A collective paranoid delusion that was beautiful in its completeness

February 17, 2024 1:54 AM

I FEEL AT TIMES that I still live in the never-ending 20th century, that I’m stuck here, that maybe everyone is stuck here, even people born too late to have seen it happen. True, there are smartphones now, and new types of ugly buildings. Images are sharper, even when you zoom in. You can tell that time has passed because unremarkable things like Sweetheart Jazz cups have acquired the status of fetish objects. But some part of the American mindset is still in 1999, which feels substantially closer to us now than 1979 did then. from Heritage 2000, a review of Time Bomb Y2K in N+1
posted by chavenet (30 comments total)

I watched that! (The doc and the reality.)

No one not alive back then will ever know the dull horror of watching the beginning of yet another argument between the “the millennium turns in 2000! Woo, party like it’s 1999!” and the “the millennium actually turns in 2001, you do not understand calendars, I will explain them to you” people. It was like watching any other slow-moving disaster, and just as predictable. I’m still recovering from it all.
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:02 AM on February 17 [18 favorites]

The latter group thoroughly lost that argument, as I recall.

The problem with the 'mass hysteria' framing is that, clearly on some level it was true, the world was not going to end in the Year 2000, but it implies that there wasn't anything real to it, which is patently false. Indeed, the whole reason that these kind of mass hysterias and moral panics happen is because there's a kernel of emotional truth around which a whole bunch of bullshit gathers. By the end of it, it can be hard to even find the thing that was true in the first place.
posted by Merus at 4:27 AM on February 17 [3 favorites]

Non-American, but to me things seem more like they're stuck in 2001 - Western zeitgeist as a rubber sheet pinned in place at that single point, so that no matter how far we pull it up towards justice, rights, decarbonisation, peace, everything will always funnel down towards oppressing an Other. Authoritarianism, state violence, media demonisation, corporate exploitation, all feeding into each other on the basis that they have to protect you from the Threat, who would otherwise take your Freedoms (not those freedoms, you don't need those, the other Freedoms).
Not a new development in 2001, and not untransformed since then (tech companies have found new ways to be omnipresent, and particularly the characteristics defining the Other are very malleable, even if it keeps coming back, worldwide, to targetting Muslims), but dependent on that moment in a way that lets it punch hard at any level of rhetoric - looming in the background to raise the stakes, casually mentioned to rerail a line of discourse, placed front and centre to eliminate shades of grey, or dropped at the end of an article to cement its rightful position at the foundation of the rationalisation that allows this century to continue down this wretched path.
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 4:31 AM on February 17 [18 favorites]

it implies that there wasn't anything real to it, which is patently false

Seriously, the attitudes I've been seeing to the Y2K problem nowadays seem downright revisionist.

There were bugs. The important ones got fixed. That's why there weren't any big disasters.

The revisionist narrative is that there were never any bugs in the first place, and that the lack of disasters is proof of that. That computers always knew that 00 meant 2000 and not 1900, and programmers were just spending time meticulously inserting no-ops into perfectly good code. That it was a scam.
posted by swr at 5:00 AM on February 17 [37 favorites]

The Matrix was right... quote agent Smith, "1999, the pinnacle of your civilization."
posted by subdee at 5:42 AM on February 17 [8 favorites]

So I got to join in this fantastic global photo project someone started back then.

In the 90s there were a bunch of "A Day In The Life Of...." photojournalism projects, where someone rounded up a bunch of photojournalists and sent them all to the same city or country, spreading them out across the place, and they all took whatever pictures they wanted on the same random day. The results were then assembled into a coffee table book.

Someone had the idea that there should be a "Day In The Life Of The World" project, but with the specific day being that New Year - and that instead of photojournalists, he wanted it to be volunteers and amateurs. So he started this big international crowdsourced project - whereever you lived, you could sign up to participate, and depending on how many other people signed up from your area (he had limits on how many people from major cities or very populous countries could participate), you were in. Then you just had to take pictures from noon on 12/31/99 and noon on 1/1/00, and then pick your three best ones and send them in for consideration to be included in the book.

