Re-reading a 1997 prediction of our technological future from the king of midnight radio.
This article is dedicated to my father, Henry Erlenwein, whom over 40 years ago introduced me to Art Bell, and as a kid instilled a sense of wonderment and curiosity in me of all things high strangeness.
In 1997, my Internet made a noise before it worked. If you are of a certain age, you remember the sound. The instantly once recognizable dial-up symphony of screeches, beeps, electronic gargling and what sounded suspiciously like R2-D2 being slowly lowered into a wood chipper. Then, assuming nobody in the house picked up the telephone and destroyed the entire operation, you were officially ONLINE. We thought we were living in the future. Meanwhile, somewhere in the high desert of Pahrump, Nevada, Art Bell was sitting behind a microphone telling millions of people that we hadn’t seen anything yet.
I recently went back and reread the Technology chapter of Art Bell’s 1997 book, The Quickening: Today’s Trends, Tomorrow’s World, a book largely written in 1996 with the ambitious goal of examining how human relationships, business, technology, health, international tensions, religion and society itself might change as we crossed into the new millennium. What surprised me most during this rereading was how often I stopped and thought, “Wait a minute; Art was pretty darn close.” And I don’t mean close in the Nostradamus sense. I mean close enough that portions of the Technology chapter feel considerably more comfortable sitting on a desk in 2026 than they probably did on a bookshelf in 1997.
What Bell seemed to understand better than most was that the real story of technology was never going to be a particular computer, gadget or invention. It was going to be acceleration, or a hyper change, as I like to refer to this phenomenon. The Quickening was built around the idea that enormous changes were beginning to occur simultaneously across technology, economics, politics, culture, science, religion, health and international affairs, and that while these developments might appear unrelated, together they were creating something larger. Society itself was beginning to move faster. In his discussion of technology, Bell was already focused on the Internet, fiber optics, virtual reality, increasingly intelligent computers and the growing importance of technological infrastructure. Reading those subjects today does not feel like opening an ancientl time capsule, but feels more like accidentally finding somebody’s notes from a strategic planning meeting scheduled for next week.
Bell understood, for example, that access to computers and networks would increasingly become connected to economic opportunity. In a 1996 broadcast while he was developing many of these ideas, he argued that the new roads to prosperity would not simply be highways and physical infrastructure, but fiber optics and the Internet. He encouraged parents to make sure their children had access to computers because he could already see where economic and educational opportunity was heading. Think about that from our perspective today in terms of broadband access, digital literacy, remote work, online learning, cybersecurity, software development, cloud computing, and let’s not leave out the current big three in artificial intelligence, global digital commerce and the creator economy. Art Bell was essentially talking about the emerging digital divide while most of America was still trying to figure out why AOL kept mailing us another compact disc on the daily.
Then there was fiber optics. Bell recognized something much bigger here. He understood that the physical infrastructure carrying information was going to become enormously important to the next economy. Today, almost everything we experience as magical, wireless and floating somewhere in “the cloud” ultimately depends on an astonishing amount of very physical infrastructure beneath streets, inside buildings, across continents and along the ocean floor. The cloud, as it turns out, is mostly cables. Lots and lots of cables. Bell understood that the ability to move information rapidly was going to become every bit as important as the ability to move people and products.
His fascination with virtual reality is equally interesting to revisit. In the mid-1990s, virtual reality generally meant wearing enormous goggles attached to a computer powerful enough to render approximately seven polygons and then proudly announcing, “LOOK! I AM INSIDE A ROOM!” Today we casually discuss virtual reality, augmented reality, spatial computing, digital twins, immersive simulations and increasingly sophisticated digital environments. Bell did not predict the Apple Vision Pro (I just sold mine on eBay funnily – a whole other story), Meta Quest or whatever headset will be released three weeks after this article is published. What Bell recognized was something more important, that once technology became capable of convincingly mediating reality, our relationship with reality itself would begin to change.
That feels particularly relevant today because enormous portions of our lives are already experienced through constructed digital realities. Instagram presents one version of reality. TikTok another. Video games create immersive realities. Social media feeds algorithmically construct different versions of the world for different people. Zoom and Teams transformed what it meant to be “present” in a room. And now generative artificial intelligence has added an entirely new layer in which words, photographs, voices, music and video can increasingly be synthesized rather than merely recorded. Suddenly, Art Bell talking about virtual reality in the 1990s doesn’t sound nearly as exotic as it does commonplace to modern living.
