[Infowarrior] - It’s Always the End of the World as We Know It

[Richard Forno]

January 1, 2010
Op-Ed Contributor
It’s Always the End of the World as We Know It
By DENIS DUTTON

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/opinion/01dutton.html?hp=&pagewanted=print
Christchurch, New Zealand

IT seems so distant, 1999. Bill Clinton had survived impeachment, his  
popularity hardly dented, Sept. 11 was just another date and music  
fans were enjoying a young singer named Britney Spears.

But there was a particular unease in the air. The so-called Y2K  
problem, the inability of computers to read dates beyond 1999  
threatened to turn Jan. 1, 2000 into a nightmare. The issue had first  
been noticed by programmers in the 1950s, but had been ignored. As the  
turn of the century loomed, though, it seemed that humankind faced a  
litany of horrors.

Haywire navigation controls might cause aircraft to fall from the  
skies. Electricity grids, water systems and telephone networks would  
be knocked out, while nuclear power plants would be subject to  
meltdown. Savings and pension accounts would be wiped out in a general  
bank failure. A cascade of breakdowns in communication and commerce  
would create vast shortages of food and medicine, which would, in  
turn, produce riots, lawlessness and social collapse. Even worse,  
ICBMs might rise from their silos unbidden, spreading death across the  
globe.

Y2K problems would not be limited to mainframe computers that governed  
the information systems of the modern world, but were going to affect  
millions of tiny computer chips found everywhere. Thanks to these  
wonky microprocessors, elevators would die, G.P.S. devices would stop  
working and dishwashers would dry the food onto the plates before  
trying to rinse it off. Even ordinary cars might spontaneously  
accelerate to fatal, uncontrollable speeds, with brakes failing to  
respond.

The Y2K catastrophe was promoted with increasing shrillness toward  
century’s end: headlines proclaimed a “computer time bomb” or “a date  
with disaster.” Vanity Fair’s January 1999 article “The Y2K Nightmare”  
caught the sensationalist tone, claiming that “folly, greed and  
denial” had “muffled two decades of warnings from technology experts.”

Among the most reviled of the Y2K deniers was Bill Gates, who not only  
declared that Microsoft’s PCs would take the date turnover in stride,  
but had the audacity to blame those who “love to tell tales of fear”  
for the worldwide anxiety. Mr. Gates’s denialism was ignored as  
governments and corporations set in place immensely expensive schemes  
to immunize systems against the Y2K bug.

They weren’t the only ones keen to get in on the end-time spirit. The  
Rev. Jerry Falwell suggested that Y2K would be the confirmation of  
Christian prophecy, “God’s instrument to shake this nation, to humble  
this nation.” The Y2K crisis might incite a worldwide revival that  
would lead to “the rapture of the church.” Along with many  
survivalists, Mr. Falwell advised stocking up on food and guns.

So the scene was set here in New Zealand for midnight on Dec. 31,  
1999. We are just west of the dateline, and thus would be the first to  
experience not only popping Champagne corks and fireworks, but the Y2K  
catastrophe, if any. As clocks hit midnight, Champagne and skyrockets  
were the only explosions of interest, since telephones, ATMs, cars,  
computers and airplanes worked just fine. The head of the government’s  
Y2K Readiness Commission declared victory: “New Zealand’s investment  
in planning and preparation has paid off.”

Confident that our millions were well spent, we waited for news of the  
calamities sure to hit countries that had ignored Y2K. Asia, a  
Deutsche Bank official had predicted, was going to be “burnt toast” on  
New Year’s Day — not just the lesser-developed areas of Vietnam and  
China, but South Korea, which by 1999 was a highly computer-dependent  
society. South Korea, one computer expert told me, had a national  
telephone system similar to British Telecom’s. But where the British  
had wisely sunk millions of pounds into Y2K remediation, South Korea  
had done next to nothing.

