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The Internet and its immense power for spreading rumors adds an unprecedented level of uncertainty when it comes to anticipating a possible mass mania. The proliferation of Y2K sites on the Net is matched only by the growth of sites with more explicitly apocalyptic themes. An unharmonic coincidence of otherwise insignificant Y2K glitches and public overreaction could turn minor problems into major public hysteria.

Eschatological terrorism

In this climate of millennial angst, an extreme and addled few may decide to help the end along with acts of violence. In 1992, a would-be assassin broke into the estate of Ronald Reagan, convinced that the former president was the antichrist of biblical lore. Overtly millennial overtones marked the notorious Oklahoma City bombing, which was conceived in part as revenge for the U.S. government's assault a year earlier on a community of apocalyptic Christian fundamentalists holed up in a compound in Waco, Texas. And the worst terrorist event of the decade, the Sarin nerve gas attack by the Aum Shin-rikyo cult in Tokyo in 1995, was explicitly millennial in nature.

Could these events be both harbinger and inspiration for a new kind of eschatological terrorism -- acts of violence by fanatical believers in a coming end, more than willing to sacrifice their lives in the service of self-fulfilling prophecies? Technology is a wild card in this scenario, conferring ever greater power upon ever smaller groups and even individuals. The Aum cult pressed Ph.D.s into service and even scoured Africa for samples of the Ebola virus. One shudders at what a deranged chemist or physicist or computer genius might accomplish, working alone and utterly unknown in the months approaching the new year.

Millennial fraud

Want to commit the perfect New Year's crime? Set yourself up as a Y2K software consultant and offer your services to unsuspecting companies desperate to fix their Y2K bugs. While you are poring over their deepest software secrets, insert a trapdoor into their code that allows you to return on New Year's Day, plunder their files and cover your tracks by making the theft look like a Y2K systems crash. This scenario loses its outlandishness when one considers that in the scramble to fix Y2K bugs, companies are turning to any number of consultants who have sprung up literally overnight. And even if the primary contractor is legitimate, an unknown percentage of this Y2K work is being subcontracted to consultants all over the globe.

Or skip the hassle of programming entirely and engage in simpler, more traditional scams. Fraudsters have already stung unsuspecting consumers by asking for their account numbers under the guise of Y2K testing down at the bank. When asked earlier in this century why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton replied, "Because that is where the money is." If Sutton were alive today, he would be learning HTML and C++, or working the telephone.

Millennial echoes

So Jan. 1, 2000, arrives without major upset -- don't relax yet, for often as not, the greatest impact of failed prophecies comes after the putative end. Recall that the millennium-struck Crusaders first headed to the Holy Land nearly 100 years after their New Year's Eve party. When The End fails to materialize this time around, many believers will simply conclude that they got the date wrong and become more convinced than ever that the end is nigh. And one of the late arrivals is no less than movie wizard Steven Spielberg, who is rumored to be hatching a Nostradamus-based thriller scheduled for a summer 2000 release. The same man who once convinced fans to believe in "E.T." now seems eager to turn us into eschatologists.

If we are very unlucky, far from being the end of millennial anxieties, the year 2000 may simply be the start of a decade-long silly season defined by no end of cults and wackos trying vainly to make their addled prophecies come to pass. But whether or not problems materialize, we are all certain to be well and truly sick of the millennium season long before it is over.

On the bright side, our cultural millennium bug also has the potential for generating more welcome surprises. Every end is also a beginning, and thus the fin de siècle will be closely followed by the debut de siècle, a time likely to be the reverse mirror of attitudes on this side of New Year's Eve. The end of the century has stood like a barrier to our sight line of the future -- our chronological horizon has steadily compressed over the latter half of this century, remaining largely fixed on the year 2000 even as the intervening years slip away.

But the world will wake up on New Year's Day and search for a new date out on a suddenly larger horizon. The consequence is likely to be a new focus on the long term, not just by business elites but among the global public at large. Publics will look to 2020, 2100 and perhaps even further into time.

A hundred years ago, the first decade of this century witnessed a global effloresence of such contemplation of the long term. Visionary writers like H.G. Wells described the sweep of the century to come, architects drew up radical new visions for our cities and artists realized utterly new forms of creative expression. Look for the same forces to exert themselves in the first decade of the next century, with a consequent quickening of creative vision and sense that all is possible, from meeting immediate challenges to opening vast new frontiers.

Of course, even this welcome focus on the long term is not without hazard. Consider how the utopian Futurist movement, originally a literary and artistic endeavor, metastasized into a darker political movement in the 1920s and beyond. Like our ancestors a hundred years ago, we will welcome the new century with a long look forward, and then the press of the immediate will tempt us to trade the vast view for a narrower gaze. Let us hope we have the wisdom to resist that temptation in the decade to come.
salon.com | May 18, 1999

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