Twenty-five years ago (and five days) I was at a gas station in Oceanside, California. It was something like 2pm and this was the era of TV screens in gas pumps being the Hot New Thing. You couldn’t control what was on them and mostly they were set to a news channel. It was December 31, 1999, and the United States was on the precipice of the year 2000. The world was angsty for a variety of reasons, geopolitically, but also for administrative ones: most computing software (including operating systems) had been programmed for a two-year date. So in 1977 or 1986 or what have you, the developers would have the year of the date stored as 77 or 86, respectively. This wasn’t the case with all software but it was the case in enough places that when 99 rolled over to 00 we would have a problem – HG Wells had written the Time Machine but should enough machines and systems decide it was 1900 instead of 2000 all hell would break loose.
Much as with the traveling barge of garbage, this was a wake up call to folks who hadn’t had to think about the dependency on computing and technology. In 1999 there was email, and you could apply for jobs and get your bank statements and purchase things online, but it wasn’t as default as today – many people still got paper statements, it was very common to get regular mail from regular people, and though we were on the verge of the dot-bombs in 2000 online shopping did not as yet compete with brick and mortar.
The reminders were everywhere: Y2K news stories, mail with updates from every OS and software provider about what they would be asking folks to do to update their stuff. Towers (aka “desktops”, so named because it was a tower-shaped box you kept under your desk or in a separate compartment to it, because your monitor most definitely was NOT flat) came with stickers reminding people to turn off their machines by 12/31/1999 just in case. There was both too much, and not enough information about what Could happen, what Should happen, and what Would (probably) happen.
As we know, in the end what happened was Not Much. The thousands of people set forth (if not millions) across the globe as part of their “IT Departments” (or consultants that would come out, for not every business had one), updated software, operating systems, and sometimes hardware, to avoid the potential disaster.
But we didn’t know that then.
There was palpable apprehension as the world rotated towards 2000, many folks took out extra cash, got extra groceries, had paper copies of everything to Prove what they owned/should have. This was juxtaposed with the idea that as a globe we were headed into not just a new century but a new millennium, that the Cold War was still over (and we didn’t have one again yet in the Middle East), and Europe was doing its collective government thing which looked hopeful. The biggest scandal in the US was that our President had gotten a consensual blow job in the Oval Office and repeatedly lied about it.
And so there I was, pumping gas into a 1996 Dodge Neon, watching the TV screen… and it showed Moscow as the clock turned midnight there. There were fireworks, people partying in the streets… but most of all there was power to the buildings, and amidst the celebrations it looked like everything was “normal”. In my head I figured, “if Russia can get through Y2K, so can we”. Remember, the iron curtain had collapsed, and Russia was in a conflation of oligarchic battles and a seriously unstable government.
Here we are 25 years (and some days) later, and we are again on a precipice — or many of them. What is AI going to do, really, in this next century? How are we (the collective we) going to deal with the impacts of climate change (rising sea levels, increased intensity hurricanes, no-snow winters, etc.). How does the world work without polarity of superpowers (it used to be pretty much one or two — and now it’s more than that). We live in a world where we can now vaccinate against some cancers, treat still others successfully; we can 3-d print heart valves and we have mapped the human genome so successfully you can figure out who you’re really related to with a cotton swab and a relatively small financial outlay. We have meat alternatives and organic farming and bitcoin and electric cars.
We also have increased conflicts, questionable ingredients, vaccine hesitancy and/or denial, four or five wars (depending on how you’re counting them vs “armed conflict” — but someone who dies in an armed conflict is just as dead as someone who dies in a war), a craptastic healthcare system (in which we pay more in premiums and personal outlay than we would in taxes to support a nationalized one, and in which drug makers have essentially carte blanche to set their prices (unlike everywhere else in the world)), billionaires publicly calling the shots (instead of in private like the good ol’ days), and a general decrease in civility in society (it is now perfectly acceptable to be an asshole in public apparently).
In 1899, the world was on a precipice, too; they just didn’t quite know it. I mean, sure, new century; but in their heads there was the Big Global Power (hello, England), your food came from your local farms and may get in by train, if you got a severe infection you very likely died (penicillin wouldn’t be around for another 28 years), and two World Wars and a Great Depression were in the next 50 years. The people who went in to New Years on 1900 had had trains and telephones and typewriters and cars, but they didn’t have planes and space shuttles and computing machines. If you had said the United States and China would become superpowers in the coming century, your peers would have thought you were absolutely bonkers. I’m sure that as 1899 rolled to 1900 there was apprehension and agita much as today: those kids were listening to the radio too much or using paper in class instead of a slate (so wasteful!), the prospect of bank runs was fresh (the Great Panic of 1893 had only been seven years prior), the Boxer Rebellion and the Philippine American war were active (apologies this post is very US centric). Those things that they knew about were, historically speaking overshadowed by the things that came — good and bad.
We go into 2025, that “perfect square” of a year, with a mix of hope and dread, exacerbated by a 24/7 news cycle that is fragmented, biased, hysterical, and algorithmically defined. We can posit, speculate, and make educated guesses at what the future holds. We will not know, though, until it is here.
Bobbie Conti 