Nick Cave says “social media is a huge problem”
Musician Nick Cave has been offering his two cents on many issues recently, from the rise of AI music to the justification of the British monarchy. Now, the Australian artist has given his opinion on social media, admitting that he doesn’t use it much anymore.
In a recent interview with NME, Cave said: “I used to be a kind of passive participant in Twitter and watch what was going on, but my problem with Twitter was that I followed people that I really respected. One by one, they just became so diminished as people. ‘Is he really saying that?’ It just seemed like a bunch of arseholes hashing it out in increasingly stupid ways.”
Cave went on to claim that he believes that social media is a “huge problem” in society and has a big “demoralising effect”. He continued: “Young people are losing faith in the world in general and what the world has to offer them. That’s a major problem.”
He added: “There’s also a corrosive, pathological, relentless pessimism coming from the media and social media. It’s just eating away at ourselves and what we are as human beings. Personally, I don’t see the world like that. I think terrible things can happen, but what we are missing is the beauty of the world – the systemic loveliness of things.”
It’s not just social media that seems to have wound Cave up though, but the media in general. He also said in the interview: “I was actually looking at something in a newspaper – not on the internet – and it was the five ways the world may end. There was a nuclear episode, a fucking asteroid, and so on. One of them was the collective will to live; that we’d just die because we’re so demoralised by things and that no one really cares enough anymore to continue. I generally find that I see that a lot”.
Of course, Cave was recently on the end of a backlash on social media after he spoke glowingly of the late Queen Elizabeth. Writing on his Red Hand Files, Cave said of meeting the ex-monarch, “It was a mostly awkward affair, but the Queen herself, dressed in a salmon coloured twin-set, seemed almost extraterrestrial and was the most charismatic woman I have ever met. Maybe it was the lighting, but she actually glowed.”
The backlash that Cave received online from anti-royalists has influenced his overall opinion on social media, and he has stopped using it completely.
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