conformists, unwilling to onboard intelligence for themselves & hellbent to take refuge in the hive at all costs. The nation divided is alien to itself.
I knew David Bowie from being among the crowd at the Marquee Club in 1966/8, when it was a shabby small space in Wardour Street. He was an egotistic poser who fancied himself better, artier and more talented than anyone else. He was horribly phoney and stayed that way all his life. I don't believe a word he ever said and especially not the 'death'.
As for 'alien life form', didn't you see him sneering and laughing when he said that?
He says what he thinks will shock you but he has no originality. Sorry but why you would think this clip is remarkable is quite beyond me.
Genius… the Metaverse will take over in probably 5 years. Bowie was no dummy, plus he was very well informed and understood the power of media since he was expert at self-promotion through the media himself! Fascinating clip.
Thanks Celia, he was always a man before his time.I wonder what he would have thought of all this? I’m hoping he would have seen through the bullshit being a Diamond Dog and all
David Bowie said that the internet was from Mars, finally a dead rockstar worth listening to!
Sorry but I think his remarks in that intvw are as fragmented as his forecast for the future of society..
Thanks for sharing that was 2 minutes worth listening to. Will be linking today @https://nothingnewunderthesun2016.com/
Although it is possible to use the internet as a tool and divorce ourselves from the rank manipulation engendered there it won’t be possible in the long run. Bowie and others were correct and it has already destroyed or compromised many. It is the real epidemic. Important to learn how to communicate one the internet and possibly current telephones, mail, even telegraphs no longer possible. Short wave radio? Pony Express? SMOKE SIGNALS?
"The Web" well that said it all.
Only addiction to what is not real ( is an illusion) fragments our mind.
We are all aliens in a world of fear.
Fear is not real, Love is.
Separation from source is not real, our oneness is.
I think he was a lightweight. Doom has been predicted caused b y every new tool that comes along. Sure, quite a few use the tool wrong and hurt themselves, but that is no argument against new tools.
As long as it makes this guy nervous, it can't be all bad. https://youtu.be/necfW5Dj5UQ
He died too young and too soon. Maybe he was lucky not to have to witness the fruition of living under near complete digital conditions.