Y2K: Apocalyptic Vibes and Maximalist Escape
By Ali Roberts
In December of 1999, much of the public and media was in a near-panic about what would happen when clocks struck midnight, marking the new millennium. The fears stemmed from a very real question of what would happen to computers, which were previously coded to utilize a two-digit year format rather than a four-digit format to save computer memory (https://time.com/5752129/y2k-bug-history/). Programmers speculated that computers might interpret “2000” as “1900,” which could cause anything from errors in financial calculations to widespread problems with power plants and transportation (https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/Y2K-bug). Fears of blackouts and infrastructure damage were widespread, but computer scientists had been working on solving some of these issues for almost a decade leading up to 2000.
I was in elementary school then, in a rural town in North Florida. By the time ideas of what was deemed the “Y2K Bug” had reached my community, it had morphed into a monstrous conspiracy theory and many folks in my city began to prepare for an apocalyptic turn of the millennium. A few of my friends would tell me that their families were stockpiling food and weapons, and one friend even mentioned a bunker where her family would ring in the new year. When I came home asking if we should be stockpiling food like we do when a hurricane is coming, my parents reassured me that we would be okay, and that people were making sure nothing catastrophic would happen. This was my first experience with mass hysteria and what might happen when the public had a hard time trusting scientists.
When I hear Y2K twenty-three years later, I think of a cyberpunk aesthetic that feels very dystopian (think The Matrix). I also think of the mass hysteria that was occurring around me and the ways that uncertainty resulted in a highly paranoid public. Y2K has come to signal something very different for younger generations. It has come to encompass the “McBling” aesthetic of the mid-2000s (https://www.vogue.com/article/what-is-mcbling). Searches for “Y2K” on social media platforms bring up aesthetics from that slightly-later era: low-rise jeans, hot pink tracksuits, flip phones, and graphic tees.
Watching increasing obsessions with low-rise jeans and Motorola Razr cell phones over the last few years has felt a bit like a fever dream to me. As we move through a global pandemic, these trends might have slightly helped curb a feeling of impending doom through shiny, gaudy, and colorful aesthetics. While Y2K might sound like “the end of the world” to me and many of my peers, I will gladly take its redefinition as an excuse to dig out my butterfly hair clips and blast some Aaliyah.
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