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When a global rock star ends their keynote with, “Oh dear, we’re all (bleep),” you know it has been a wild ride. And Sir Bob Geldof’s keynote was certainly that, touching on war, famine, humanitarian aid and the unbreakable link between music and technology throughout his life and career.
Addressing a packed audience of IT service providers (ITSPs), MSPs, solution providers, distributors and vendors during the closing keynote at ChannelCon EMEA in London, Geldof revealed he had been the second person to set up a dotcom business in the UK.
“My personal history with technology is that I’m completely useless with it, but I look for what it is possible to do. I ask why isn’t it doing this? Why can’t you do that? And with that in mind I set up Deckchair.com because I needed to take the children to Disney World in Florida and I couldn’t believe the price of planes,” he said.
“I thought there must be some way where you can look at prices simultaneously and ask for a list from the cheapest to the most expensive. I still had to buy the over-expensive plane tickets, and we never made our IPO, but the platform worked and it sold.”
Speaking of his birth in 1950 in an era of “huge, manic and urgent economic expansion” after the war, Geldof said the invention of the transistor radio was what transformed the world, beaming rock and roll to a hungry global audience.
“I was five years old when I first heard the revolution that was Elvis bleed out of my hand to a small and crucially portable transistor radio in County Cork one summer’s afternoon. The singer was singing about teddy bears, but this wasn’t some kiddie song,” he said. “This was an urgent, hiccoughing, longing, dipping high and low sound. The otherwise dispossessed, the otherwise ignored and marginalised had blasted into that sun-choked afternoon that day, and simultaneously, everywhere. The war had been won by these marginalized people.”
Geldof explained he had been involved with other “whiz bang technologies” and it is always the potential that piques his interest.
“It has never arrived at what I think the ultimate expression of technology must be. I sat on Tim Berners Lee’s board for a while, but even Tim couldn’t explain what it was that he had invented when he came up with a brilliant name of the World Wide Web,” he said. “Maybe we’re there now with this whiz bang thing we keep hearing about with AI. Maybe it will bust the world. This is what technology actually does. Its advance is always revolutionary, always dangerous.”
In 1985 when Live Aid happened, it was technology that made it possible, Geldof said.
“It was to newer, faster technologies of guitars and keyboards, recording techniques, mass television and new cameras that I spoke my own rage and anger, and that in turn provoked others through satellites—those humming dishes in the sky—where the world saw and heard itself not as nations, but as neighbours from Wembley and Philadelphia via Moscow, Tokyo, Lagos, Paris; a world quite literally united through music. One planet, one signal, one song.
“And it was technology at its best, not dividing, but amplifying our shared humanity,” he said.
Twenty years later at Live8, Geldof said technology had advanced enough to allow the world’s citizens to speak directly and simultaneously to their politicians.
“In 1985 we had used satellites to beam out a message. In 2005 the world used the web to beam one back,” he said.
But he also spoke about technology’s darker side.
“The age of rock and roll is over now. Social media is a transgressive medium that isolates rather than socialises. It is in effect, an echo chamber of one’s own tastes and prejudices. There is little exposure to a different, or other point of view or style or taste; no contrary idea to the ‘safe’ will enter your increasingly stale thought. You get stuck. It sticks you. I think we’re all stuck right now.”
Geldof also questioned whether those who design the technology actually think about its true impact.
“We are living through the end of that optimistic post-war cooperation, and reverting, as ever in transitional period to a politically primal individual nation state, politics and economics, protectionism, narrow focused national ambitions and demonization of the other. Identity is all once again, and is as stupid and ultimately meaningless as ever,” he said.
“None of this is good and has been, without any doubt, brought about by the towers of Babel that are the new technologies, and it always leads to war. It leads to radical advances in weaponry and science, and therefore technology. Some of it wondrous, some of it dubious and all of it scary thrilling and wonder-inducing.
“Everyone in this room is involved at the forefront—making money from it, predicting it, selling it, attempting to predict its course to gain competitive advantage. But who considers its value and worth to society? Who thinks about whether what they are doing is good or bad?” he said.
