In Warsaw in 2006 I found my way to a Kraftwerk concert, complete with their hit The Man-Machine.

When growing up I somehow missed out completely on the elusive Kraftwerk’s musical impact. The show was both artistically and philosophically fascinating.

One highlight was observing one of the robotic (behold that amazing futuristic tie!) Kraftwerkers getting increasingly uncomfortable, before dashing off stage as a song finished for what promised to be a convulsive lavatorial experience – the perils of live rock music in an Ageing Society.

The retro-style and retro-substance of the show was a strange self-parody of a self-parody. As they got going some 30 years ago amidst the post-WW2 German economic boom Kraftwerk blazed a trail for electronic music and an eerie vision of an explicitly Germano-European integrated high-tech future: We want the whole World to know that we are from Germany, because the German mentality – which is more advanced – will always be part of our behaviour. We create out of the German language, the mother-language, which is very mechanical; we use it as the basic structure of our music. 

Hence Autobahn, an electronic but intriguingly lyrical tribute to German motorways before the pressure of traffic we see today. And Trans-Europe Express, extolling the joys of integrated European railway travel.  

But the defining point of Kraftwerk was their zealous admiration of technology in all its forms, plus the explicit idea that humankind would be subsumed by and in it. Hence all sorts of repetitive but drily clever songs about computers, electric cafes, radioactivity, space-labs, titanium, neon lights, numbers, robots and the like. Hard though it is to grasp now, back then even pocket calculators were really cool.

Yet the show in Warsaw some three decades on conveyed little of how technology in fact has evolved, away from Kraftwerk’s vision of Big mass standardization towards Small(er) mass differentiation, or at least constantly evolving and unexpected combinations of both. Kraftwerk’s backdrops were curiously dated clips depicting bland conformity, such as anonymous healthy cyclists pushing their way across a sunny Europe in Tour de France.

Basically Kraftwerk got it 100% wrong.

We are not becoming more like machines. They are becoming more like us.