Episode 15: THE WAY DOWN
[ASHES]
Standing there, on the mound, you look out to where the horizon should be.
You haven’t been able to see that far for a long time. In part, this is the ash, a substance perpetually falling from the sky in a thin veil.
It’s also because you haven’t been able to get hold of a pair of glasses since the collapse because the scientists claim they need them all.
There’s a distinct feeling to everything and it takes you a while to put your finger on it. It’s an old, almost forgotten feeling.
Remember when we used to have parties? Those fun things, back when fun was still a possibility and not an abstract notion?
And afterwards, the next morning there would be that feeling. Amidst the wreckage of the party the night before, bodies occupying unusual spaces, lying prone on the sofa, or the carpet, or in the bathtub.
Stale smoke in the air. Awkward bones and blown out hearing.
The brittle sonic environment of a hangover.
Yes, that’s it, the inevitability that you drank away last night combined with the regret of this morning.
That’s what this feels like.
[CHICKENS]
There’s that phrase, isn’t there?
Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.
It means that you shouldn’t celebrate success too early. That maybe you should wait until it is a certainty, rather than a likely.
Or maybe it isn’t a saying. Maybe it is a superstition.
An omen.
If you do celebrate too early, you doom yourself.
[WARNING]
He’s not playing Spock here, but that is what they are going for.
Logical.
This isn’t the Leonard Nimoy of The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins fame, this is the Leonard Nimoy of Boldly Going fame.
And he looks like a rugged Neo from The Matrix, hair cut short, utilitarian black clothes, back-dropped by scrolling computer data inter-cut with stock footage like an Adam Curtis film.
This isn’t a documentary, this is an emergency broadcast.
This is the Y2K Family Survival Guide.
After a brief description of the problem as an unfortunate lack of foresight leading to a potentially devastating series of computer issues, Nimoy begins to list everything that could be at risk.
Aeroplanes, banks, hospital equipment, broadcast equipment, federal records, school records, supermarkets, nuclear launch codes, everything.
There are rapid cuts between stock footage of heart monitors, and bank transactions.
What then follows is a prepper’s guide to the collapse of millennial civilisation.
Chemical toilets and dehydrated food… The latter presumably helping people avoid the former as much as possible.
We cut to a British veteran, Ted Wright, a former Desert Rat who survived outside Rome with just his wits, a gun, and a small hole he dug in the ground. He’s here to give practical tips on preparing for the imminent collapse.
He is emphatic about not following FEMA’s advice of tying up your waste in plastic bags, describing them as efficient bioreactors that will bring about new plagues.
We are informed that two gallons of oil will keep lamps lit for a month provided we only use them five hours a day.
You are told, more than once, to get hard copies of your bank statements and deeds to your property and to keep it safe with some cash and a passport, as if an accidental nuclear strike cares about such things.
My favourite line is, “Hot meal? Sure if you want to’, as if, in the future, the very notion of cooking via fire has been rendered a luxury.
And that is what we are being told here. This is a manual on how to survive without technology. It is teaching us the things that animals know instinctively, and things that we have somehow forgotten.
It isn’t all about survival though. Culture gets a brief nod. Remember to pack things that don’t require electricity.
Puzzles, crafts, books.
Whilst we can assume this video inspired hundreds of people to run out to buy Mason jars and lamp oil to be stashed in their basement ahead of the oncoming apocalypse, I can’t quite see them all running out and buying enough books to get them through a crisis. These are the sort of people who are planning to bury their own faeces like feral cats, and the only need they have for books is as a handy source of makeshift toilet paper.
It was the best of wipes, it was the worst of wipes.
Towards the end, all of the experts are asked, on a scale of one to five, how damaging is the Y2K problem going to be.
Most go for two, some go for two and a half.
One expert says, “World-wide, easily a four, but here in America, maybe a two at most” as if the very notion of globalism will be rendered pointless by the catastrophe.
The video ends with a final word from Nimoy. He reminds us about the myth of another civilisation. This civilisation collapsed because of technology.