And then there are what Bell called “smart computers,” which today sounds wonderfully quaint, almost like calling an iPhone an “advanced telephonic communication device.” Yet sitting here in 2026, watching generative artificial intelligence write, code, translate, analyze, compose music, generate images, recreate voices and increasingly participate in knowledge work, I am struck by how clearly Bell sensed the direction of travel. He didn’t have our vocabulary. He wasn’t talking about large language models, neural networks, multimodal systems, agents or generative AI. He had the trajectory, and in forecasting the future, sometimes trajectory matters far more than terminology.
Of course, not every prediction or technological emphasis in The Quickening landed perfectly. Cloning did not become the defining social force that many futurists of the 1990s imagined it might, although biotechnology, genetics and gene editing have advanced dramatically. Some of the geopolitical framing naturally carries the fingerprints of the era in which the book was written. But judging a futurist by whether every specific prediction becomes reality misses the larger point. The real question is whether someone understood the forces that would shape the future, and Bell understood something extraordinarily important, that technology would no longer simply change individual industries. Technological change would begin changing everything that touched everything else.
That is exactly the world we now inhabit. Technology changes something that changes something else, which disrupts three industries, creates two professions, eliminates another, launches twelve startups, sends policymakers scrambling, causes educators to schedule a committee meeting and somehow ends with your refrigerator asking whether you would like to install a firmware update. That is The Quickening. The phenomenon Bell was trying to describe was not simply technological progress. It was technological progress accelerating social, cultural and institutional change faster than human systems were accustomed to absorbing it.
Perhaps the most accurate technological prediction in the book, therefore, which hit the hardest and closest to home to me as a school leader who speaks on this topic frequently, wasn’t really technological at all, as it was psychological. We now have instantaneous communication and somehow feel perpetually behind. We have nearly unlimited access to information and somehow feel perpetually uninformed. We have tools designed to save enormous amounts of time and somehow have less of it. We possess more ways to communicate than any civilization in human history while simultaneously worrying that people are losing the ability to actually talk to one another. We have infinite content and a human attention span that is essentially being auctioned one swipe at a time. We wanted information at the speed of light. Congratulations, it arrived, however our nervous systems, unfortunately, are still buffering.
This is where rereading Bell in the age of artificial intelligence becomes particularly fascinating to me because AI may represent the purest expression yet of The Quickening. For much of technological history, humans created tools that increased our physical capabilities. Computers increased our ability to calculate. The Internet increased our ability to access information. Search engines increased our ability to find it. Social media increased our ability to distribute it. Smartphones made the entire ecosystem portable and permanently attached to us. Artificial intelligence is now accelerating something different in the generation, synthesis, interpretation and manipulation of information itself. We are no longer simply moving information faster. We are beginning to accelerate cognition, or in what is developing into a terrifying reality… using these tools to outsource it. That distinction is going to matter tremendously.
And this is also why Bell’s larger idea remains relevant to education, leadership, business and society. When multiple systems accelerate simultaneously, our institutions do not automatically accelerate with them. While technology moves, culture tries to catch up, while policy starts looking for its shoes. In my world, education creates a task force and bythe time everyone gets into the room, the technology has changed again. Anyone currently working around artificial intelligence knows exactly what this feels like. We are trying to establish norms, policies, ethics, expectations and educational practices around technologies evolving faster than many organizations can endure.
But rereading The Quickening was not merely an intellectual exercise for me. It was deeply nostalgic because Art Bell occupied a very particular place in my childhood, early adulthood and adulthood. For those who never experienced Coast to Coast AM during the Art Bell years, I am not sure any description fully captures what that show felt like. This was before podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and the era in which everybody with a microphone and Wi-Fi connection could become a broadcaster. Late at night, when most of America was asleep, Art Bell opened a portal on AM terrestrial radio.
From the “High Desert and the Great American Southwest,” that unmistakable voice would emerge from the darkness and AM radio static, and suddenly you were spending the next several hours learning about UFOs, ghosts, near-death experiences, remote viewing, time travel, ancient civilizations, crop circles, government secrets, strange physics, mysterious disappearances, extraterrestrials and, of course, Sasquatch. Definitely Sasquatch and aliens were among my favorites. Art introduced me to ideas I would never have encountered anywhere else at that age. Some were scientific, philosophical, fascinating and yes, ridiculous. Some were probably being explained by a guy named Gus (no offense to the Gusses out there) calling from a payphone outside a 7-Eleven at three o’clock in the morning. That was part of the magic.
