The real Y2K bug

Tue, 18 May 1999 16:00:00 +0000

There are two millennium bugs lurking in our future -- one in our computers and the other in our culture. The calendar glitches in our machines will cause more than their share of mischief. But the culture bug will have vastly greater impact on our lives -- and unlike our computer headaches, the culture bug can't be patched with a few lines of code. The good news is that the culture bug may also be a feature: Along with the problems it delivers, it will also yield some unexpected benefits.

This cultural Y2K bug stems from our human fascination with boundaries. We trace figures in the clouds, draw borders on the landscape -- and slice time's continuum into arbitrary chunks as small as seconds and as large as millennia. Thus, the temptation to invest our greatest hopes -- and deepest fears-- into the moment the old year rolls into the new is all but irresistible. And zeros amplify this inclination: The greater the number of zeros in a year to come, the sooner we get nervous and the longer it lasts. Decades make us twitch, and century-ends can change the trajectory of popular culture -- as happened 100 years ago, when centennial-struck citizens in Europe and America spent the better part of the 1890s contemplating what was to come. The moment survives in our vocabulary, with fin de sihcle being synonymous with a mood of sophistication, world-weariness and fashionable despair.

Salon.com > Paul Saffo

The real Y2K bug