The 1988 Show
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hallmark than anything the Academy Awards might have bestowed on
some movie released to theaters in 1988? And if anything, the last
quarter of a century has been marked by rapid technological change—so
much so that we might even (mistakenly) think that technological change
is the most important change in our culture.
In 1988 physicist Stephen Hawking published his book A Brief
History o f Time with a foreword by Carl Sagan. Also in 1988, physicist
Richard Feynman died. Both events—a start and an ending—had a major
impact on science and on the culture at large.
Nineteen-eighty-eight was also the year that the U.S. B2 stealth
bomber was unveiled. The program would go on to cost $45 billion, and
the B2, flown with only a crew of two men, cruised the skies throughout
the remaining days of the Cold War and eventually into Iraq and
Afghanistan. The B2s carry eighty 500-pound smart bombs or sixteen
2400-pound nuclear bombs—totaling about 450 Hiroshimas per plane.
According to The New Yorker in August 2011, the raid that killed Osama
bin Laden was originally proposed to be completed by a B2, but it was
argued that the external collateral damage would be too great and the
destruction so complete that it would be impossible to verify that the
right person had been killed, so special forces were sent in instead.
Technology and violence tend to go together, both changing together.
Again, we are coming up to the realization that ethics and politics are
always at the heart of metaphysical questions.
This was also the year of the CD. 1988 was the first year that
CDs outsold vinyl and became the most popular format for music
delivery. Perhaps it is this historic fact that should most interest us. CDs,
of course, continue today to far outsell vinyl albums; but apart from
hipsters who cling to vinyl (and soon might long for the days of the CD),
the MP3 file is quickly becoming the main musical media format. MP3s
and online soiuces are, in fact, media with very little physical heft to
them. CDs were digital but still had mass. As recently as 2008, Justin
Bieber was a popular musician—and I am going to go ahead and use the
term “music” to refer liberally to what he creates—^and he had nothing
other than a YouTube channel: there was nothing, physically, holding his
music; nothing, physically, you could even buy.
One of the interesting consequences of the digitalization of
music is that it has changed the idea of what it means to own a piece of
music. Making an investment in an album or CD, as I did back in 1988,
was making an investment in one’s identity. To have a milk-crate full of
Led Zeppelin albums or a bookshelf full of Talking Heads CDs was as