DAVID BOWIE was a musical genius, loved by millions throughout the world for his amazing talent and originality.
His death from cancer in January 2016 at the age of 69 was one of many celebrity losses last year.
Fittingly, he left the world with words that should both warn and inspire us.
And that’s quite apart from his last album Lazarus released just two days before he passed away.
For Bowie had a rollercoaster relationship with the Internet.
During the 1990s he enthusiastically welcomed the worldwide web, thinking it was a great platform for intellectual and creative freedom.
In 1998 he launched BowieNet, an Internet service provider which offered access to the emerging online world.
He was genuinely excited about cyberspace becoming a world free of censorship and regulations.
Later he closed BowieNet down when the Internet became darker but was a regular contributor to bowie.com, his own official forum, and offered these deeply insightful words in his last ever online post.
‘Google’s motto is b s. They are destroying the most glorious gift humanity was granted in the last 300 years.
‘Google is Illuminati. Illuminati is Google. The future under Google is a fascist dystopia. Their way or the highway, no room for dissidents, no room for free speech. Google is a boot stamping on your face for eternity.
‘Google are deep state. Forget about conventional wars, forget about spies, forget about intelligence agencies, forget all of that. It’sall about the Internet and Google run the Internet. They decide what you feel, how you think, what information you can and can’t look at, and ultimately who does and doesn’t have a voice.