Science & Tech Quote by Colin Greenwood

Greenwood’s phrasing is almost aggressively modest, and that’s the point: “for me” softens what could be a grand claim into a musician’s backstage observation. He isn’t marveling at the internet as a shiny tool; he’s naming its real plot twist: the “aggregate thing,” the way millions of small choices harden into a force that feels bigger than any one person’s intent.

The line works because it’s half awe, half wariness. “Aggregate” is a cold, statistical word dropped into a sentence about “fascination,” and that friction captures the internet’s mood. It’s intimate and impersonal at once: your private clicks becoming public weather. Coming from a band like Radiohead, whose career intersected early with file-sharing panic, digital fandom, and later experiments with direct-to-fan releases, the subtext reads like lived experience. The internet didn’t just change distribution; it changed authorship and judgment. A song is no longer a single event - it’s a swarm of reactions, remixes, think pieces, leaks, rankings, memes, and algorithmic aftershocks.

By calling it “that aggregate thing,” Greenwood also sidesteps the macho tech-utopian narrative. No conquest, no disruption-speak. Just the unnerving reality that culture online is emergent: nobody’s fully in charge, everyone’s contributing, and the outcome can be beautiful or brutal. The fascination is less about connection than about scale - how quickly a crowd can turn curiosity into consensus, and consensus into pressure.