‘Computer World’: What did Kraftwerk predict about the internet?
Do you ever stop to think about how mad it is that the sum of human knowledge sits in our pocket or bag, accessible whenever we feel like, in the amount of effort it takes to pick up a small rectangle of metal and glass?
Trust a band like Kraftwerk not only to make music that suits a world like that but also to identify the inherent terror of that prospect.
That analysis of the band goes far beyond “lol, they’re robots”, though. Sure, the band have played with robotic imagery and even gone so far as to call their brand of music “robot pop”, but there is nothing that Kraftwerk resemble less than cartoon novelties.
Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider’s band is a genuine pioneer on so many levels. In fact, their influence goes even beyond their effect on music technology, and considering they all but invented electronic music, that’s saying a whole lot.
They innovated the use of synthesisers, drum machines and vocoders in pop music, and while they should absolutely get credit for that, it does take focus away from the fact that they were also an incredible pop group with smart, literate songwriting that could play off their cold, emotionless exterior for emotional depth, laughs (seriously), and in one specific case, genuine tension.
After all, the one thing you could count on everyone in Kraftwerk to be is smart. Each member is the kind of person to know where the wind is blowing, and, in 1981, they released one of their many landmark albums. Only four short years after the first mass market personal computer went on sale in the form of the Apple II, the band released Computer World.
How did Kraftwerk predict the future?
With the album, Kraftwerk sought to reckon with a world powered by the emotionless, robotic world of computers. The album was titled after they crafted a song of the same name.
One that, in the band’s typically sparse lyrics, was reckoning with how computer-powered corporations were taking over the world—a world that has absolutely no comparison with our world today, what are you talking about?!
In an interview with NME around the record’s release, Ralf Hütter said, “Our whole society is computerised, and each one of us is stored into some point of information by some company or organisation, all stored by numbers”.
Adding: “When you get into Germany at a border, they place your passport into a machine connected to the Bundeskriminalamt in Wiesbaden so they can check whether you can enter or leave, for various reasons other than whether your passport is correct.”
He goes on to highlight how it’s even deeper than that, that the goal is a 1984-esque regime of computer-assisted corporate entities grinding down our self-sufficiency until we’re nothing more than perfectly organised cogs in the machine. One wonders whether the last 20 years of human history have been much of a surprise to the men behind Kraftwerk.
After all, they predicted it over four decades ago in a single song.
