By Lina Leskovec

It is not at all uncommon to hear about people expecting the end of the world. I remember my friends and I staring at the clock on December 21st, 2012, waiting to see if the Mayans were right and the Earth was in fact about to be destroyed. None of us actually believed it – we thought it was silly and intriguing, a fun thing to engage with since that year was full of doomsday predictions in pop culture. That is the most elevated status doomsday predictions usually achieve on the rare occasion they make it out of prepper cults and into the general public. There is, however, a notable exception in recent history. About 25 years ago, ideas of a possible societal, if not exactly worldly, collapse permeated discussions in all sorts of spheres. It was the turn of the millennium and the usual anxiety about what the future brings was accompanied by a very particular new panic – the fear of the Y2K bug.  

What exactly was this bug and what made it so scary? Put simply, the Y2K bug was a result of the way computer data was stored. Since storage was very expensive in the beginning stages of computers usage, a system was developed that only logged the last two digits of a year instead of the full four. For example, data from the year 1965 was stored under the number 65, omitting the 19. This saved a lot of energy and money, but it failed to account for one inevitable issue; the 19 would sooner or later be replaced by a 20i. This was probably not a primary concern in 1965, but as the end of the century (and millennium) was approaching, people began to get more and more anxious about what this switch would entail. The worry was that computers would not be able to tell the difference between 00 meaning the year 1900 or the year 2000 so they would either start malfunctioning or completely shut downii. Naturally, not everyone was equally concerned. The more moderately minded were wondering about the reprogramming that would be necessary to deal with the bug. The more extreme individuals warned of banks shutting down, governments collapsing and planes falling from the sky.  All this worry was embedded in a broader debate about the overreliance on technology in contemporary society and how unstable such a reliance really is. But as the year 2000 rolled around, all worries quickly dissolved. Banks and governments remained intact, planes remained in the sky.  Pleas to decouple from technology were at least partially put to rest. The Y2K bug was not just harmless – it had no affect at all. The paranoia around it seemed, and might still seem, silly.  

But the paranoia also was not completely misguided. People’s fears were not simply a result of completely nonsensical predictions about the functioning of computers that proved false as soon as we came into the year 2000. While the more dramatic scenarios probably would have never happened, there was, in fact, a bug. And on New Year’s Eve of 1999, dozens of people worked tirelessly to overlook a smooth transition into the new millennium, making sure that large computer systems would not collapsei. Their hidden labour allowed for the impression that Y2K was nothing to worry about.  In this way, the Y2K paranoia reveals something fundamental about the anxieties that come with technological development. In essence, the whole issue with Y2K was a result of choosing a cheaper option (saving on costly computer memory), but one that would be unsustainable in the long term. The risk associated with it would be dealt with in the future. When the time came to face the result of choosing an unsustainable option, intense labour was needed to temporarily fix it. But other risks accompanying technological development remain and are again postponed until the future. Paranoia about technology is therefore not just a fear of the unknown, it encompasses the issues with a system of labour that is meant to maximise profit in the short term and avoid any sort of transcendental thinkingiii.  

Over two decades after Y2K, fears about technology remain alive and well. But rather than focusing on technology alone, we should look at the larger image of why it upsets us. Why is technological development endangering our employment, instead of easing the burden of menial everyday labour? Why are we choosing cheaper options that we know have longevity issues? If this was properly addressed, computers might not look so scary.