“Y2K is real. It’s coming” – On the Righteous Gemstones and Remembering Y2K

A furious crowd had gathered in front of a prominent televangelist’s church. With placards denouncing the church’s leadership—accusing them of lying—the former members of the flock chanted angrily. And when the church’s leaders arrived, in their limousine no less, the protestors banged on the vehicle’s side, refusing to let their fury be ignored. While inside that limousine the couple whose name was synonymous with that church wondered what they had done to deserve this treatment…granted, they knew exactly what they had done, and they had a quiet suspicion that the vitriol being directed at them was at least somewhat deserved.

Based on the previous paragraph: what was the cause of the protest?

Chances are pretty good that whatever you guessed, it probably wasn’t Y2K. Or, more specifically, how a church had tapped into the anxiety in the run up to the year 2000 to sell books, video cassettes, and expensive buckets of survival food.

After all, the switch from 1999 to 2000 happened more than 23 years ago. And though the switchover happened without any of the catastrophes that some folks were predicting, it seems kind of odd that people would still be protesting about it 23 years later.

In fairness, the protest itself, or the footage of the protest, was supposed to have taken place in the early days of the year 2000. But the protest itself actually takes place in the third season of the HBO/Max program The Righteous Gemstones, in which Y2K serves as a major plot point. Well, not so much Y2K itself as how the family of televangelists (the Gemstones) at the center of the show had profited off of Y2K, and how their greed sets off a chain of events that comes back to haunt the family decades later. It’s not so much that the episode is engaged in saying anything particularly interesting about Y2K, as that the episode is interested in exploiting the vague memory of Y2K in order to further mockingly skewer the Gemstone family.

The Righteous Gemstones is a silly show. An over-the-top satire of a family of narcissistic hypocritical bullies who insist that they’re serving God, when it is repeatedly made clear that they are only interested in padding their bank accounts and own egos. Created by Danny McBride, the show delights in foul language, slapstick violence, crude sexual humor, and bizarre characters—with the starring Gemstone family played by John Goodman, Adam DeVine, Edi Patterson, and McBride himself (with Walter Goggins turning in an especially hilarious performance as a Gemstone relation). Much of the show’s action, set in the present day, follows the misadventures of the younger Gemstone siblings (DeVine, Patterson, and McBride) as they seek to take over their family’s church from their father (Goodman). While the younger Gemstones are portrayed as crass bumbling fools, spoiled rich kids unable and unworthy of leading the family church, Dr. Elijah “Eli” Gemstone the paterfamilias (Goodman) is generally portrayed as a shrewd church leader and businessman, he has a capacity to bully and swindle but always appears significantly more sincere in his faith than his offspring. Furthermore, Eli’s dearly departed wife Aimee-Leigh (Jennifer Nettles) is often portrayed as something of a saint in the Gemstone’s memory (and in actuality), a voice of empathetic reason who restrained the families worst impulses (that have taken over in her absence).

What makes the Y2K episode a telling portrait of the Gemstone family is that it is not set in the present (obviously) but more than twenty years ago. And though much of the show focuses on the selfish scheming of Jesse (McBride), Judy (Patterson), and Kelvin (DeVine), the Y2K episode makes it clear that Eli is far from a paragon of virtue—quite happy to take advantage of trusting parishioners—and perhaps more importantly that Aimee-Leigh was a participant in the schemes as well.

As a satire of televangelists, The Righteous Gemstones taps into Y2K as an opportunity to heap further scorn on the Gemstone family. Portraying Y2K as yet another example of a time when the Gemstone family used their position—and the faith of their followers—in order to line their own pockets. While the show is filled with other schemes the family concocts in order to make money, what sets Y2K apart is that it was a real event. Indeed, the Y2K plot line works by tapping into (and reinforcing) the way that Y2K has come to be remembered in the popular imagination: a hoax that was hyped up by doomsday grifters (many of them religious, like the Gemstones) and irresponsible media outlets. In popular culture there seems to be a memory of ominous headlines about 1999 becoming 2000, a sense that it all had something to do with computers, and a memory that the year 2000 began without major incident. Thus, as The Righteous Gemstones so perfectly demonstrates, today it is easy to look back at Y2K and laugh—and the less well we remember Y2K the easier it is to laugh at it.

