Zachary Loeb
Appearances
Today, Explained
The truth about Y2K
And that's like big and exciting. And within a lot of that media coverage, once the public starts paying more attention, there's all of this effort to find the people who think the world is ending and to kind of elevate these people who are saying it's the end of days, it's the end of time, buy a shotgun and head for the hinterlands. It's making people buy water, buy generators.
Today, Explained
The truth about Y2K
I don't know that it's necessarily going to be a computer problem. I think it's going to be a social and people problem.
Today, Explained
The truth about Y2K
Because, look, it's fun to imagine society collapsing in a way that it isn't fun to imagine a bunch of IT workers dutifully doing their jobs and repairing code. 60 Minutes did a good long piece on Y2K.
Today, Explained
The truth about Y2K
And it's easy to look at that and be like, oh yeah. Listen to these strange people who are preparing for the end of the world and then forget that in the next clip there was some government official being like, no, we're taking care of this. Don't worry.
Today, Explained
The truth about Y2K
The Simpsons 1999 Halloween episode, their treehouse of horror, they had a segment called Life's a Glitch in which Homer Simpson was responsible for doing the Y2K maintenance at the Springfield nuclear power reactor and he fails to do it. That's Homer Simpson's computer.
Today, Explained
The truth about Y2K
The world kind of ends, and it's easy to remember that, but it's The Simpsons. It's satirical.
Today, Explained
The truth about Y2K
And luckily, the world of nuclear maintenance, the world of computer maintenance, isn't filled with Homer Simpsons.
Today, Explained
The truth about Y2K
So I think that it's important to answer this question in two ways. When we talk about what the expectations were for what was going to happen, it's really important to note that by the time you get to 1998 to 1999, most of the people in the IT sector, most of the people in the government who are working on this, are saying that Y2K is going to be a bump in the road.
Today, Explained
The truth about Y2K
That's the acronym for the end of the world as we know it. People around the Clinton administration liked to particularly use the phrase, like a winter storm.
Today, Explained
The truth about Y2K
Now, in terms of what actually happened when 1999 became 2000, well, I imagine some people drank champagne. Some people maybe kissed somebody. I imagine that as this recent film makes clear, there were some teenagers who were getting involved in hijinks. But the computers did not come crashing down. The lights did not fail. But that doesn't mean that nothing happened.
Today, Explained
The truth about Y2K
And if you look at, for example, the Crisis Averted Report, which is the Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Problems final report that they put out in the early months of the year 2000, there are pages and pages and pages of things that went wrong that they're documenting.
Today, Explained
The truth about Y2K
Issues with satellites, issues at nuclear power plants, lots and lots of issues that were Y2K related that did in fact happen. So one of the things that Y2K really drove home was the extent to which by the end of the 20th century, so much of daily life had become dependent on computer systems, computer-related infrastructure. Y2K wasn't just about people's new desktop computers.
Today, Explained
The truth about Y2K
Y2K was about the fact that the electric grid was relying on computers. That keeping the grocery stores stocked properly was also reliant on computers. And just as it's important for us to make sure that we are taking care of and maintaining our more traditional infrastructure— bridges, tunnels, stuff like that.
Today, Explained
The truth about Y2K
As computing becomes infrastructural, we also need to make sure that we are maintaining and properly taking care of it.
Today, Explained
The truth about Y2K
Yeah, if I knew the answer to this, that would be wonderful. I would sleep much better at night. I do think that unfortunately, sometimes it does take a looming threat with a hard deadline to push people to work together on something. And Y2K certainly did involve lots and lots of people working very hard together.
Today, Explained
The truth about Y2K
The level of bipartisanship in the US government at the same time that President Clinton is being impeached, mind you, The bipartisanship around working on Y2K is really, really impressive in Congress. The work that companies are doing sharing best practices and information is very important.
Today, Explained
The truth about Y2K
And the work that is being done internationally between countries sharing expertise is also really, really important.
Today, Explained
The truth about Y2K
I think that one of the things that Y2K can also teach us is that sometimes when we see that problem coming and the experts are like, hey, we've got this problem coming, we can listen to the experts and we can marshal the resources that they are saying are necessary and perhaps we can solve the problem before it becomes a catastrophe.
Today, Explained
The truth about Y2K
Now, the result of doing that is that it often means that then 20 or 24 or almost exactly 25 years later, people wind up looking back at it and laughing and thinking it was funny and they don't recognize all of the real serious work that went into mobilizing to fix the problem. But we are able to look back and laugh because luckily a lot of people at the time knew that this wasn't a joke.
Today, Explained
The truth about Y2K
I think that it's important to continue thinking about Y2K because at the core of Y2K is really a confrontation with how reliant we as a society and we as a world have become on computer technology. Yeah.
Today, Explained
The truth about Y2K
Far too often, the dangers that we expose ourselves to, the risks that we expose ourselves to, they only become things that we really confront, they only become things that we really deal with in these moments of crisis. And so Y2K is this moment of crisis that forces us to think about how reliant we had become on computer technology
Today, Explained
The truth about Y2K
And I think it would be a good thing for us to be thinking about and aware of these issues as they persist today without needing something going horribly wrong to make us pay attention to it. But the deadline probably helped. Oh, of course. I mean, there's nothing like having a discrete deadline to which you can count down that really, really drives the issue. It really builds it up.
Today, Explained
The truth about Y2K
So pretty much from the beginning of this problem, and it has its origins in the 1950s and 1960s, the computer programmers who are making the decision which eventually is going to become the Y2K problem, they're aware that eventually this is going to become a problem.
Today, Explained
The truth about Y2K
it's always something that it's very far distant it's down the road starting in the 1970s you start to see people talking about this a little bit more specifically the computer scientist bob beamer writes an article in 1971 talking about this future problem that it's going to represent the worst part is the embedded chips
Today, Explained
The truth about Y2K
You can actually find the first coverage of this in the New York Times in 1988. 1993 is really the point at which the IT sector really starts waking up to this issue. really starts working on this issue, really starts talking about this much more internally. The point at which the government really starts paying attention to this is actually 1996.
Today, Explained
The truth about Y2K
And by the time the public really starts to pay much more attention to this, the irony is those working in IT, those on the government side, are already pretty confident that the problem is being handled. They are less concerned by the point that the public starts having its freak out to the extent that that happens.
Today, Explained
The truth about Y2K
I'm not sure there really was panic. I think that there were lots of media outlets that were really, really eager to report on the end of the world because reporting on the end of the world is big and flashy and exciting. And in 1997, there's this cover story in Newsweek magazine that's like, the day the world crashes. And it has like a computer monitor crashing through the magazine cover.