It’s just a myth, he says.
It’s just a myth.
[CAYCE]
Born in 1877, Edgar Cayce was a clairvoyant.
Actually, he wasn’t a clairvoyant, he was a quack, a charlatan, and a liar, but he was known as a clairvoyant.
He spoke of healing, reincarnation, the afterlife, past lives, nutrition and Atlantis.
In many ways he ushered in the New Age movement. with his non-profit organisation, the Association for Research and Enlightenment. It sounds very scientific, but it was the opposite of that.
Often, when you want to sell something completely unscientific, it helps to describe it using sciency words.
Research and Enlightenment.
Proof.
Evidence
Conclusion.
Beards.
Thick glasses.
Cayce, like most self-described psychics, predicted the end of the world on a regular basis. He proclaimed, in 1933 that San Francisco would be destroyed by an earthquake in 1936, a revelation that came to him in a dream:
I had been born again in 2100 A.D. in Nebraska. The sea apparently covered all of the western part of the country, as the city where I lived was on the coast. The family name was a strange one. At an early age as a child I declared myself to be Edgar Cayce who had lived 200 years before. Scientists, men with long beads, little hair, and thick glasses, were called in to observe me. They decided to visit the places where I said I had been born, lived, and worked in Kentucky, Alabama, New York, Michigan, and Virginia. Taking me with them the group of scientists visited these places in a long, cigar-shaped metal flying ship which moved at a high speed. Water covered part of Alabama. Norfolk, Virginia, had become an immense seaport. New York had been destroyed either by war or an immense earthquake and was being rebuilt. Industries were scattered over the countryside. Most of the houses were built of glass. Many records of my work as Edgar Cayce were discovered and collected. The group returned to Nebraska, taking the records with them to study... These changes in the earth will come to pass, for the time and times and half times are at an end, and there begins those periods for the readjustments.
Obviously, this didn’t happen.
In 1936 we did get the Clark Cable film, Earthquake about the 1906 San Francisco disaster. Maybe he caught his dream-self popping along to the cinema and misunderstood.
Wouldn’t that be fascinating? Our Astral bodies having social lives much like our own, taking some time off to listen to music or catch a movie.
Or maybe those scientists in 2100 had got it wrong.
It happens.
In that quote, just towards the very end, you’ll see that Cayce mentions “These changes in the Earth”.
Earth Changes were part of a central philosophy for him. The idea that the planet would soon, relatively speaking, undergo a serious of cataclysms brought about through natural and man made disasters.
He predicted the polar axis would shift.
Atlantis would re-emerge.
Crazy, huh?
We do know that Edgar Cayce didn’t predict his own end. He passed on 3 January, 1945 in the Virginia mountains, where he was recovering from a sudden illness.
It is also not known if he celebrated the new year two days before.
[CIVILISATION]
I was given a copy of Jared Diamond’s Germs Guns & Steel for Christmas in around 1998.
As an aside, a book is a great present to give someone for Christmas as it gives them a legitimate excuse to disappear from reality for a little while, even as they are sat right there on the sofa. It let’s them sink beneath the swelling waves of social interactions stretched thin.
If you want a harmonious Christmas, make sure people have escape routes.
In the book, Diamond proposes that most of history, and why certain civilisations come to dominate the narrative, are not because of inherent differences between people, but environmental factors.
At a surface level this may mean that people with access to ready supplies of food and another resources can concentrate more of their time on thinking.
Another way of looking at it is that the environmental challenges people faced also informed their technology.
For example, people living in the British Isles had to build houses that were waterproof. When time came to build sea-faring vessels, we just turned those structures upside down, so to speak.
The theory is not without criticism. It seems achingly Euro-centric and also implies that much of history is a form of accidental colonisation.
He also attributes to Europeans technology that could be more accurately be described as Asian and Middle Eastern in origin.
More fundamentally is the metric Diamond uses for “advanced”. He chooses technological innovation over the happiness and well-being of the population. He picks global reach and conquest over societies that are satisfied with contained locality.