History matters. The past matters. And the way that those bygone days get remembered in the present matters. All of which is to say, that even though few people are likely to ever point to The Righteous Gemstones as an authoritative source on the past, it’s worth paying attention to the way that it presents the past. In fairness, it’s not so much that The Righteous Gemstones gets Y2K wrong (there really were some religious figures who exploited fears around Y2K in order to make a quick buck selling survival supplies), as that the view it presents of Y2K is so focused on doomsday religious grifters that it misses the larger context and the larger story. And this is a particular problem with the memory of Y2K, which has come to focus on exactly that part of the story (doomsday grifters) while ignoring the rest of the story.

Thus, it’s worthwhile to discuss some of the broader context. Not because we expect satirical comedy shows to get everything right about past events, but because many watching those shows don’t really know all that much about the historical events being satirized.

We interrupt this program for a brief explanation of what the year 2000 computing crisis (Y2K) really was.

To summarize it quickly: in the mid-twentieth century, computer memory was still very expensive, and anything programmers could do to save memory also saved money. Thus, responding to demands to save money from managers and executives, programmers hit on the idea of truncating dates—coding dates using six characters instead of eight characters. This worked quite well…as long, that is, as the computer could assume that the missing century digits were 1 and 9, but it wouldn’t work so well once those missing century digits became 2 and 0. Should those missing century digits be wrong it could cause a variety of problems for impacted systems: some systems could fail altogether, some could churn out a ton of garbage data, and some would trundle along without issue (not every computer system relies that heavily on dates). Programmers knew truncating dates would be a problem when the year 2000 rolled around, but everyone figured someone else would fix it, or it would cease being a problem once memory became cheaper…but time marched on, the can was kicked down the road, and as new code was built atop old code these problems were buried deeper. By the time programmers began sounding the alarm in the early 1990s, time was running out, and to make matters worse computers had become much more prevalent (and many more essential functions relied on computers).

This was a technical problem, but in the process of trying to sound the alarm loud enough to get managers and executives to take it seriously (and devote the funds necessary for fixing it) awareness of the problem spilled beyond the IT world. Businesses (notably the financial sector) started to realize they were at risk, governments started to realize the same—and there was a flurry of activity to find and fix the problems before the deadline. And while some in the tech press had deliberately used hyperbolic language to draw attention to the problem, that hyperbolic language was uncritically picked up and circulated by some media outlets and fringe figures. As a technical problem, Y2K was one that was being furiously worked on by a legion of IT workers around the world, who were working around the clock to check and correct the various systems—with their progress being carefully monitored by executives and officials (the US Senate even convened a special committee on Y2K).

Y2K revealed the extent to which modern societies had become dependent on the normal functioning of computer systems, and it did so by raising the specter of some of those systems failing. It was a new kind of problem, one surrounded by a fair amount of uncertainty. Granted, by the time the public really started paying attention to the problem most in the technical community had concluded that the worst that would happen were some “bumps in the road,” even if there were still some people who were preparing for the worst.

And when the year 2000 began without major incident people were quick to remember the most hyperbolic headlines, and just as quick to forget all of the people who had worked tirelessly to make sure those headlines remained hyperbole (while also conveniently forgetting all of the experts who—at the time—had pointed out those headlines were hyperbole).

We now return to our previously scheduled program…

“Y2K is real. It’s coming.”

When Eli Gemstone speaks this line, directly into the camera, it comes as part of an infomercial in which Eli and Aimee-Leigh sit side by side on a couch urging people to buy “Gemstone Survival Buckets.” Buckets of emergency supplies that just so happen to feature a neat little “Y2K Ready!” on the packaging. The language in the ad is ominous, tapping into fears about preparedness, with the Gemstones specifically invoking Jesus in order to make the case that it is not just that the Gemstones want people to be safe and ready, but that (as Eli puts it) “the Lord wants you to be safe.” The ad is clearly created in such a way as to seem ridiculous to viewers of The Righteous Gemstones, but in truth the ad isn’t too outlandish when held up against other advertisements out there hocking survival supplies and miracle cures. Though it is important to recognize that the world of dodgy survival supplies and snake oil salespeople is one that predated Y2K, and one which continues to thrive quite well today. Nevertheless, beyond the religious comments and the Gemstone branded sales pitch, the punchline of the ad winds up being Eli gloomily stating: “Y2K is real. It’s coming.”

