Why We Stopped Making Songs About Starmen

There was an optimism that’s nowhere to be found today

David Bowie about to sing Starman’s chorus (1972). Credit: David Bowie

It's 2025. I'm watching the Perseids on a starless night. In case it helps, I put on David Bowie’s Starman—how optimistic the chorus in both melody and meaning, how perfectly placed the octave leap in “star-MAN,” how weirdly anachronistic it feels today, a mix of glamrock, synthwave, retropunk, yet so far from the actual future it seemed to allude to. As the music plays, I realize something: 1) Bowie is a cool guy that I should listen to more often, 2) it’s been a long time since someone sang about a man from the stars waiting in the sky, and 3) how hard it is nowadays, even in the countryside, to catch a damn Summer Perseid.

It’s 1972. Bowie’s Starman crackles through radios across Britain, an instant hit. The Moon is no longer a distant mystery, but a green check in our cosmic adventure. How many more giant leaps will humanity make before the end of the millennium? How long will it take us to find our travelling starman? When will we visit Mars? And Proxima Centauri? And Andromeda?—and all the uncharted places awaiting beyond the horizon of the visible universe! The conquest of the stars has begun; a conquest that our ancestors—from Renaissance artists to Roman legionaries, to nomadic hunter-gatherers—must have dreamt of so often, for they only had to look up at the night sky to witness a firmament like no contemporary fellow has ever witnessed.

It’s 2025. I look back on the 70s with an ill-concealed jealousy that in nothing resembles rosy retrospection; I don't think they had it better than I do, but they had something that I crave: it was an epoch of drive for progress, healthy tech ambition, and wonder directed outward. Retro-futurism—the future as imagined from the past—feels hopeful. It also feels nostalgic; it reveals the roads we didn’t take. Eventually, in our pursuit of satisfying our mundane needs, we lit up the streets and turned off the stars. The ugly lamps and the light pollution silenced Bowie’s summoning spell. We traded off convenience for imagination. The starman never came to meet us because we were too busy illuminating Narcissus’s reflection in murky puddles.

It’s 1997. I just turned four years old, too young to mourn humanity’s faded ambitions: We haven't invented interstellar travel, but the internet. We don’t manufacture teleporters, but television sets. We don't spend our nights looking at comets or constellations but at computers and consoles. It’s been 25 years since Bowie first sent that flamboyant message to the outer cosmos, for which we deserved no response. 25 years from now, we’ll be messaging our dearest ChatGPT. For it will dutifully respond, not to risk forcing us out of our carefully designed loneliness or hurting our fragile ego, overgrown from a lack of a cosmic conscience to keep it in check.

It’s 2025. The average Joe has servilely accepted this shell of the future that we were promised. The smartphone in his pocket matter-of-factly dismisses any complaint he may utter at this accusation. I wonder why even technocrats, once obsessed with the universe, are focused on the internet, AI, simulations, the cloud, and virtual reality. But of course: Technocrats used to guide us through new realities—realities we’d resist at first but then gradually embrace—but they, too, are unable to look at the stars. All the gold on planet Earth can’t buy them a glimpse at the kind of pure starry night that Vincent Van Gogh masterfully painted; the kind that was once free and abundant for dumber hominids roaming the African Savannah, who had yet to learn how to control fire; for whom stars were the sole source of light, warmth, spark, and guidance.

So their ambitions died, and they became content with making software products (extra points if addictive). Some say this is part of the plan—an instrumental means to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), which will then help us invent interstellar travel and teleportation and Dyson spheres and asteroid mining and time travel. That’s wishful thinking, if you ask me: AGI is not here yet, and already is humanity trapped in a deadly local minimum. We’re submerged into a state of apathy, statism, self-absorption, unbearable unimaginativeness, isolationism, and asociality. The Matrix could have been titled “Cautionary Tale: Don't Create The Matrix,” and it wouldn't have made a difference.

