The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

The mechanical explanation for how this would obliterate the grid was too complicated to explain, so journalists focused instead on the theoretical consequences: Power outrages would be rampant, terminating the lives of hospital patients on life support. Gas pumps and ATM cards wouldn’t work, eliciting panic. Airline navigation systems might go haywire. Nuclear missiles could accidentally launch. A 1997 Newsweek story, “The Day the World Shuts Down,” quoted a data expert who feared “on Jan. 1, 2000, a lot of elevators could be dropping to the bottom of buildings.” A Vanity Fair article from January of 1999 was headlined “The Y2K Nightmare” and described “a looming disaster with an immovable deadline that will touch the entire world.” President Clinton signed an executive order to create the Council on Year 2000 Conversion, a group tasked with updating the federal government’s bank of 7,336 computers at a cost of $8.5 billion. The Fed had to print more money because people started hoarding cash. The essence of the problem had the qualities of 1950s science fiction: The smallest possible detail, overlooked by technologists unaware of their godlike power, would instantaneously return a futuristic society to the Stone Age.