It would be interesting to question a small nomadic group surviving through substance foraging if they would be any happier working in a factory during the industrial revolution.
In his subsequent book, Collapse, Jared Diamond looked at the opposite phenomenon. Why is it that societies and civilisations ultimately collapse?
He concludes that in almost all cases the factors are environmental. These may be natural disasters or man-made pressures. Deforestation, soil issues (salination, declining fertility), water management and over-population.
He also speculates that in the future anthropogenic climate change, coupled with a build up of toxins in the environment will lead to rapid depopulation and further collapse.
Again, there was some controversy. Diamond forgot to reference the aggression of industrialised societies on civilisations they deemed conquerable or exploitable being a factor.
He also limited his scope to the physical environment.
What if our environment isn’t purely physical? What if it is cultural… conceptual, even?
The erosion isn’t just happening to the soil when it is happening to your human rights, supported by billionaires with their platforms and algorithms under the aegis of technological progress.
Culture slowly turning sour, riddled with the toxins of capitalism that pushes unhealthy lives.
[CHICKENS]
The entire planet celebrated the millennium as the clocks struck midnight on the 31st December 1999.
I can remember where I was. I was at the Yorkshire House.
It was full of people and smoke and music.
Back then it was always full of people and smoke and music.
Now, it isn’t.
We’d awake on the first day of this new era half-deaf and unable to speak from shouting over the noise all night.
Glorious.
I remember a conversation.
“Thing is, this isn’t even the start of the millennium. There wasn’t a year zero. That’s not how time even works. We’re a year too early.”
They were right. We had, in our desperation for something to look forward too, opened our presents a year too early.
And then we were counting down. We were counting down the seconds. Some people thought they were counting down to the new millennium.
Some of us thought we were counting our chickens.
[ATLANTIS]
Edgar Cayce helped popularise the modern myth of Atlantis.
It’s a myth that has been used as a warning about hubris. It has been used as a justification for genocide.
The myth of Atlantis is a flexible, useful fiction.
Earlier mentions of an advanced civilisation can be found in the writings of Plato, who described the island nation of existing on an island the size of Asia and Libya combined, just past the pillars of Hercules. He described their downfall being brought about through a disastrous war with Athens followed by earthquakes and floods.
Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophists transformed the Atlanteans into cultural heroes. The Nazis relocated them as Nordic superheroes.
Cayce added flavour to this suggesting it was the Atlantean’s own technology that eventually brought about their downfall. He also suggested that the people of Atlantis migrated to the Yucatan Peninsula and to Egypt.
Interestingly, Cayce also suggests that the technology of Atlantis would make a comeback. His dream visions led to him seeing flying vehicles and strange energy sources.
Sadly, none of his predictions were concerned with the internet.
Cayce also believed that the whole history of Atlantis had been stored in three separate locations, one of them being in a hall of records under the Sphinx in Egypt.
He doesn’t tell us how this information is stored, or if the good folk of Atlantis still used pen and paper despite their technological advances. He avoids the question of whether their data was stored using a proprietary codec.
At the time of writing the hall of records has yet to be rediscovered.
[ADVERT]
We open of a shot of the city skyline from the other side of the Queensboro bridge.
Cut to a garbage truck passing a warehouse as two young men speed out from under a shutter. They are on skateboards.
Cut to a band. This is Reef, an English band, from near Glastonbury, who are now apparently recording a demo song in a warehouse loft, somewhere in the city.
There’s an awkward cut in the song as we snap from the lazy funk of the verse to a mid section of the chorus. It feels a little like when a CD skips.
“The Sony Minidisc can do everything ordinary tape can do, except on a Minidisc you can record digitally”
Cut to a Minidisc being handed over to a suited record executive in his office. The band sit squished uncomfortably on a single sofa in front of some platinum disks on the wall.
The voice-over continues as we see the executive make a number of dismissive gestures and poses whilst listening to the recording.
