Not completely unknown Bob Dylan has some Dylanesque thoughts on the sorcery of technology Making high-tech resolutions for 2025 with the help of Bob Dylan. Nate Anderson Jan 4, 2025 7:00 am | 1 Bob Dylan performing in Indiana in 2023. Credit: Getty Images Bob Dylan performing in Indiana in 2023. Credit: Getty Images Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreWith the holiday release of the biopic A Complete Unknown, Bob Dylan is once again in the national spotlight. For me, the film provided a welcome excuse to read up on Dylan, who has always been a reputable source of enjoyably gnomic quotes, self-mythologizing, and enigmatic asides. Even in his old age, Dylan still deliversespecially when he gets going on technology, joysticks, and "dog ass" television programs.Consider the interview Dylan gave to The Wall Street Journal in December 2022. (You can read the whole thing on BobDylan.com.) The piece was, notionally, about Dylan's book, The Philosophy of Modern Song. But it quickly morphed into a meditation on creativity in the era of on-demand streaming content, along with a discussion about how Dylan had spent his time during the COVID-19 lockdowns.Dylan claims that he spent the pandemic replacing door panels on a 56 Chevy, painting some landscapes, and re-reading Rime of the Ancient Mariner while pondering the mysteries of opium. Okay. He also had time left over to stream some TV:Ive binge-watched Coronation Street, Father Brown, and some early Twilight Zones. I know theyre old-fashioned shows, but they make me feel at home. Im not a fan of packaged programs, or news shows, so I dont watch them. I never watch anything foul smelling or evil. Nothing disgusting; nothing dog ass. Im a religious person. I read the scriptures a lot, meditate and pray, light candles in church. I believe in damnation and salvation, as well as predestination. The Five Books of Moses, Pauline Epistles, Invocation of the Saints, all of it.As with many of Dylans song lyrics, I cant say precisely what nothing dog ass means, nor how he got from streaming TV to predestination, but its certainly a vivid and moral response. Much of the interview, in fact, concerns modern technology and its effects on humansespecially when it comes to creativity.We might expect someone like Dylan, immersed as he has always been in folk songs, old standards, and American history, to bemoan the corrupting influence of new technology. And he does offer up some quotes in that vein. For example:Everythings become too smooth and painless The earth could vomit up its dead, and it could be raining blood, and wed shrug it off, cool as cucumbers. Everythings too easy. Just one stroke of the ring finger, middle finger, one little click, thats all it takes, and were there.Or again:Technology is like sorcery, its a magic show, conjures up spirits, its an extension of our body, like the wheel is an extension of our foot. But it might be the final nail driven into the coffin of civilization; we just dont know.But Dylan's perspective is more nuanced than these quotes might suggest. While technology might doom our civilization, Dylan reminds us that it gave us our civilizationthat is, "science and technology built the Parthenon, the Egyptian pyramids, the Roman coliseum, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, rockets, jets, planes, automobiles, atom bombs, weapons of mass destruction."In the end, technology is a tool that can either decimate or stimulate human creativity.Keypads and joysticks can be like millstones around your neck, or they can be supporting players; either one, youre the judge. Creativity is a mysterious thing. It visits who it wants to visit, when it wants to, and I think that that, and that alone, gets to the heart of the matter...[Technology] can hamper creativity, or it can lend a helping hand and be an assistant. Creative power can be dammed up or forestalled by everyday life, ordinary life, life in the squirrel cage. A data processing machine or a software program might help you break out of that, get you over the hump, but you have to get up early.Getting up earlyI've been thinking about these quotes over the recent Christmas and New Year's holidays, which I largely spent coughing on the couch with some kind of respiratory nonsense. One upside of this enforced isolation was that it gave me plenty of time to ponder my own goals for 2025 and how technology might help or hinder them. (Another was that I got to rewatch the first four Die Hard movies on Hulu; the fourth was "dog ass" enough that I couldn't bring myself to watch the final, roundly panned entry in the series.)Tech has undeniably made it possible to do my own creative workto write for Ars Technica, to create a high-fidelity recording studio in a spare room, and to work on a mystery-novel-in-progress. Generative AI has helped me to prototype new design ideas for watercolor paintings. Zoom has allowed me to take guitar lessons with a great guitar teacher who physically lives two hours away.But tech has also undeniably been the biggest single temptation to avoid those hard-but-rewarding jobs. You know the culprits: email, texts, Slack, hyperlinks, streaming video, the YouTube algorithm, the latest ridiculous story on Reddit, etc, etc.In Dylan's words, tech has been a "helping hand" and an "assistant," but I still have more to do when it comes to self-discipline; that is, I have "to get up early."Critics argue that it is unfair to place the entire burden of discipline onto individuals, who are up against well-funded systems, algorithms, and designers bent on capturing their time and attention. This is true, of course, but we can critique the world while also dealing with it as it is, and right now, the world is still awash in schemes to divert my attention. And there remains plenty that I can do to avoid or limit these schemes, even as I critique them.So, as I think about my own approach to creative work in 2025, I wanted to share this Dylan interview and to check in with the Ars community: Do you have any plans, systems, or even wildly improbable goals in place to productively govern your tech use this year?Nate AndersonDeputy EditorNate AndersonDeputy Editor Nate is the deputy editor at Ars Technica. His most recent book is In Emergency, Break Glass: What Nietzsche Can Teach Us About Joyful Living in a Tech-Saturated World, which is much funnier than it sounds. 1 Comments