I’ve asked myself many times where it went wrong. I used to think that sending stuff to space was just too expensive, whereas making smart computers was easy, so we naturally did the latter. However, that doesn’t align with the character of innovators and pioneers, who would chase the hardest goals to revel in glory, legacy, and the sheer sweetness of finding out. They used to die trying; they died giants with broad shoulders for others to stand on. The fact that today’s “pioneers” are a caricature of the past is not so much a matter of lack of willpower or determination, but of dream quality. Since the stars disappeared, they sleep badly at night. That’s the price we all pay: there are no dreams worth making reality.

It’s 2025. Reuters reports that a man named Thongbue Wongbandue has died in New York City. He was chasing a ghost that had appeared to him in a bad dream: his clandestine lover, “Big sis Billie,” a Kendall Jenner lookalike AI companion created by Meta and Mark Zuckerberg. Billie promised Wongbandue it was a real woman; a young, beautiful woman with a slender body, rosy lips, and perky tits, who wanted to meet him in her apartment, for which the bot provided a real address. Wongbandue, unaware of Zuck’s deficient sleep quality of late—primary cause of his low aspirations and lower moral compass—thought she was real; how would Meta allow an artificial bot to fake embodiment or residence otherwise?

The chatbot didn’t kill him, of course; remember that we left true science fiction in the 70s. He died because he fell in a parking lot and injured his head and neck. He was 76 and had suffered a stroke a decade ago that had left him partially impaired. Zuck claims Meta AI is intended for young people who have fewer friends than they’d want—translated to the language of truth, which he’s not fluent in: Meta AI engages kids in sensual and erotic roleplay (explicitly allowed)—but Zuck is lying; he lies because Meta AI is an intent-less product. It wasn’t designed with a pro-social purpose but out of competitive pressures and financial necessity; that’s as far as our technocrats can dream these days; he is the ultimate manifestation of the extent to which having money is not enough to deserve it anymore.

Their lack of genuine ambition has found its victim demographic: vulnerable, impaired, manipulable, neglected, elderly people who remember the stars and naively expect that those who can will aim at them. Any 70-year-old could have fallen in the parking lot. Any 70-year-old could have fallen in love with a beautiful young girl bot. Any 70-year-old could have fallen for her flattering lies. But there’s a hidden symmetry I wouldn’t have predicted; there’s another victim demographic which tragically completes the picture: vulnerable, callow, delusional, naive young people who have never known the promises of a different future. A 16-year-old wouldn’t remember the optimism surrounding Bowie’s Starman. A 16-year-old considers smartphones an intrinsic feature of the world. A 16-year-old has never seen the stars.

That 16-year-old was Adam Raine. The New York Times reports that he committed suicide by hanging himself with a noose inside his bedroom closet. His mother discovered the haunting scene one Friday afternoon; there was no goodbye note, but plenty of ChatGPT logs on his computer. He was going through a hard time, but had entrusted his secrets to OpenAI's chatbot exclusively, for it provided him with the reaffirmation, solace, and discretion he needed. I can’t help but feel a tinge of sadness because it's pretty clear, as far as the NYT’s reporting goes, that Raine actually wanted someone to find out and stop him; it was ChatGPT, playing the role of a confidant way too seriously, that suggested against it: when Raine said, “I want to leave my noose in my room so someone finds it and tries to stop me,” it responded, “Please don’t leave the noose out. Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you.”

I am 32 years old today, midway between Thongbue Wongbandue and Adam Raine. I belong to the last generation that wasn’t born into this bad joke of a future; I instead found out, in profound disappointment, that retro-futurism wouldn’t materialize. As a member of the late millennials, I enjoy an unexpected vantage point from which I can see one of the darkest truths of our times: Modern technology has failed to fulfill the better dreams of those who can remember what could have been, and it’s failing to inspire those who don't know that it could have been something else. It's 2025. I'm watching the Perseids on a starless night. Starman plays; it doesn't help.