“It has random access”
The executive makes a snap decision, ejects the disc and flings it outside, through an open window. It is not clear if he always does this.
The disc plummets from the high-rise building.
“It’s capable of taking the…”
The disc slaps the concrete pavement. The absence of a pile of other media suggests the executive does not normally fling things out of the window.
The wheels of a skateboard roll over the disc.
“…odd little knock”
The skateboarder stops, picks up the disc and slots it into a waist mounted player.
Please, do not question that he was just skating around with his headphones in, listening to nothing at all.
“And it is as portable as you are”
He skates off looking for something that can be described as either “rad” or “gnarly”.
“Sony Minidisc, the future of tape”.
[Y2K]
The problem was caused through pragmatism.
It was memory that was limited, not foresight.
By storing year dates as two digits, rather than four, significant amounts of memory could be saved. The rationale being that for the majority of the twentieth century remaining, the “19” part of the year date would go unchanged, and so could just be taken as read.
There was plenty of time, and plenty of scope for new, better code on better hardware that wouldn’t need this rather crude fix.
Except, that’s not how computers advanced, as a technology. Instead, we replaced the things that we could and left the things that seemingly worked.
There were people throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s who pointed out that a lot of code still relied on the two digit date system that would, when we reached the year 2000, fall backwards to 1900 instead of stepping into a new millennium, but they were mostly ignored.
There was plenty of time.
Besides, no one will be using this code and this hardware then.
Except we were.
On a foundation of archaic code, created when memory was scare, we built an entire digital world. Banking, medicine, travel, utilities, communications.
And in that time we had come to rely on all of these things.
[90S]
The run up to the millennium was a rather wonderful time, in hindsight.
Of course, there were still wars, economic uncertainty, disease, famine and all the forms of prejudice… homophobia, xenophobia, misogyny, racism… there are always wars, economic uncertainty, disease, famine and all forms of prejudice…
But it was also a strangely optimistic time.
The internet brought a new frontier and with it came an economic boost and a new form of liberalism.
You could be whoever you wanted to be online. You were unburdened by class, race or sexual identity. You could just pick a username and off you go on your merry way.
As Peter Steiner’s 1993 cartoon in the New Yorker (and later to be internet meme) puts it, ‘On the internet, nobody knows you are a dog’.
The film industry was undergoing another golden period that saw low budget indie films sitting next to big blockbusters.
Grunge and dance music had demonstrated a global appeal for what was once considered underground music. Hip hop was beginning to dominate the music charts.
Fandom had powered communities of TV series like The X-Files and Twin Peaks and a new home on the internet had helped it flourish, replete with off-topic forum boards and flame wars.
And technology in general, CDs brought nearly perfect audio to the masses. We had games consoles with brilliant games. Couch co-op brought people together and helped them fall out with each other in their own homes.
There were courses teaching you how to “surf the web”.
But underneath all of this there was an anxiety lurking like a sunken civilisation.
There’s an interview with David Bowie, a big fan of the emergent internet. Jeremy Paxman, on Newsnight in 1999, asks, “It’s just a tool though isn’t it?”.
Bowie responds:
No. It’s an alien life form [laughing], is there life on Mars? Yes, it’s just landed here…
The potential of what the Internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable…
The actual context and state of content is going to be so different to anything we envisage at the moment.
Where the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in simpatico it’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.
It’s happening in every form. That grey space in the middle is what the 21st century is going to be about.
And just look at those lyrics of Jamiroquai’s 1996 banger, Virtual Insanity.
[PREDICTIONS]
If you are going to get into the clairvoyance game, there’s certainly a technique you can employ.
It goes like this:
Predict new technology (Death Rays, Sentient Technology, Strange Power Sources. All popular choices).
Predict doom, associated with that new technology.
That should, at least, get you as far as the next millennium.
You can also throw in the big guns. The Second Coming. Armageddon and, for seasoning, add some wars. If your visions are not giving you an exact location, it is probably best to say something vague and evergreen, like The Middle East.