I signed up and managed to get in. I was planning on heading to Times Square, where I'd heard they were be holding special observances of "the stroke of midnight" in each other region of the world leading up to midnight, and I figured that'd be perfect - I could nip over after work at about 4 pm and get photos of that, because what was the likelihood that anyone would be in Times Square to celebrate "wooo! It's midnight in Kazakhstan!" But that was the year that the NYPD started closing down the streets around Times Square early. I ended up wandering over to 8th Avenue and taking photos of whatever looked interesting - including some dude walking down the street trying to sell some cheap plastic fake glasses with the number "2000" as the eyepieces. Until I was developing the film later, I didn't notice that at the exact moment I took the picture, he was next to a sign in a shop window - "Closing Store, All Merchandise Must Go." I then bailed, as I'd heard there was a midnight fun-run in Central Park where everyone could run in costume; I got some shots there, and then I went to crash with a friend who lives near Times Square so I could get up early the next morning and walk over to get pictures of NY Sanitation cleaning up after.

One of the photos I picked to send into them was that photo of the guy selling the glasses. It made it in to the book that they later compiled - and it it is directly opposite the page where you'll find the photo of the youngest photographer, a 13-year-old girl from Delhi, I believe.

Some of those photos in that book are lovely, by the way. I'm just a "glad to be included" entry, honestly.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:50 AM on February 17 [21 favorites]

Oh, hang on - if you go to the Millennium Photo web site, they have a PDF with 12 sample pages of photos, and a couple of my favorites are in there.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:19 AM on February 17 [4 favorites]

I’m still recovering from it all.

I expect that's because you did what any right-thinking person did and celebrated both 1/1/2000 and 1/1/2001 as if they were the NEW MILLENNIUM

extra points for celebrating it all year long
posted by chavenet at 6:35 AM on February 17 [6 favorites]

We're 4 iterations away from PS9. Still waiting
posted by JoeXIII007 at 7:04 AM on February 17 [3 favorites]

The revisionist narrative is that there were never any bugs in the first place, and that the lack of disasters is proof of that.

See also “Global warming is just another hoax like that hole in the ozone layer.” No, we fixed it through concerted human action, you cretin.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 7:10 AM on February 17 [21 favorites]

This malaise, the feeling that there is nothing new, is itself nothing new of course. We find ourselves at the notorious 'end of history' trumpeted by Francis Fukuyama after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fukuyama's thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a 'terminal beach' was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche's most prescient pages are those in which he describes the 'oversaturation of an age with history'. 'It leads an age into a dangerous
mood of irony in regard to itself', he wrote in Untimely Meditations, 'and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism', in which 'cosmopolitan fingering', a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement.

- Mark Fisher, 2009
posted by Richard Saunders at 9:29 AM on February 17 [6 favorites]

My personal Y2K bug is that any music made after 2000 is new music.
posted by srboisvert at 9:30 AM on February 17 [13 favorites]

I wanted to link to a Y2K commercial I recall, people partying outside, somewhere like Times Square, when all the lights go out at midnight; but I can't find it, can't recall what was being advertised, even. Instead, what I could find is the Nike ad which I don't recall.
posted by Rash at 9:30 AM on February 17 [1 favorite]

The revisionist narrative is that there were never any bugs in the first place, and that the lack of disasters is proof of that. That computers always knew that 00 meant 2000 and not 1900, and programmers were just spending time meticulously inserting no-ops into perfectly good code. That it was a scam.

We are now only 73 years away from a lot of payment systems learning once again they should use 4 digit years for credit card expiry dates.
posted by srboisvert at 9:34 AM on February 17 [6 favorites]

Seriously, the attitudes I've been seeing to the Y2K problem nowadays seem downright revisionist.

There were bugs. The important ones got fixed. That's why there weren't any big disasters.

Yeah, I was working in hi-tech at the time. The serious geeks at my workplace were not one hundred percent unconcerned. At the behest of one of them, I made sure to buy big bags of stewing beef and potatoes, and have the bathtub filled with water. Then I woke up here on the west coast, turned on the TV and saw that they were celebrating the new millennium (or miloonyum as we were calling it) in New Zealand, Australia etc, so quickly figured we were alright.