Here is a similar line. Granted, the following line has the virtue of really coming from the year 1999, and it also comes from a source that was actually interested in dealing with the problem (and managing the public perception) not selling survival gear:

“The good news is that talk of the death of civilization, to borrow from Mark Twain, has been greatly exaggerated. The bad news is that Committee research has concluded that the Y2K problem is very real and that Y2K risk management efforts must be increased to avert serious disruptions.”

The above lines come from the initial report issued by the Senate’s Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem. That report was the cumulative result of the Committee’s early work on Y2K—which consisted of numerous hearings where experts from a range of fields came to testify. And the Committee would issue another report at the “100 Day” mark (as well as a “Crisis Averted” report in the early days of 2000). If you are looking for a rigorous and sober account of Y2K, as it was seen at the time by those with access to the best available information (and you don’t want to devote years of your life to researching Y2K), that report is a good piece to read. Heck, even its executive summary will provide a much more nuanced view of the realities of Y2K, then the popular hindsight blessed view.

In looking at the previous quotation from the Committee’s report, there are several things worth pointing to directly as they provide some needed context. First and foremost: though it is played for laughs when Eli says “Y2K is real,” the report also clearly acknowledges that “the Y2K problem is very real.” Granted, this point does need to be placed in the fuller context of the rest of the quotation, namely: “the talk of the death of civilization…has been greatly exaggerated.” One of the challenges the Committee confronted (and many others working on Y2K confronted) was in needing to recognize that Y2K was a “real” problem that required genuine attention, while simultaneously pushing back on all “the talk of the death of civilization.” The Gemstones did not release a real Y2K book (the Gemstones are not real), but the Senate Committee (as well as many of the technical experts) were deliberately engaged in pushing back on the many very real apocalyptic hucksters like the Gemstones. That being said, we should not ignore that the Committee also noted, “risk management efforts must be increased to avert serious disruptions” which is a more complicated way of saying “It’s coming.” There are real problems and challenges in the world that need to be addressed in order to avoid “serious disruptions,” and working on those problems requires recognizing that they are “real;” however, that doesn’t mean that those problems are necessarily apocalyptic.

The Special Committee’s report presented an in depth analysis of the Y2K problem, one that drew upon expert testimony and information in order to assess Y2K’s risks to numerous sectors (including: utilities, health care, telecommunications, transportation, financial institutions, government, and general business). One of the main points that the Committee recognize is that computers had become essential to the functioning of a wide range of sectors, and thus a problem that threatened to cause widespread problems for computers had the potential to snarl those sectors. Importantly, though, the committee was not singing a funeral dirge and telling people to buy survival supplies. Far from it! The report was a calm consideration of the basis of the problem, all of the work that had already been done to address the problem, and an acknowledgement that in the time remaining there was still more work to be done.

I imagine that if you went to members of the Special Committee (or sober minded IT experts) in 1998 or 1999 and presented them with the ad from the Gemstones they would probably reply with some version of “Well, I agree that Y2K is real, and Y2K is coming…but people are working around the clock to make sure that when it comes, it won’t be a problem.” And the reason I feel confident imagining this is because members of the Special Committee (and sober minded IT experts) were routinely asked to respond to the exaggerated claims of people like the Gemstones.

Yes, there were people like the Gemstones saying “Y2K is real…buy this survival bucket.” But it is worth remembering that they were exploiting the fact that figures with much more authority than them were also saying “the Y2K problem is very real.” Granted, most of those authoritative figures were also taking great pains to reassure people that they did not need to buy survival buckets (and that they should be wary of those selling survival buckets).

“Do you think it’s unethical to scare people and then benefit from that fearmongering?”

Clad in a flowing white robe and a wooden sandwich board, a long-haired man walked barefoot down the snowy street, holding a cross aloft in his right hand. All around the man cars were snarled in traffic, and panicked people stared anxiously at the man. Granted, the man was not the source of the onlookers’ anxiety, they were probably much more concerned about the computers that were literally falling from the sky. The Millennium Clock’s countdown had reached zero, and the man’s sandwich board read in dramatic caps: “the end of the world!?!” followed by the words “Y2K insanity! Apocalypse Now! Will computers melt down? Will society? A guide to Millennium Madness.”