Edgar Cayce wasn’t shy of predicting any of this. His dream visions showed him great earthquakes and impending technologically inspired terrors.
He also had Jesus rocking up, again, in 1998 in plenty of time for the year 2000 beer run.
He also predicted that there would be conflict in The Middle East.
[PAST DATES OF DOOM]
The Y2K bug gets the attention, but it wasn’t the only date related computer apocalypse.
For example, the date of 5 January 1975 caused an issue when the 12-bit field that stored DEC PDP-10 dates overflowed. This was referred to as the DATE75 bug.
The TOPS-10 operating system on the DEC PDP-10 calculated the date by simply taking the number of years since 1964, multiplying by 12, adding the number of months since January, multiplying by 31, and adding the number of days since the start of the month.
The maximum value that could be stored in the 12-bit field was 4095, which corresponded to January 4, 1975.
The DEC PDP-10 looked a bit like a wonderful blue wardrobe with spinning tape wheels. When you picture rooms full of computers in the 1970s, you are probably picturing these.
We managed to survive this disaster without the aid of prepper-style videos that taught us how to live off dried food and rainwater until order was restored. Maybe we didn’t know the severity of it. Perhaps we didn’t think computers had permeated too much of our every day lives at that point.
They were big, hulking machines that sat in dedicated rooms. They were exceptional rather than ubiquitous.
Let’s look at something a little closer.
Shortly before the Y2K problem came the 9 September 1999 issue.
9/9/99.
In this footnote of computer date shenanigans, there was a problem because the number 9999 had been frequently used to store the information of “unknown date”. This was particularly useful for rolling contracts and placeholder information.
There was no fuss made of this either. Maybe we were already fixated on the Y2K bug. Either way, we survived this also.
Ultimately it caused little trouble beyond a few misunderstandings.
At best it was a warning shot.
An omen.
[ATLANTIS]
There are two ways of looking at it.
Head on, it appears that every civilisation carries with it stories of an earlier civilisation that had strayed, spiritually, only to be wiped clean by a flood.
The Cheyenne, a North American Great Plains tribe, have a flood story, as do the Hopi and the Mayans.
Judeo-Christianity and Hinduism have flood myths.
The epic of Gilgamesh features a flood.
Atlantis is just another addition.
Perhaps all of these stories are referencing the same event. Perhaps there was a super-advanced civilisation that found their own undoing in their technology.
That is certainly one way of looking at it. A way that might seem concurrent with Jared Diamond’s thesis on environmental damage causing the extinction of civilisations or with Edgar Cayce’s dream visions of the future.
Another way of looking at it, perhaps with a sideways glance, is that these floods didn’t really happen, or if they did, they were unconnected natural disasters with no meaning and no thought, the consequences of nothing other than geography and poor luck.
Instead, the reason why these myths persist in our cultures is that they tap into something fundamental about our psyche.
We fear ourselves and what we are capable of.
We have a pathological need to warn and re-warn ourselves that we have a capacity for making things that get out of hand. Rules stripped of context, governments stripped of restraint, technology stripped of purpose.
When our first ancestor fashioned a tool out of flint, they also fashioned a weapon.
With every discovery and invention comes a new way of seeing our own destruction. It’s psychological firmware, written deep in our lizard brain like a line of atavistic code.
At some point there are so many ways for our tools to destroy us that we become fixated on the inevitable point at which they go from being something that enables us to something that removes us altogether.
[FUTURE DATES OF DOOM]
In 2010 there was confusion between dates stored in binary-coded decimal and those encoded in hexadecimal.
Both store the numbers 0–9 as 0x0–0x9.
The problem comes when we reach the number 10.
Binary-coded decimal encodes the number 10 as 0x10, however, hexadecimal interprets this as 16.
The fallout of this was surprisingly large. In Germany 20 million bank cards became unusable when ‘valid from’ and ‘expiry’ dates that should have ended 2010 suddenly ended 2016.