However, exactly 10 years ago today, as the date change moved on  
through the Far East, India, Russia, the Middle East and Europe, it  
became apparent that it made little difference whether you lived in  
Britain, which at great expense had revamped many of its computer  
systems, or the lackadaisical Ukraine, which had ignored the issue.

With minor glitches that would have gone unnoticed any other day of  
the week, the world kept ticking on. It must have been galling for  
computer-conscientious Germans to observe how life continued its  
pleasurable path for feckless Italians, who had generally paid no  
attention to Y2K. There were problems, to be sure: in Australia, a bus- 
ticket machine stamped the wrong date, while in Britain a tide gauge  
in Portsmouth Harbor failed. Still, the South Korean phone system came  
through unscathed.

By the time midnight reached the United States, where upward of $100  
billion had been spent on Y2K fixes, there was little anxiety. Indeed,  
the general health of American information systems, fixed and not,  
became clearer in the new year. The Small Business Administration  
calculated that 1.5 million businesses had undertaken no Y2K  
remediation. On Jan. 3, it received about 40 phone calls from  
businesses that had experienced minor faults, like cash registers that  
misread the year “2000” as “1900” (which seemed everywhere the single  
most common error caused by Y2K).

KNOWING our computers is difficult enough. Harder still is to know  
ourselves, including our inner demons. From today’s perspective, the  
Y2K fiasco seems to be less about technology than about a morbid  
fascination with end-of-the-world scenarios. This ought to strike us  
as strange. The cold war was fading in 1999, we were witnessing a  
worldwide growth in wealth and standards of living, and Islamic  
terrorism was not yet seen as a serious global threat. It should have  
been a year of golden weather, a time for the human race to relax and  
look toward a brighter, more peaceful future. Instead, with computers  
as a flimsy pretext, many seemed to take pleasure in frightening  
themselves to death over a coming calamity.

No doubt part of the blame must go to those consultants who took  
businesses and governments for an expensive ride in the lead-up to New  
Year’s Day. But doom-laden exaggerations about Y2K fell on ears that  
were all-too receptive. The Y2K fiasco was about more than simple  
prudence.

Religions from Zoroastrianism to Judaism to Christianity to U.F.O.  
cults have been built around notions of sin and the world’s end. The  
Y2K threat resonated with those ideas. Human beings have constructed  
an enormous, wasteful, unnatural civilization, filled with sin — or,  
worse in some minds, pollution and environmental waste. Suppose it  
turned out that a couple of zeros inadvertently left off old computer  
codes brought crashing down the very civilization computers helped to  
create. Cosmic justice!

The theme of our fancy inventions ultimately destroying us has been a  
favorite in fiction at least since Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” We  
can place alongside this a continuous succession of spectacular films  
built on visions of the end of the world. Such end-time fantasies must  
have a profound, persistent appeal in order to keep drawing wide-eyed  
crowds into movie theaters, as historically they have drawn crowds  
into churches, year after year.

Apocalyptic scenarios are a diversion from real problems — poverty,  
terrorism, broken financial systems — needing intelligent attention.  
Even something as down-to-earth as the swine-flu scare has seemed at  
moments to be less about testing our health care system and its  
emergency readiness than about the fate of a diseased civilization  
drowning in its own fluids. We wallow in the idea that one day  
everything might change in, as St. Paul put it, the “twinkling of an  
eye” — that a calamity might prove to be the longed-for  
transformation. But turning practical problems into cosmic cataclysms  
takes us further away from actual solutions.

This applies, in my view, to the towering seas, storms, droughts and  
mass extinctions of popular climate catastrophism. Such entertaining  
visions owe less to scientific climatology than to eschatology, and  
that familiar sense that modernity and its wasteful comforts are  
bringing us closer to a biblical day of judgment. As that headline put  
it for Y2K, predictions of the end of the world are often intertwined  
with condemnations of human “folly, greed and denial.” Repent and  
recycle!

Denis Dutton is a professor of philosophy at the University of  
Canterbury, New Zealand.