This was the cover of the January 18, 1999 issue of Time Magazine. The article itself bounced back and forth between lightly mocking a large cast of religious leaders predicting the end of days and survivalists stocking up on supplies, with occasional quotations from government officials and IT experts who emphasized that the problem was being handled and that people didn’t need to worry about computers falling from the sky. And though this article, and cover, is easily seen as just another interesting piece of Y2K ephemera it relates to the Gemstones based on the earlier quotation about benefiting from fearmongering. For the person who speaks that line in the episode is identified as a journalist from Time Magazine, who Eli has agreed to speak to because, as he puts it, “That’s a periodical I respect.” But were the Gemstones real, and had they jumped on the apocalyptic bandwagon, it seems more than likely that Eli and Aimee-Leigh would have been amongst the many other religious figures skewered in that January 18, 1999 cover story. That Time article had not been dismissive of Y2K—and the calamitous cover image could certainly be accused of itself engaging in “fearmongering” in order to sell copies—but it had taken lengths to contrast what industry/government officials and IT experts were saying with the “millennium madness” being sold by the likes of the Gemstones.

That Time cover was a source of not inconsiderable frustration for many within the religious community. With quite a few prominent religious commentators pointing to that cover as proof that they were being mocked and laughed at by the broader secular society. And there were quite a few prominent religious figures who warned that their co-religionists (who were doing things like selling survival buckets) were just making religion look silly, and they were warning that should Y2K just be a “bump in the road” (as was being predicted by many officials) it would wind up driving people away from the churches that had talked up Y2K (and potentially drive people away from church altogether). Of course, the world of bible prophecy is generally a contentious one with the leaders of various flocks often disagreeing with one another’s predictions—yet even as some folks (like the Gemstones) turned to the bible for proof that Y2K was a sign of the end times, there were equally religious folks who turned to the bible in order to argue that Y2K was another example of the folly of man but not proof that the end times had arrived.

Magazines like Time loved to report on the Y2K survivalists and religious prophets of doom. And Time was hardly alone in this regard. Many periodicals—including the decidedly non-tabloid press—peppered their Y2K coverage by scoffing at those selling survival buckets. Many of these publications featured an interesting mix of coverage wherein they would provide ongoing detailed reporting on the remediation efforts underway in various industries and in various countries, mindful of the progress being made, while continuing to laugh at those buying extra cans of beans. And in much of this reporting (Time being an excellent example of this), there seems to be a certain unspoken sense that an article about people buying guns and heading for the hinterlands just makes for a more engaging article than a lengthy explanation of fixing computer code with a professor of computer science. Indeed, a sentiment that I came across again and again in my research, was government officials and IT experts expressing frustration at how they had spent hours calmly explaining Y2K to a journalist only for that journalist to turn around and write an article all about survivalists instead.

The scene with Eli and the Time journalist is played as if Eli is being interrogated, and about to be exposed. But Time had been skeptical of the likes of the Gemstones before 1999 officially became 2000. Granted, Time (and many other publications) had been quite happy to cash in on Y2K to sell magazines…though there is a significant difference between selling magazines and selling expensive survival supplies.

“It was the grace of the Lord Himself that prevented humanity from facing that disaster.”

In explaining why it was that the world was spared from a Y2K apocalypse, Eli (and Aimee-Leigh) both make reference to God’s grace. Framing the fact that a catastrophe did not happen as proof of the power of prayer and of the Lord’s boundless capacity to forgive. Just as Jonah had warned the people of Ninevah, and in the end God spared them—so too had the Gemstones warned the people, and in the end God spared them as well. It’s a similar sort of explanation that is often made when doomsday predictions fail, for it reaffirms faith in the higher power, and suggests that far from being a fluke that the danger was real but that it was prevented by the pious actions of believers.

Of course, as the protestors outside of the Gemstone’s megachurch attest—this explanation did not prove satisfying to many people. Indeed, many people were quite annoyed and frustrated by this explanation. Granted, in the real world, perhaps no group was more frustrated by explanations like than people who worked in IT.