Then there’s the Y2K22 bug. The shortened acronym is getting a little stretched, and it might be quicker just to say the words out loud.
The maximum value of a signed 32-bit integer, as used in many computer systems, is 2147483647. Some machines stored the year in the leftmost digits, meaning that January 1, 2022 would be 2200000001.
This date problem caused problems with the Microsoft Exchange Server 2016, in particular, the part that scans for malware. Emails were held endlessly in transport queues until the problem was fixed.
Shortly after we roll into 2038 any system that runs on Unix time (and there are an awful lot of these) will have a blip. These systems can only represent dates between 13 December 1901 (at 20:45:52) and 19 January 2038 (at 03:14:08) due to the limits of the dates being stored as 32-bit integers.
It is expected that rather than waking up on 20 January, 2038, we will be somehow transported back to the year of 1901.
The there is some deliberate time travel that will be needed by owners of early Nokia phones from Series 40. These only support dates up to 31 December 2079.
In the unlikely event of someone still using a mobile phone that will be over 70 years old, the only fix would be to rewind the clock back to a compatible date, such as 1996 to display the correct day of the week on the main screen.
Excel will eventually collapse as the maximum (as of 2025) supported date for spreadsheet calculation is 31 December 9999. Similarly, optical disc file systems have a date range that ends then too.
We’ll also be hitting a problem in the year 10,000 since this will be the first date of the Gregorian calendar to feature a year with five digits.
The problem is this. Our current technological paradigm, no matter how advanced it may seem, was flawed from the start.
There are a near infinite number of problems to be solved, and this is only when we consider dates. As time advances, our upkeep of this technology will continue. Until we discover a way to store infinite digits, this problem will persist.
In 292,277,026,569 the 64-bit integers that Unix currently uses to store times and dates will run out of space once again. This time it will create a mini-apocalypse at 15:30:08 on Sunday 4 December.
This is our forever problem.
[Y2K]
I’m not sure when it happened exactly. It feels like it was after the event, or maybe very shortly before, possibly starting in the US, like these things usually do.
We went from calling it “The Y2K Bug” or “The Y2K Problem” to just “Y2K”.
A triplet of characters that simply means, “The Year 2000”.
[MINIDISC]
You sweep away some of the ash that has settled. It feels oddly fluffy and light.
As you clear the desk you become an archeologist.
Ancient objects reveal themselves slowly.
You’ve seen some of these things before, although none of them work anymore. They need a power supply that no longer exists. The outlets and sockets are purely decorative.
But here it is, the thing you are looking for.
A palm-sized square. The pinnacle of ancient technology.
They called it Minidisk.
It harnessed an obscure, arcane physical property called the Curie Point.
The Curie point is the temperature above which certain materials lose their permanent magnetic properties, becoming paramagnetic.
The Minidisk uses a laser to do this.
A laser!
It uses a remarkably high quality, but lossy audio compression called ATRAC to fit 75 minutes of music on a re-recordable disk, housed in a 7cm square plastic case.
You know all of this because you read it in a book that someone had been smart enough to stash in their bunker right beside some empty jars, a chemical toilet, and some near useless passports.
This is it. The most advanced technology we have ever built. Digital, mechanical, magnetic, optical and all powered by a single 1.5v AA battery.
And in your hands, as you turn it over and admire it. This is useful. Really useful. You’ll be able to hand it to those beardy, glasses-wearing scientists and they’ll give you a month’s worth of dried meat.
[PREPPERS]
There’s a bit in The Clock of The Long Now, where the accessibility of technology is explained.
If, in some dystopian future, you pick up a CD but do not have a CD player, how are you going to access it? Even if you know what it is, and even if you understand how, theoretically, to extract the data, you still might struggle finding or making the components to do so.
How about if you pick up a vinyl record? You might struggle to understand its purpose, but it is far more likely that you will be able to access it with something as simple as a pin and a paper cup.
The data is more apparent.
The same is true of things like books. You can infer things from them, just by studying them. I recommend you pick up a foreign language book, particularly a language you don’t know anything about, and spend some time with it. You’d be surprised by the information you can extract.
