The pattern was totally full of static, but when we looked deeper into the static we found it was utterly full of pattern as well

Imagine a really tall person in a really short bed and a really short person in a really long bed

Fans of folk music will sometimes discuss the time when Bob Dylan first “went electric” in 1965 at a music festival. Prior to that he had not been electric. He had been non-electric. He was just Bob Dylan and not ELECTRIC DYLAN. There’s like, a whole controversy about this.

My concern is that when discussing this topic phrases like “Dylan went electric” or “Dylan goes electric” or “Dylan plugged in” and so on are always used. No one ever says “that first time Bob Dylan publicly performed with an electric guitar”, even though that’s what (I think!?) they mean. To my knowledge Bob Dylan was before — and remained so after this moment — an organic creature who generates energy by consuming food which has converted sunlight into usable free energy just like the rest of us. He didn’t turn into a friggin robot on some random night in July 1965 and henceforth run on battery power or something. He’s still flesh and blood, a mere mortal. I’d like to see these articles stop talking about how he “went electric”.

Electric cars on the other hand have indeed gone electric. Their ancestors burned fossil fuels but through the power of positive thinking and with evolution via natural selection of random mutations, the current crop of electric cars use electric power batteries instead of burning fuels in their engine chambers. It’s possible of course that the thing which put that electricity into their battery was more of an organic burning process and not a purely electrical one of course. You can’t expect every car to know where every single calorie in its diet comes from.

I guess Bob Dylan is the same way. Maybe he BELIEVED that he had gone fully electric and converted into some sort of futuristic android at that point in time? But what’s sort of weird about that is that at this point 1965 was ~55 years ago, and it must be really dispiriting to Bob Dylan to have this self-awareness that despite himself having gone electric decades ago the vast vast majority of his contemporaries and colleagues and fellow performers — not to much a few generations of totally new people born since then — have not yet gone electric, and are mostly still just walking around eating biomass for fuel, just as they did before he went electric.