Go look at the pages of Computerworld, or InformationWeek, or the various IEEE publications that deal most closely with computers—and in the waning days of 1999 and the early days of 2000, you will find a steady supply of various card-carrying members of the IT profession expressing frustration about Y2K. Not because they thought it was all a hoax. But because they, and their colleagues, had just worked their asses off for years fixing and testing code, and had done this under an enormous time crunch…only to find that when the computers kept working relatively fine that nobody was giving them credit for the work they had done.

This was a sentiment that was evocatively captured by a comment from Leon Kappelman in InformationWeek (in February 2000) where he noted.

“the IT profession deserves a combination of the Nobel Peace Prize, knighthood, and the Medal of Honor for the way it handled the year 2000 problem. We kicked the Y2K’s bug’s butt, and we did it efficiently and effectively. We did it so well, in fact, that we made it look easy to those who weren’t paying attention anyway. It can be called an overnight success that was five years in the making. If you don’t believe that Y2K was about real problems that needed to be solved and real risks that needed to be managed, you probably don’t believe polio was real now that vaccination has all but eradicated that bug.”

Kappelman’s comments are particularly evocative and were published in a periodical aimed at a readership of those within the IT community (a publication in which Kappelman had written a Y2K related column); however, Kappelman was hardly the only member of the IT community to express some version of this sentiment. Some of these attitudes appeared in print, some were echoed in various aftermath reports, and some of these feelings persist today amongst the people who decades ago pulled overnight shifts to correct the code.

Eli Gemstone makes a comment about God saving the day. This is a line that is clearly meant to get disbelieving laughs from people watching The Righteous Gemstones. However, the overall tone towards Y2K taken by the episode (and by the popular memory of Y2K more generally) is to act as though it was just luck, or a fluke, or proof that it was all a hoax that nothing too serious happened due to Y2K. Yet, as Kappelman noted, that victory that looked like “an overnight success” had been “five years in the making” (indeed more than five years in the making).

Contrary to what Eli Gemstone claims, God didn’t save the day when it came to Y2K. Instead, an army of IT professionals saved the day. Granted, that point doesn’t really make for good satirical television.

“I never believed it was really going to happen. Did you?

In a private moment, when they believe that no one else is watching or listening to them, Aimee-Leigh makes the above confession to Eli. One that is met with him responding that he also did not believe it. In many respects this moment is the linchpin of the entire episode, as it is the moment that fully confirms that the Gemstones were all too happy to feign concern in order to gin up fears all so that they could cash in. Though the scene is a private conversation between Aimee-Leigh and Eli it brings with it a sort of voyeuristic thrill for viewers—after all, there are plenty of prophets of doom and survival grifters out there (something which is hardly exclusive to Y2K) and while many suspect that these people don’t really believe the stories they are spinning we so rarely get to see the moment when they admit that they knew it was all a scam. But watching Aimee-Leigh and Eli say this feels like a payoff, like all of those other folks selling survival buckets must be privately saying some version of the same thing in private.

Of course, in the context of Y2K, Aimee-Leigh’s confession seems to line up with the general attitude towards Y2K today. One where most people say with a self-assurance rooted in hindsight that they never believed anything was going to happen. Granted, if you have spent the time to really consider what the predictions from knowledgeable sources (not people like the Gemstones) looked like by the last quarter of 1999, this just winds up raising the question of what was the “it” that people thought was going to happen.

From plenty of personal experience, I know that when you talk to people (those who had not been working on Y2K in some capacity in the 1990s) about what they thought was going to happen they often respond with some version of “they said the planes were going to fall out of the sky and the nuclear reactors were going to meltdown.” Granted, if pushed to say who the “they” in this “they said” was, the responses tend to get a bit more muddled. Sometimes people rush to say, “the government” or “the media” or some version of “everyone.” But if you go back and look at what the government, and the media, and the IT community was saying—particularly by the second half of 1999—they weren’t saying that planes were going to fall out of the sky and they weren’t saying that nuclear reactors were going to meltdown. This does not mean that they were saying there was no potential for disruption, but that they were saying the disruptions that occurred would be more like “bumps in the road” (a phrase that was often used). And there is a vast chasm that separates “there might be some minor disruptions” from “nuclear reactors will melt down.”