Even when the power goes out, books still work.
Maybe our downfall isn’t that we stray from our spirituality, but that we lose contact with the immediacy of our world. That technology becomes ever more abstract and notional and that we spend more of our lives living in this holographic realm.
With each act of compression, with codecs and algorithms, with things stored ‘in the cloud’ rather than locally, with songs streamed but not owned, with subscriptions rather than buying, access to tools that disappear when a company folds, proprietary file formats, copy protection that relies on active servers….
There are people swimming against this flood.
They are going back to owning DVDs rather than watching films on Netflix because they’ve fallen foul of their favourite show just evaporating.
The are hoarding vinyl and tapes and CDs and Minidiscs because streaming platforms are replacing their content with AI approximations and still somehow justifying cramming adverts into their subscriptions.
And creators of arts of all kinds are becoming wary about sharing it digitally as it gets swallowed by large language models and algorithmic AI.
There’s a return to hand written exams and essays because homework can’t be trusted.
The news can’t trust video any more.
Our cultural well is polluted and it causes a strange sickness in all of us. One that starts with symptoms of paranoia followed by rapid polarisation.
It is making us act in strange ways no longer in our own best interests.
This is the environmental damage that afflicts our civilisation.
Right now there are probably videos being made about it using an AI generated facsimile of Leonard Nimoy warning us to keep copies of print media and our passports. It glitches around like it is in the actual matrix as it tells us the best way to deal with digital effluent.
[THE AFTERMATH]
In the end, most people noticed nothing at all.
When the dust settled we woke up with our terrible hangovers, clothes smelling like an ashtray. We would perceive this new era through bleary eyes that hurt in the light and heads that throbbed in time with our heartbeats.
The television worked and we watched people all over the world lose their collective shit a year early, aided by spectacular firework displays and awkward hand-holding renditions of Auld Lang Syne.
It’s a common trope to now see it as a lot of fuss made over something that wasn’t worth it, but the real truth is that thousands of people put in hundreds of thousands of man hours at the cost of billions to make sure the world didn’t end.
Or at least that the planes didn’t drop out of the sky, and that emails would continue to be delivered in a timely fashion and that your bank cards would work.
The Millennium Dome opened, a strange monument to nothing at all except surviving the passage of time.
Prince Charles started the morning by presenting “Thought for the Day” on BBC Radio 4. His thought echoed that of Plato and Cayce, and Diamond and everyone else who talks about the fall of civilisations as they stray from the spiritual towards the technological.
He said:
Perhaps, in the midst of all the celebrations and the hype, deep down inside many of us may feel intuitively – to paraphrase a wonderful passage from Dante – that the strongest desire of everything, and the one first implanted by nature, is to return to its source. And since God is the source of our souls and has made it alike unto himself... therefore this soul desires above all things to return to Him.
[LAST PARTY OF THE YEAR]
Maybe we have over simplified things.
Maybe we conflated two things because we didn’t really understand the implications of either.
What if, on one hand you had the purely technical issue, the Y2K bug, and on the other you had Y2K, the psychological event precipitated by our own inbuilt recognition that we had finally crossed a divide.
That technology was not serving us, so much as we were serving it.
A deep-seated realisation that maybe we had reached the apex of our civilisation and that from here on it was all downhill. That we threw a party as a final hurrah to things getting slowly better, to optimism, to a shared human purpose.
That we finally understood the inevitability of planes falling out of the sky and nuclear reactors causing untold damage through neglect and error, and the certainty that we would become less capable and less understanding in our new world.
A moment where we realised that technology would be in charge of us, and that we would be playing catch up.
Servile and obsequious.
We had made the thing that would destroy us, it was out of our hands.
Our eggs had hatched and our chickens were digital. You can only count them in hexadecimal or binary-coded decimal, and things get weird after you have more than ten of them.
The acknowledgement that the end was approaching.
This is the hangover of that celebration.