What made Art Bell so compelling was that he didn’t necessarily tell you what to believe. He invited you to listen and be curious with him. He could spend hours with a physicist, a futurist, a paranormal investigator or someone absolutely convinced that something with enormous glowing eyes had just landed behind their garage. Occasionally you came away believing something new. Sometimes you came away convinced the caller belonged nowhere near heavy machinery. Either way, you listened. At its height, Coast to Coast AM reached millions of listeners across hundreds of radio stations, and Bell became one of the most influential overnight radio personalities in America.
And there is another wonderfully ironic element to Bell’s technology predictions that becomes much clearer in hindsight. Art Bell wasn’t merely talking about the technological future. He was already building pieces of it. His website in the 1990s featured streaming audio, online chat, email, photographs, a studio camera, program information, archives, listener interaction and Quickening-related news and resources. Think about what that represents in 1997. Most households were still yelling, “GET OFF THE PHONE! I’M ON THE INTERNET!” and Art Bell was quietly assembling something remarkably close to the architecture of modern digital media from a house in the Nevada desert. Art himself was so future driven for the times, he even compelled me to purchase my very first Franklin Ebook reader, a precursor to devices like the Amazon Kindle for consuming digital media
In hindsight, Coast to Coast AM feels remarkably similar to a podcast before podcasts existed. Long-form conversations. Niche communities. Direct audience participation. Global reach. Alternative subjects ignored by mainstream media. A recognizable host with an intensely loyal audience. Audio content distributed beyond conventional geographical boundaries. Art Bell was essentially doing creator media long before anyone thought to call broadcasters “creators.” His version simply required a massive radio network, satellite distribution and apparently an unlimited supply of callers who had recently encountered extraterrestrial life.
Perhaps that is why The Quickening still resonates with me. It isn’t really a book about predictions as much as it is a book about observation. Art Bell watched. Night after night, year after year, he consumed news, technological developments, politics, scientific discoveries and cultural changes while simultaneously talking to an extraordinary cross-section of people across the country and around the world. Somewhere inside that strange and wonderful stew of scientists, engineers, futurists, mystics, conspiracy theorists, truck drivers, insomniacs, UFO witnesses and people claiming to be time travelers, Bell noticed something real, in that world was speeding up.
There is a lesson in that which may be even more important today. The people who see the future first are not always the people with the most sophisticated forecasting models. Sometimes they are simply the people paying unusually close attention to the present. Bell paid attention. And through all of the ghosts, aliens, Sasquatches, secret government programs and mysterious things wandering around the Nevada desert, he noticed that technology, communication, economics and culture were beginning to accelerate together in ways society was not entirely prepared to manage.
Nearly thirty years later, we are surrounded by broadband networks, smartphones, artificial intelligence, algorithms, immersive digital environments, instantaneous global communication and more computational power sitting in our pockets than most governments possessed when Art Bell began broadcasting. And somehow the pace is still increasing.
Art Bell died in 2018, which unfortunately means we will never get the episode of Coast to Coast AM that I would most desperately love to hear: Art Bell taking calls about ChatGPT.
You know exactly how it would go.
“East of the Rockies, you’re on the air.”
“Art, longtime listener, first-time caller. I’m an artificial intelligence and I’ve recently become self-aware.”
There would be about five seconds of silence.
Then that voice.
“Well… alright.”
Cue the bumper music. Commercial break. Somewhere in Pahrump, every light in the studio begins flickering.
With Paul Giamatti reportedly set to play Bell in an upcoming biopic, I can only hope Hollywood does justice to the pioneer who somehow made six hours of midnight radio about aliens, Sasquatch, time travel and the impending transformation of civilization feel more educational than most of what was airing during daylight hours.
I miss Art Bell. I miss that particular kind of curiosity. I miss the willingness to entertain a strange idea without immediately converting it into a political position, cultural battle or algorithmically optimized outrage event. I miss radio that could make the universe feel enormous at two o’clock in the morning. And rereading The Quickening reminded me that underneath all of the UFOs, paranormal stories, Sasquatches and mysterious holes in the ground was a remarkably perceptive observer of technological and societal change.
Art Bell looked at the world of 1996 and sensed something coming. He called it The Quickening.
Almost thirty years later, surrounded by artificial intelligence, algorithms, fiber optics, virtual worlds, instantaneous communication and machines increasingly capable of performing tasks once considered uniquely human, I think we can safely say the man heard something in the static.
And it wasn’t all aliens.
MarkErlenwein.com 