Long before Mark Zuckerberg was staring at you creepily from a virtual Paris and in a time when Fortnite wasn’t even a formative thought, David Bowie was blazing a trail toward the future of the metaverse.
BowieNet and Bowie World were an ahead-of-their time set of projects that saw what the internet could be long before the current push of making avatars part of our lives and integrating online fan clubs into the world of celebrity.
While BowieNet, the internet service provider the musician helped launch has disappeared (as have most dial-up ISPs), Bowie World, the 3-D virtual world where fans would gather to explore, talk with each other and (often unknowingly) chat with Bowie, lives on, an online relic that has defied the march of time.
Both ventures were revolutionary when they launched and offered peeks at what the internet could do for the music industry. As BowieNet approaches its 25th anniversary, we spoke with some of the key people behind the online ventures to learn how they came to be—and how involved Bowie was in the projects.
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