Did Devo predict doomscrolling?
The bleak automaton trance that seizes our collective lizard brains known as doomscrolling is an especially modern phenomenon. A perfect storm of zapped attention spans, irate addictions to negativity biases, and its opiate-stimming effect all have rendered the contemporary neural fryer, or smartphone, a perfect way to perpetually expose yourself to political failure and social collapse at your complete convenience. Whether at home or on the go, humanity’s ‘de-evolution’ can be gawped at with just the flick of a finger. Now that’s progress!
It sounds like perfect conceptual fodder for Ohio multimedia pranksters Devo, but our present-day nightmare is their old energy dome hat. Mankind’s backwards trajectory was predicted over 50 years ago by the boiler-suited arch subversives, naming their very synthpunk band’s name in an ode to their dismal assessment of where America was heading.
First posited as a piece of inspired jest between Kent University art students Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale, their dystopian theory took a darker and more serious turn following the state National Guard’s murder of four protesting classmates on May 1970, the victims shot barely a foot away from Casale.
“You stop being a passive person who believes the mythologies, the propaganda you’re being fed. You really have a dim view of illegitimate authority. Then you see how history gets written because people hated the students and thought more of them should have been killed,” Casale told Highsnobiety in 2023. “Those who got to write that history got the story upside down. They were gaslighting the victims. And you see that, and now you’re terminally pissed off. Devo was born from questioning the prevailing reality and being on the wrong end of it.”
Fuelled with an affinity for junk culture, hippy aversion, and Yusoslav pseudo-anthropologist Oscar Kiss Maerth’s The Beginning Was the End’s cannibal apes hypothesis, Devo formed properly in 1973 in the middle of the country’s Midwestern Rust Belt to a conservative crowd who didn’t take kindly to their bizarro funhouse mirror reflecting the misshapen landscape of industrial decline with their costumed goggles and hazmat suited theatre.
Finding fame in New York, hype suddenly exploded around Devo, being namechecked by David Bowie and Iggy Pop and visionary ideas conjurer Brian Eno producing their debut Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! in 1978.
So, did Devo really predict doomscrolling?
Masochistically, wedding yourself to a little tech window of ever-rolling calamity interspersed with a Spongebob meme perhaps goes further than even Devo ever intended.
With a pervading fog of futility hovering over Western civilisation’s disintegration and the noxious powerlessness collectively felt in the face of a political class rolling the red carpet for an oligarchal global capture, ‘de-evolution’ feels depressingly more pertinent as the world spins further out of control, and doomscrolling its most telling symptom.
However, Devo never preached despondency. Rather than becoming overwhelmed with complacent pessimism, put down the smartphone and turn your righteous anger into furious art or committed political organising.
“We looked around and we saw Madison Avenue as an example of how you change things in the United States,” Casale concluded. “They were getting people to eat shit food and drive crappy cars and be happy about it. So we thought, ‘Subversion, that’s how you change things’.”
