I’m so old I viscerally remember the Y2K panic that ate up the emotional bandwidth of the American media class who then stoked fear into the hearts of the doomer classes from system administrators to evangelical millenarians.
I was very much online during the Y2K era though I didn’t start blogging (unless you count girly message boards or Geocities) till much later. I was however happily a cybercore hippie girl. If you want to feel jealous and are a Zoomer, I owned a teal iMac G3 and iPod. So I it delightful that a younger generation has decided to dust off some of the silliest times of my youth and refurbished them into Instagram and TikTok aesthetic trends.
What is less funny is how much past fear mongering over technological doomsday scenarios look exactly like our current ones. I remember the simmering fears, the debates over types of damage, and extensive coverage of weirdos who were preparing for a kind of end times.
It feels familiar to how very extreme our reaction to artificial intelligence is being portrayed by both the media and its wildest singularity evangelists. I say this as someone who readily calls themselves a doomer so it’s not a milieu that’s foreign to me.
Here is a brief synopsis I patched together from a Perplexity query with links included if you are too young to remember it.
The Y2K crisis was the feared failure of computer systems when dates rolled from 1999 to 2000, because many programs stored the year with only two digits and could misread “00” as 1900 instead of 2000.
In practice, it became a major prevention project rather than a disaster, with governments, banks, utilities, and other organizations spending years fixing code, updating hardware, and testing systems before midnight on January 1, 2000.
The most dramatic predictions were widespread power outages, banking collapse, transportation shutdowns, and chaos in critical infrastructure, but those outcomes did not materialize at midnight. More extreme claims, such as nuclear systems failing and detonations occurring, also did not happen.
Instead, the world saw only limited glitches, such as small database errors or minor local issues, not the civilization-level breakdown many feared. The unusual part of Y2K is that success looked like nothing happening, which is exactly what the preparatory work was meant to achieve.
So here I am on Day 1999 of writing every single day, and I’m waiting to turn over into my own 2000th day. I have no anticipated bugs for that event. I stayed up till midnight with my mother walking the main street of our town with a bunch of others waiting to see if anything happened. Nothing did so we drove home.
But it’s enjoyable to remember the kind of disasters that were predicted with such anxiety ended up being problems we worked our way through. We keep at problems by naming them early. Humans intervene and we change our behavior. That’s something you celebrate about us as a species.
I am excited to have achieved such long tenure of daily public writing because much of it covers we have worked our way into a new panic that I’ve been watching for over twenty years. Singularity thought and the extropians have been part of my daily internet diet for quite some time. I think we will find a way to survive this too. Though I grant it sounds a bit more complicated.
I’m sure 1999 me would be proud of the strange futurist I became in my adulthood. I doubt she would have expected that I’d be investing in nuclear power or that I’d have managed a career in cosmetics as a side quest. This is actually a side quest another nerd pursued. I don’t even wear makeup in 1999. I occasionally do in 2026. But if I need to party my way into the singularity I’ll probably at least wear lipstick.
