U2's ZooTV Tour 1993: A prophecy of our media dystopia

Dublin, August 1993. I spent much of the summer working as a casual stagehand at various live music venues, hauling PA equipment from tour trucks in the pre-dawn darkness. Mostly grunt work for whatever band's crew happened to be playing that night. In late summer, U2 rolled into Dublin for the final European leg of their ZooTV tour, and with them came something I'd never encountered before.

The first truck I unloaded contained three brightly painted East German Trabant cars, each stripped of its innards and converted into housing for massive stage lights. The second held an old crate containing what resembled doppelganger U2 outfits, complete with cartoonish oversized heads. Over the next few hours, I wheeled countless pieces of electrical equipment into a dark underworld beneath the stage, helping to assemble what looked like a vast underground television control room. Above us, a small army of workers hoisted what appeared to be a 60-foot transmitter tower into the sky. In a shadowy corner, someone tinkered with a satellite dish while two technicians stacked dozens of TV screens into towering monuments of flickering light.

The Show Begins

By late evening, the swirling guitar noise and industrial drum beats began to merge with the undulating drone of the crowd. Beer-drenched sweetness filled the thick summer air. As the music gathered pace, a colossal array of TV screens flickered to life, sending a deafening stab of light and white noise across the stadium. Over a cascade of blinding broadcast interference, a rapid sequence of words and aphorisms appear: "Taste is the enemy of art," "It could never happen here," "Future is a fantasy."

The crowd erupt as a silhouette of lead singer Bono materialises over a video clip of a massive EU flag. It wasn't clear whether he was part of the video or simply standing before one of the enormous screens, but as he marches across the stage in a farcical Nazi goose-step, the golden stars of the EU flag began to fall. He throws a Basil Fawlty style Nazi salute as the band launches into "Zoo Station," a song partly inspired by the bombing of Berlin's zoo during World War II. As darkness settles over the stadium, time seems to evaporate and nothing makes sense anymore.

Excerpts from Leni Riefenstahl's infamous Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will were intercut with clips from American infomercials. Bono shifts between personas, An aloof rock star, messianic televangelist, golden-suited devil wielding a remote control, flicking through cable news channels on the gigantic TV screens. Then, against all rock concert convention, the music stops. The tour's satellite dish linked the stadium with interviews of residents in war-torn Sarajevo. It was a moving but jarring interruption. For a moment, the cold reality of war threatened to derail this rock-and-roll spectacle, but somehow the strength of the music carries it through.

The text “Everything you know is wrong'' appears like a malign proverb at various points throughout the show. It feels like the subliminal strapline of every advert and propaganda piece we’ve been subjected to throughout our lives.

Unanswered Questions

At the time, the band offered no meaningful explanation of what ZooTV was about or what it was trying to convey. There were plenty of questions but few direct answers. A frustrating void that seemed intentional, forcing audiences to grapple with the disorienting experience on their own terms.

Looking back today, it's clear that U2 were exploring aspects of society that most mainstream publishers found too uncomfortable to confront: the return of mass murder in Europe, the convergence of propaganda and cable news in America, and the numbing effects of relentless mass media consumption. Through culture and music, ZooTV offered a way of processing a world where people were increasingly trapped in confusion by a non-stop deluge of information. It subverted the most powerful communication tools of the era by turning the firepower of broadcast media directly on the audience. An attempt to break media's hypnotic spell by overwhelming viewers with its own techniques.

The Optimistic 90s

The tour's radical concept emerged during a uniquely optimistic moment in technological history. In the early 1990s, the emerging Information Age sparked wild imaginations about it’s future. The prevailing narrative at the time was that widespread access to technology would be a force for good. Liberating societies, democratising the world, and connecting humanity in unprecedented ways. Few mainstream voices argued that the World Wide Web would become a powerful conduit for manipulation, division, and harm.

Many believed that the men of Silicon Valley were building a utopia of which most of humanity would benefit. The internet was still in its infancy, mobile phones were luxury items, and the idea that everyone would carry a supercomputer in their pocket seemed like a distant dream. The Berlin Wall had fallen, the Soviet Union had collapsed. Democracy and free markets appeared to have triumphed. Technology was broadly seen as a great democratiser that would eventually level playing fields and give everyone a voice.

A Prophecy Fulfilled

More than three decades later, as I contemplate the meaning and impact of ZooTV, I can't escape the feeling that U2's abstract conceptual approach holds crucial insights into our current predicament. What seemed like performance art in 1993 now reads like a field manual for surviving information warfare.

The "Everything you know is wrong" messaging that felt provocatively abstract then has become the operational reality of our social media age. We live in ZooTV's prophetic vision made manifest: a world where Nazi propaganda techniques blend seamlessly with influencer marketing, where digital connections deliver both genuine human connection and devastating disinformation, where the lines between entertainment, manipulation, and information warfare have dissolved.

The screens that once required a stadium full of equipment to display now sit in our palms, delivering personalised disinformation, on mass, 24 hours a day. The remote control that Bono theatrically held is now wielded by algorithms that in some fundamental way knows us better than we know ourselves. A cacophony of competing narratives designed to exhaust our capacity for discernment.

ZooTV didn't just predict our present tech dystopia; it provided a blueprint for recognising it. By forcing audiences to experience media overload as an artistic form of resistance rather than simply consuming it passively, the show offered a form of inoculation against the very techniques it employed. In our current moment, when distinguishing between authentic information and sophisticated manipulation has become a survival skill, perhaps U2's radical experiment offers more than historical curiosity. It provides a reminder that consciousness itself can be an act of resistance against the machinery of mass influence.

Over thirty years later the golden stars of that EU flag are still falling, in a digital hailstorm that shows no sign of stopping. If history has taught us anything, it's the importance of understanding the difference between observing society and participating in it.