In fairness, if you’re looking for “planes falling out of the sky” or “nuclear power plants melting down” you could point to things like the Simpsons’ Y2K Halloween episode, or the made for tv film Y2K: the Movie—as both of these do feature planes falling out of the sky and nuclear power plants melting down. But do we really consider an episode of the Simpsons to be an authority on a problem? And do we really consider made for tv disaster movies to be completely accurate (and Y2K: the Movie was denounced at the time by government sources and IT experts for its hyperbolic inaccuracies)? Similarly, people can point to real world Gemstone like figures who were predicting a biblically preordained doom…but how much stock do we generally put in the predictions of such people?

There were certainly figures from knowledgeable circles in the government, in industry, and in IT who were quite anxious about Y2K. And many of them, particularly between around 1993 and 1996, really were warning about what might happen in foreboding terms. However, if you go back and read their warnings, something you will continually find are plenty of caveats and qualifiers. They were rarely saying “this bad thing will definitely happen!” Rather they were saying some version of “unless we do something to prevent it, this bad thing might happen!” An accusation can be made that some of these figures played up the severity of the “bad thing” in order to spur action, but once the actions to address the “bad thing” began to happen most of these figures shifted their tone. There are plenty of people in the Y2K space who were saying quite ominous things in 1995, who by 1999 were saying that they were confident the problems had mostly been fixed. And though, by the end of 1999 most in positions of responsibility seemed satisfied with the work that had been done, their efforts to fix the problem had been undergirded by a belief that if nothing was done there really would be problems. And that belief was itself built upon a very real foundation of testing that had revealed to many of them that their computer systems did in fact have problems.

To be clear, this is not to suggest that no one was predicting disaster. There certainly were some people predicting the worst—and not all of those people were fringe survivalists or televangelists like the Gemstones. However, when we look back at the predictions made around what “was really going to happen,” it seems a bit odd that people continually dwell on the most hyperbolic and outlandish predictions. Especially considering that by the last quarter of 1999 there were plenty of prominent sources trying to reassure the public that everything was being handled, and that there was no reason to panic. The Clinton administration was telling people to prepare for Y2K in the same way that they might prepare for a winter storm—though the administration consistently added that this level of basic preparedness was just good common sense regardless of potential problems.

It’s certainly more entertaining to look back and remember the most outlandish predictions—especially if those predictions came from the sorts of people you are already predisposed to make fun of—but for the sake of historical accuracy it’s probably worth paying less attention to fringe voices, and more attention to those who had actually been in the trenches working on Y2K and who were trying to tell everyone that the problem was largely fixed.

“I guess I romanticized the idea at first. You know, not civilization ending, but going back to a simpler way of life.”

Shortly after confessing to Eli that she never really believed anything catastrophic would happen, Aimee-Leigh adds the above line about having “romanticized” Y2K. She pivots from this—her evocation of “a simpler way of life”—as being about wanting to worship “the old fashioned way” (which seems to be meant as a critique of her family’s megachurch), and a desire to raise their kids (who are already portrayed as selfish troublemakers) away from the “trappings of all this wealth.” Coming only a moment after her more revealing confession, Aimee-Leigh’s comments on romanticizing can feel a little bit like an attempt to justify her and her husband’s actions. And yet in a certain sense, this line is the closest that The Righteous Gemstones gets to making a significant point about Y2K.

At the time that the Y2K episode of The Righteous Gemstones aired (the summer of 2023), the computer exacerbated concerns of the day did not have much to do with a coding decision made by computer programmers decades earlier. Instead, the current computer concerns were related to things like AI, the control of social media platforms, control over computer chip supply and manufacturing, and the way that entertainment companies (like the one airing The Righteous Gemstones) hoped to use AI to disempower writers and actors. Yes, Y2K might be a bygone concern when it comes to computers, but concerns about computers have hardly gone away. Though today we rarely think or talk about “the computer” itself, or “the computers” but instead have come to assume computers as a sort of given—a key piece of the infrastructure of our daily lives. Of course, we criticize X (formerly Twitter) and Meta (formerly Facebook), while waiting for the next Apple device, and wondering if our old blogposts are getting scraped for some chatbot—but the conversation has moved beyond computers themselves. It seems reasonably fair to assume that for most of those watching the Y2K episode of The Righteous Gemstones, computers have become a fairly normal feature of everyday life. Indeed, most of the people watching the episode probably did so by streaming it on a computer or computer adjacent device.