Party on! And get started on that stew.
posted by philip-random at 10:07 AM on February 17 [2 favorites]

good piece, i enjoyed reading that
posted by glonous keming at 11:11 AM on February 17 [1 favorite]

any music made after 2000 is new music.

speaking of which, have you heard that new one from Sigur Ros?
posted by philip-random at 11:23 AM on February 17 [1 favorite]

I used to get the paper edition of The Onion, back in the 90s. I kept a clipping of "U.S. Dept. Of Retro Warns: 'We May Be Running Out Of Past'" until I lost it in a move. It really felt like we'd settled on a culture of the Unremarkable, that wouldn't be worth emulating. I brought this up to my brother once, and he noted that as image and video fidelity got better, we would some day run out of media artifacts.

Nostalgia for an era is expressed in style, and for so many centuries that included the artistic techniques available: poetic forms, older versions of your language, and ways to paint. The Renaissance brought all sorts of new pigments to European art, along with fundamentals of perspective that brought perception of space into painting.

And then suddenly we had photography, and film, and television, and videotape, and so forth. Each of these brought artifacts that were instantly recognisable no matter which artist held the camera, and those became symbols of the eras they featured in. We started thinking of eras not by painter, but by film artifacts.

So we now get an immediate sense of "then" from sped-up jittery silent clips, or overexposed 16mm colour film, or interlaced video with CRT-camera hot spots, or grainy static from bad VHS tracking.

But at some point everything's 4k, even when filmed from the device your kids can afford to keep in their pockets. At some point the artifacts are too subtle to really work as a "Meanwhile, in the 2030s..." indicator.

Of course, we've hit this before, at least in some professional contexts. We decided at some point in the late 20th century that medium-format studio photography was our definition of "real", and called paintings that replicated this "photorealistic" (previously).

Anyway, my sense of dread and hope for this century has fermented rather potently over the past eight years. So this line from the Onion article I linked hit me like a freight train:

"We are talking about a potentially devastating crisis situation in which our society will express nostalgia for events which have yet to occur," Williams told reporters.

Same.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 12:31 PM on February 17 [14 favorites]

Only 13 when 1999 became 2000? And stuck, unaware that the era was defined by -- begun -- September 2001, then warring in Afghanistan and Iraq?

I know I was still a kid at 18 in 1999. I know I was promised a lie: of agency transforming the world as a voter and consumer, of peace after the stalemate of the cold war, of justice globally through Fair Trade. The rich got richer, and skewed the game in their favour, and the public servants were voted into office on unfulfillable promises. Undoubtedly secret knowledge is out there that would give me power -- blockchains, conspiracies, the next big tech grift -- so I'm off looking for them instead of building relationships with my community.
posted by k3ninho at 1:08 PM on February 17 [11 favorites]

Excel definitely gets confused when something is not a date though.
posted by chmmr at 2:03 PM on February 17 [1 favorite]

We are now only 73 years away from a lot of payment systems learning once again they should use 4 digit years for credit card expiry dates.

Digits, nothing. If they're so concerned enough about using storage space efficiently, they shouldn't be representing integer values as text all. That's the really exasperating thing about the Y2K bug: it all comes from people making a decision that was already bad even before you consider the Y2K bug.
posted by baf at 2:26 PM on February 17 [2 favorites]

Dan Piepenbring: “What did they do to forestall the apocalypse? The media never seemed to tell us, and Time Bomb Y2K wisely doesn’t try to explain. Maybe we didn’t want to know—maybe it was actually too boring. ”

It was boring. It definitely didn't look like dudes in matching windbreakers trying to be cool. What it looked like was a dozen people working 16 hour days in a rented construction trailer in the parking lot of the administration building of the water authority located just downwind of the world's largest advanced wastewater treatment facility doing a year's worth of work in 3 months because the financial millennium started on October 1st.
posted by ob1quixote at 2:45 PM on February 17 [13 favorites]

