wayYyyYyy back in 2000, just after @somafm launched, i listened to Groove Salad for the first time - their downbeat channel, which iirc was broadcasting via Shoutcast to my hot little winamp install
groove salad was my introduction to many of the downtempo bands i listen to today.
but back then, i was left breathless by this very obscure track by Solid Doctor - consisting of samples taken from an interview with an academic talking about the natures and risks of technology - "Faustian Bargain".
it was the peak of 2000s technofuturism and techno-utopianism. i was a young university student back then, and i had never heard critiques of technologism before.
those sampled interview snippets set me on a career path that led to systems theory, maturana & varela's re-imagining of cognition, and eventually to martin heidegger's question concerning technology... which prompted completing a doctorate in that field. it reshaped the entire way i thought about technology.
but i never figured out who the heck that person was in the samples. until today.
thanks to a youtuber's good eyes/ears, it turns out to be none other than Neil Postman speaking in a book interview about cyberspace in 1995.
(note: they're not the exact same samples but the words and topic are the same, so presumably Solid Doctor found another interview around the same time)