In other words, for the people watching the Y2K episode of The Righteous Gemstones computers have become a taken for granted feature of everyday life. But it’s worth remembering that in the lead up to Y2K—in the mid 1990s—the computer was ascendant, but it had not quite reached its current dominant heights.

As Y2K itself makes clear, computers had been around long before the 1990s. Furthermore, the history of computing makes it clear that there was a lot of significant stuff happening in computer development throughout the middle of the twentieth century. It did not take until the 1990s for computers to cease being room-sized behemoths that were only available for companies and large institutions—however the early computer hobbyist communities, and even the early market for personal computers remained somewhat small (at least in comparison to the present). The 90s was the decade in which the computer (at least in the US) really took off—the decade of the first web browser, of Wired magazine, of the iMac, of (then Senator) Al Gore writing of the importance of the computer for American capitalism (and democracy) in Scientific American, and of the Department of Commerce warning that those who lacked access to computers (and the nascent Internet) risked “falling through the net.”

When we look back at Y2K today, one of the things that we often forget is that it was a computing crisis that hit at precisely the moment when many people were starting to see that computers were playing a bigger and bigger part in their daily lives. While computers were already integral to important infrastructure and the fulfillment of government services, in many ways Y2K thrust that information into public consciousness and did so alongside a warning that the computer systems upon which so much relied were far from perfect.

Aimee-Leigh’s comment about “romanticizing” Y2K is in keeping with a sentiment that can be found in a fair amount of the discourse around Y2K at the time. And this was not only to be detected amongst those who might have a politically conservative desire to return to some imagined past. There were many people who were hoping that Y2K would not result in calamity, but that it would still result in enough of a disruption as to force people (and societies) to pause before they became even more dependent on opaque computer technologies. After all, many people in the 1990s felt like it was still possible to imagine a world where computers weren’t everywhere, or where computers were used for some things but not everything—and there was a sense that societies were heading in a direction where the power of the computer would only increase, and that it would do so by depriving regular people of their own power over their own lives.

And one of the ways that some people reacted to Y2K was therefore to take it as an opportunity to say that perhaps it would be a good idea to slow the embrace of computers. To pause, and really think about what the tradeoffs were. To ask where computers were taking people, and if it was really somewhere that societies wanted to go. After all, if these systems had the potential to cause so much havoc should they fail, and if the maintenance of these systems required vesting tremendous power in the hands of those who could fix these systems—might it be a good idea to ease the societal foot off of the ignition pedal on the information superhighway. For some people Y2K appeared as an opportunity to change course, to decelerate, or at least to spark a conversation about what all these computers were doing. Sometimes this was framed as an appeal to a romanticized past with fewer computers, but it is not as though the 1990s was not also filled with romanticized pictures of the computerized future.

The Righteous Gemstones is not particularly interested in a discussion of the state of computerization in the 1990s—but when we look back at Y2K, it’s important to recognize that when people in the 90s were talking about Y2K, they quite often weren’t really talking about Y2K. Rather they were using Y2K as an opportunity to have a deeper and more complicated conversation about the societal tradeoffs represented by computers.

And that is a conversation that is still ongoing, and is still desperately needed, today.

If you’re looking for a good, grounded, historically accurate account of Y2K, The Righteous Gemstones isn’t the place to look. Granted, the show is right about at least one thing, you should probably be quite skeptical of anyone trying to sell you emergency survival buckets.

“I’m so sick of Y2K” – a review of Y2K the Movie

Waiting for the Fail Whale – What Y2K Can Teach Us About Twitter

Theses on Technological-Pessimism

Theses on Technological-Optimism

Theses on “the Techlash”

About Z.M.L

“I do not believe that things will turn out well, but the idea that they might is of decisive importance.” – Max Horkheimer librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com @libshipwreck

View all posts by Z.M.L →