Popular media has the potential to distort all of our perceptions. This strangely modern phenomenon has been compounded with the advent of social media, which has exacerbated a herd-like mentality, and diminished individuality and imagination. Daily existence has become cold, loveless and inhuman, and the future ahead of us looks bleak, especially with the growing threat of artificial intelligence.
The nineties were a golden age in comparison, but reminiscing about this decade seems like a distant dream. It was a sweet memory of a dream that soon turned sour, but very few figures in culture had the foresight, or indeed the courage to predict the nightmare that unfolded. In fact, the opposite seemed to be the case. There was a rather misplaced optimism that, as the new Millennium approached, society itself was entering a new era when all of the hardships could be eased by technological advances. The flaws of this philosophy were rarely questioned, but a few courageous and perceptive people in the artistic world did.
The characteristically doom laden English band Radiohead recorded their third studio album “Ok Computer” between 1996 and 1997 at St. Catherine’s Court studios in Bath. The album depicts a dystopia, dominated by a globalist technocracy. It seems a bitter irony that the Labour party were triumphantly, and cynically using D-Ream’s single “Things Can Only Get Better” as a campaign anthem. Remembering this episode of crass opportunism is jarring.
The positivity was badly misplaced because the new century was not a time of great promise. Radiohead’s prophecy proved to be correct. They envisaged the twenty-first century as a hellscape of alienation and atomisation. Even the title was a prediction that disembodied facsimiles of human voices would be recreated to replace real ones.
It seems more prescient today than when it was originally released. The new technological dawn was not a herald of greater things, it was a stark warning to humanity. Technology has not unshackled us, it has enslaved us. Our future as a once supremely intelligent and innovative species could be on the brink of destruction if we allow these machines to do our thinking for us.
Modernity does not necessarily equate improvement or amelioration. Tradition does not mean backward thinking either, it is actually the bedrock of our civilisation. There is an element of pathos in this whole story. It is poignant and rather apposite that a very modern group of musicians with highly sophisticated instruments, equipment and recording techniques decided to produce their album in the grounds of an old monastery, long dissolved in a post-religious age. In this haunting context, the music has a greater profundity which continues to resonate.
Ponderings 