As part of the What They Knew series, Part II of What Radiohead Knew follows an android Mother teaching her child about time — how it shaped humanity… and how they broke under the forces gathering at the end of the century.

As Thom Yorke spirals into the making of Kid A, the world outside fractures: Y2K, the dot-com bubble bursts, the internet becomes a second bloodstream, and culture slips into the uncanny.

But something else is waking. In the static, the child hears the Conductor — a voice tied to humanity’s fall, murmuring of grief, progress, and impossible forces.

As one century collapses and Kid A emerges, one truth surfaces: no one survives the future unchanged.

This is the story of a band trying to outrun fame, a world trying to outrun itself, and a machine child standing at the edge of a revelation it may not be ready to face.

Intro music: “Monkey House” by Evan Toth. Grateful for Evan’s generosity in letting this track set the tone for What They Knew.

**The sections discussing Radiohead were informed by research conducted by Stephen Hyden, particularly his book This Isn’t Happening, and I want to acknowledge and credit his work accordingly. Please Check it out.**

Further Exploration:

• “Exit Music: The Radiohead Story” by Mac Randall (2000)
• “Radiohead’s OK Computer: An Oral History” by Rolling Stone (2017)
• “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” by Shoshana Zuboff (2019)
• “The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity” by Amy Webb (2019)
• "The Birth of The Web" CERN
• “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires” by Tim Wu (2010)
• “Why the Future Doesn't Need Us” by Bill Joy, Wired Magazine (2000)
• "Tim Berners-Lee on 30 years of the World Wide Web: We can get the web we want." The Guardian (2019)

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