I think what I like best about the n+1 review--what I liked best about 2000, in fact--was this line, "on some level the people clamored for disaster." You worried--or, I certainly did--that everything would be destroyed, but within that destruction was a hope for change. Maybe everything would burn down and something better would grow in its place. This wasn't just a Y2K-bug mindset, years of religion had paired all this stuff in my head, the second coming, judgment day, but also technological possibility. It wasn't quite that Jesus would come back and send all the sinners to hell, because PlayStations were also involved, and the pretty holograms on the Windows ME install CD. It all got mixed into this idea that something was going to happen.

I guess the sad part isn't just that nothing dramatic and awful happened, it's that twenty years later something dramatic and awful did happen, and it changed absolutely nothing. We went through a whole pandemic and never got any narrative closure. That's the problem with millenarianism, it suggests a narrative that isn't there. You're not getting swept up into a story. You just exist, and bad things happen.

But it's really hard to explain to my kids how 1999 felt like the end of a story, or the start of a story.
posted by mittens at 4:01 PM on February 17 [16 favorites]

> But at some point everything's 4k, even when filmed from the device your kids can afford to keep in their pockets. At some point the artifacts are too subtle

But 24 or 30 fps and narrow field-of-view. For the most part, only sports and a very small number of feature films are shot at 60 and 48 fps. If "immersive" and "spatial" video with 100 degree & more FoV and 90 or 96 fps catches on, we'll have something to be nostalgic about from the 2020s.

Also CGI can still improve.
posted by ASCII Costanza head at 6:42 PM on February 17 [1 favorite]

Metafilter: You just exist, and bad things happen.
posted by Literaryhero at 9:02 PM on February 17 [8 favorites]

Not to derail into specifics, but the most dramatic Y2K effect was largely in real-time clock modules (RTCs) that had been installed in just about every piece of industrial equipment ever. Most of the critical Y2K struggle wasn't software on PCs or mainframes, but code running in tiny embedded systems. And the push to swap those out was almost unimaginable in its scale and effectiveness.

I remember our boss insisting we be on-shift at midnight to catch any Y2K situations. I agreed, pointed out that our systems ran on UTC, and that would mean being on shift at 4pm Pacific. I had a wonderful night out with Mrs. Hobo To Be.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:47 AM on February 18 [6 favorites]

ASCII Costanza head: there's quite a difference between "subtle FPS difference nobody cares about" and "shaky, silent, and sepia". I'm not convinced that "slightly lower framerate and different focal length" is going to be useful in the same way that "hair in the gate" is for screaming "The Past" at audiences.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 3:16 AM on February 18 [1 favorite]

I was at a new year's party in the Chicago burbs y2k. One thing I noticed when stepping outside round midnight was the complete lack of air traffic around what was usually one of the busiest airports in the world.
posted by JJ86 at 7:40 AM on February 18 [1 favorite]

the 20^th century, i argue, started in 1917 and ended in 2016. because of this, 1999 feels either so close you can touch it or so far away that it’s practically invisible, due to how the world right now is a jumbled-up mix of the past and the future, something like the part of the 1920s wherein both top-hatted 19^th-century monocle-wearers and sharp-suited sexy-haircutted 20^th century nazis stood upon the face of the earth at the same time.

on edit: it’s sort of striking, though ultimately just random chance, how both the actual 20^th century and the actual 21^st century started with a global plague.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 7:48 AM on February 18 [4 favorites]

i found nothing in TFA to really argue with but i note that i'm only around a year younger than the author and probably similar in other relevant respects and i would just like to point out that: (1) when the urge to propound nostalgia boomerishly comes for the part of our age cohort with the aforementioned shared characteristics, the realisation of that urge will take the form of thinkpieces whose status as boomerish nostalgia-propounding is plausibly deniable, and (2) i'd have hoped mid-30s was too young for boomerish nostalgia, and (3) i see you, Dan Piepenbring.
posted by busted_crayons at 9:36 AM on February 18 [1 favorite]