All Hands on Deck, We’re About to Hit Y2K

“You better print files, your hard drive could die, you better download, I’m tellin’ you why,

Y2K is coming to town.”*

*

The last time Western society put this much faith in a piece of its own technology, it hit an iceberg and sank.

This time, we’ve spotted the iceberg from several years off, and we still aren’t sure we can steer clear of it.

Y2K is the millennium bug, that wicked little creature tic-ticking away like a bomblet in computers the world over, all set to blow up when the New Year’s confetti countdown hits 5-4-3-2-1 double zero, the year 2000.

At last, some kind of domino theory will come to pass. Cyberspace, not Commies, will topple the Free World, mainframe by mainframe. The millennial cataclysm arrives on schedule--not from the heavens, as divines preach, but from the machines of our own making. Cherchez le microchip.

Not since the killer plague bacillus of the Middle Ages, or the influenza epidemic at the end of World War I, has a bug had the potential to visit such chaos upon us. Life-support machines shut down! 747s tumble from the sky! Stock markets implode! Slot machines in Vegas go dark! Alarm clocks fail, making millions oversleep!

Unless, unless . . . cyber-meisters in capital cities are assuring us that matters are well in hand, that billions are being spent to guarantee it. In this CyberState of California, 52% of the state’s 600 or so “mission critical” computer systems--for running prisons, 911, hospitals, welfare, and of course taxes and revenue--are already millennially pure, says George Kostyrko, California’s Y2K czar, and the rest will be, come spring.

If you think Bill Gates will gallop in during the last reel, Mr. Deus Ex Machina with a plastic pocket protector, recall that here’s a man who had a federal judge in stitches watching his videotaped deposition in Microsoft’s antitrust trial because Gates asked the attorneys what they meant by words like “concern.” And “compete.” And “we.”

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“It sees you when you’re sleeping,

it knows when you’re awake,

it knows when you’ve been bad or good,

so pay cash for goodness’ sake.”

*

Part of me will not be sorry if our techno-idolatry gets a comeuppance, even if it takes my PC with it. Gossipy, know-it-all computer info-systems loom over us like a monstrous uber-Mom, keeping track of what we eat, what we read, where we shop and dine and vacation and buy tires, probably even the size of our new underwear.

The mere act of using a credit card or ATM card can reveal more than Freud or fraud could ever extract. Somewhere, computers know your preferred cocktail, what you bought your kids for Christmas, your brand of birth control pills or dosage of antidepressants. Somewhere, out of the reach of Ken Starr’s subpoena but not of computer memory, are the titles of La Lewinsky’s bedtime reading material. And somewhere is recorded the day and the moment I fell from grace and used my ATM card to buy . . . a pound of Oreos.

*

“I’m makin’ a list, checkin’ it twice,

puttin’ my dough in gold and in ice,

Y2K is coming to town.”

*

Already there are reports of cautious stockpiling of solar panels and gold coins and kerosene lanterns, of back orders for dried fruit.

Already there are stories about the Chrysler plant where they turned the clocks forward to test Y2K, and the security system shut down and people couldn’t get out of the building . . . of the techno-professionals polled by Chief Information Officer magazine who said they wouldn’t fly commercial on New Year’s Day 2000 . . . of a survey in which 38% of computer industry execs polled were considering taking their private assets out of banks and investment firms.

Such alarmism troubles Jon Fullinwider. He is Los Angeles County’s Y2K czar, and I knew he possessed a sound sense of priorities when he put me on hold to take a call from his vet.

Apart from making sure that jail doors do not fly open at the stroke of midnight, nor respirators go flat in mid-surgery, he thinks his job is to shape our perceptions of Y2K. Let us be alert but calm . . . prepared but not apocalyptic. This isn’t El Nino, only a big storm.

I’m planning for it like an earthquake that I can mark on my calendar months ahead. So computers will think it’s 1900, the last Victorian year? Fine. I’ll be prepared to straddle the centuries. Toilet paper and firewood, antibiotics and candles, batteries and a set of Dickens. If anybody needs me, I’ll be up in Fortress Morrison, trying to remember how to use a manual can opener.

Patt Morrison’s column appears Wednesdays. Her e-mail address, at least until midnight on Dec. 31, 1999, is [email protected].