y2k for dummies (and people who were born too late to experience it)

what the panic was all about, and what we could have learned from it

Before it was the name of a fashion trend consisting of skinny white teenagers wearing baby tees (sometimes literally t-shirts for babies), low rise jeans, claw clips, and chunky platform flip flops, Y2K was the name of the technological glitch that some people thought would end the world.

bug girl @buggirl

i know the girls who thrift children’s clothing to sell on depop as “”y2k women’s fashion”” are going to HELL and i don’t even believe in hell

As a person who was born in 1999, I was not making memories during the Y2K craze of the late nineties. I remember hearing about it growing up and always thought it was a crackpot theory that only people with colanders on their heads believed. It seems so ridiculous looking back that I never took it seriously — especially because it was very quickly proven to be unfounded.

It wasn’t until recently that I found out — as I’m sure most people born before the nineties knew all along — that Y2K was a legitimate fear, and that legislation was even passed to help manage the crisis in case it happened.

Despite its reputation as overblown conspiracy hype, Y2K is something worth looking back on because it says a lot about how we prepare for disaster. So here’s the low-down: What it was, how it went from legitimate concern to conspiracy theory, and what it says about how we respond to crises.

First off: What was Y2K?

“Y2K” is shorthand for the year 2000, and it became the name for the societal panic that was tied to the new millennium. In the 1990s, programmers saw that there was potential bug that might happen with computers in 2000. When a lot of computers were made, engineers used a two-digit code for the year, but they left out “19” because up until 2000 that part was kind of implied. The problem was that eventually the clock would strike midnight and that ‘99 would switch to ‘00. Programmers (and nerds) started to worry that computers would read ‘00 as 1900, not 2000.

And this was actually a real problem. Again, not the head-in-a-colander conspiracy I was always told it was. Places like hospitals, banks, and power plants would’ve been seriously affected by the bug. As National Geographic reported earlier this year, those are all businesses whose computer systems rely on having the correct dates when they check on things like interest rates and safety procedures.

“Banks, which calculate interest rates on a daily basis, faced real problems. Interest rates are the amount of money a lender, such as a bank, charges a customer, such as an individual or business, for a loan. Instead of the rate of interest for one day, the computer would calculate a rate of interest for minus almost 100 years!” —National Geographic

It was a big enough worry that elected leaders actually passed legislation to help protect people from consequences that might occur if the bug did indeed fuck everything up. A House bill, dubbed the “Y2K Act,” became law in July of 1999.

“Prohibits any person who transacts business on matters directly or indirectly affecting residential mortgages from causing or permitting a foreclosure on any such mortgage against a consumer as a result of an actual Y2K failure that results in an inability to accurately or timely process any mortgage payment transaction.” — H.R.775

So what happened when the clock struck midnight and the nines turned to zeroes? Well…not much.

There were a couple glitches here and there across the world. But nothing major. Engineers had noticed the glitch far enough in advance that they were able to fix it where it mattered most — but even countries that didn’t prepare for the glitch at all didn’t really see any problems.

After nothing happened, people started to brush off the craze. But some people had spent months preparing because they thought the end of the world was coming. People stocked up on dried goods, built bunkers, prepared backup generators.

We should go back for a moment. Because here’s where the disconnect was for me. How did a simple tech glitch — that most programmers got under control in time — turn into an apocalyptic event?

The answer, which may not surprise you, is evangelical christianity.

In her book “The Real History of the End of the World,” Sharan Newman wrote that the beginning of a new millennium, paired with a tech glitch and a super-leap year, got some religious folk riled up. “For many evangelical Christians,” Newman wrote, “these signs together were what they had been expecting for generations. The call went out that Armageddon was at hand.”

That belief then spread beyond Evangelical Christians and morphed and reached all parts of the world. Panic ensued, people stocked up on canned goods, and some even started writing books about what people should to to prepare. It even got skewed into a moral panic, where people scolded society for becoming so dependent on technology and computers to run everyday life.

A woman named Karen Anderson wrote a book called “Y2K for Women: How to Protect Your Home and Family in the Coming Crisis.” In a 1999 New York Times article about how homeowners should prepare, Anderson gave tips on how to protect yourself, and how to know when to abandon ship.

''If you're in a single-family house, and the water gets shut off, you can improvise when it comes to dealing with waste-water,'' Ms. Anderson said. ''But what do you do when you're in a high-rise building and you can't flush the toilet? Your only alternative, really, is to leave.'' — Karen Anderson, NYTimes

An idea started to spread that every single computer system might break down when the year 2000 hit. Credit card readers, phone lines, electric grids, water, gas, anything you could think of that people depend on daily.

In her 1999 book “Surviving the Computer Time Bomb,” author and journalist Minda Zetlin paints a bleak image of a worst-case scenario for what could happen after Y2K.

“It's early in January 2000. There's no food in the refrigerator, but you're not sure you can get to the local grocery. None of the traffic lights in town are working. In fact, your electricity has been flickering on and off all day, so that even if you can get food, you're not sure it will keep in your refrigerator.

When you finally do trudge out to the market, you find the shelves surprisingly bare. People have been frantically buying food, and none of the expected shipments have arrived. Still, you collect a few canned goods, bring them to the cash register, and present your credit card which, of course, is rejected. Disheartened, you trudge home again.” — Minda Zetlin, “Surviving the Computer Time Bomb”

It’s giving Cormac McCarthy.

Now, as I’m sure you’ll notice, some of these things we have lived through. We saw the empty store shelves and we’ve been in the midst of supply chain issues for months now (or longer? My sense of time has been obliterated). In the following paragraph, Zetlin describes the plunging of the stock markets, and she even writes, “An angry crowd has broken out over the Mall in Washington” over missing welfare checks. It’s eerie, the worst fears that people had back then, which were dismissed with the incumbent new millennium, are now being realized more than 20 years later.

Which begs the question: Did we learn anything from Y2K? Because it truly seems like it’s an exemplar of how preparing for a crisis can prevent the worst outcomes. By seeing this problem years out, programmers were able to make changes where they needed to. But when a real, life-altering crisis hit the planet, we were at a loss.

We all know that the Trump administration was not prepared for a pandemic. Though administrations prior worked to put a pandemic readiness plan into place, Trump and co. abandoned most of it; when that crisis did indeed strike, it led to all those things that the Y2K truthers were so terrified of: supply chain issues, a declining economy, and people angry about the current situation rioting in D.C.

And of course, Y2K is not the only crisis that we could have learned from. But it’s one in recent years where we took the right steps — arguably more than we needed to — so that years later, the problem is laughable to us. Imagine if we could look back at the early days of COVID when we spent months inside sanitizing groceries and say, “Wow, what a funny time. We were so worried, and all for nothing.” ✦