Y2K was a catastrophe that never happened, prompting many to conclude it was a catastrophe that had never been possible to begin with. It does, in hindsight, seem like the manifestation of a perpetual hysteria machine—a digital doomsday with a specific date and time, perfectly designed for those who longed for an apocalypse they could mark on the calendar. The knee-jerk memory of the Y2K problem tends to place it somewhere between a media hoax and a technological boondoggle, and the conventional wisdom is that the estimated $300 billion spent fixing the glitch was the economic equivalent of
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