Kyle Mooney dreams up a New Year’s Eve 1999 apocalypse. Historian Zachary Loeb explains why the real Y2K wasn't one. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Anouck Dussaud, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Rob Byers, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Kyle Mooney in a still from "Y2K," the film he directed and starred in. Photo credit: Nicole Rivelli. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What was the public's reaction to Y2K?
25 years ago, if you were alive, you or someone close to you was wondering what would happen when the clock struck midnight on New Year's Eve. Would the power go out? Would planes crash? Would ATMs start spitting out money all over the world? But then, nothing happened.
But what if something did? I was 15 when Y2K happened. And for those of us who were alive during Y2K, it was a letdown. Nothing really happened. And I think I've always been sort of minorly obsessed with that. So one day the idea kind of struck me to make up a movie about teenagers go to a party and Y2K actually happens.
Chapter 2: What inspired Kyle Mooney's movie Y2K?
On Today Explained, Kyle Mooney is going to tell us about his new movie, Y2K. And then we're going to hear why Y2K didn't happen.
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Sean Ramos for him. You might know me from Today Explained. Kyle Mooney, you might know from his pitch-perfect Inside SoCal Quick Hits.
All right, love is your boys. Without them, you are weak. They give you strength and believe in you and are always down to let you be who you are. Even if sometimes you're not down to drink and smoke. Let's face it, you're always going to be down to drink and smoke. Or from his flexing Baby Yoda on Saturday Night Live. Baby Groot? Do me a favor.
Keep my name out your little tree mouth before I stab you like a twig.
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Chapter 3: What happens in Kyle Mooney's Y2K movie?
We've seen an evolution of AI, and it's seemingly become more threatening and more real than even it was when we first started talking about this.
A lot of the actors in your movie weren't even alive on New Year's Eve 1999. Did you have to have, like, you know, Camp Y2K where you kind of gave them the essentials of what life was like back then?
We made playlists for them. We sent them lists of movies to watch. And, you know, any phrase or reference they didn't know, obviously we'd fill them in. It was really on them to decide how much they wanted to invest in learning about...
The culture and the time, like, I think the characters, like, even though they are these archetypes of the period and, like, some of them are very distinctly late 90s, early 2000s, there is a universal quality to them. And I think that, like, even our young actors, I think, could relate, like, I know a comp to this and I know the vulnerability of being this age. I say let's go to the party.
I don't know, dude. Listen, okay? In a few hours, you have a built-in excuse to kiss the newly single girl of your dreams. And some of our older listeners might be listening to us, like, reminiscing about 25 years ago and be like, son, it wasn't that different. Right. It feels especially true because Y2K, beyond your movie even, is having a moment.
I mean, there are like Y2K vintage clothing stores. Charli XCX, who had a huge year, has a song on her album called Von Dutch. Did the fact that Y2K is back in so many ways... you know, kids using digital point-and-shoot cameras again, help you sell this movie to the studio that ultimately made it, A24?
I think so. I mean, I can't say that I'm, like, the king of the zeitgeist by any means. You know what I mean? I'm not, like... Unfortunately, I'm not incredibly aware of what's happening in the moment at times, but, like, you kind of got a sense that Y2K as a fashion aesthetic was coming back, But it's grown in the time from like the conceptualization to now.
And now I feel like now I'm just like lucky that we're getting it out sort of in time because I feel like we're probably at a moment where people will be sick of it after this. You know what I mean? And we could be like a month or two away.
Yeah, and then we'll see what comes back next. Do you think we can learn anything from Y2K from your experience making this movie?
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Chapter 4: How has Y2K culture returned in modern times?
Zachary Loeb teaches history at Purdue University, and he's especially into the history of Y2K. You can find him on campus trying to convince his students that Y2K is still worth thinking about 25 years later.
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.
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
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.
For all of our listeners who are too young to remember or who maybe just didn't care about the hysteria in 1999, can you remind us when exactly it was that someone said, hey... You know, there might be a huge computer glitch on New Year's Eve 1999.
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.
Nobody really anticipated that. We would be worried about a 100-year span, but people from 1900 are still alive. One of the most fateful cost-cutting measures was to deliberately leave out the first two digits of the year date. The source of the year 2000 bug is this. Older computer programs have a two-digit area to store the year, 85 or 97 for instance.
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Chapter 5: What lessons can we learn from 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
Those are the little things that run your coffee maker, open and close the security gates on a bank or a plant.
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.
Without the conversion to the four digit date as is needed for the year 2000, our entire government computer system could potentially fail. And as we know in today's world, computers throughout this nation and around the world are interrelated and interdependent.
The potential problems are widespread. The systems impacted by this software glitch range from personal computers to the computer systems which operate at the Department of Defense.
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.
What was the extent to which people freaked out? Was there a panic?
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.
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.
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Chapter 6: Why is Y2K still relevant today?
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.
Oh, God, it's spreading!
The world kind of ends, and it's easy to remember that, but it's The Simpsons. It's satirical.
Well, look at the wonders of the computer age now.
Wonders, Lisa, or blunders?
I think that was implied by what I said.
Implied, Lisa, or implode?
Mom, make him stop.
And luckily, the world of nuclear maintenance, the world of computer maintenance, isn't filled with Homer Simpsons.
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