Y2K; or, Remembering one of the Great IT Panics

Worried about IT’s apparent threat to democracy? Once upon a time, IT was feared as a trigger to a nuclear conflagration

It’s now apparent that the Millennium Bug is a good thing, after all. It has provided American publishers with hot book titles like Millennium bug: how to survive the coming chaos. It has given a fillip to American survivalists and communitarians alike: today, they have a real excuse to stockpile water and guns, and at the same time be friendly to neighbours they have never bothered to say hello to in years.

Then there’s Edward Yardeni, chief economist at the investment bank Deutsche Morgan Grenfell in New York: he has made a living, these past two years, by forecasting that ‘Y2K’ could bring about a world recession. Finally Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and no fewer than 269 other deeply responsible organisations around the world have taken the opportunity to write to presidents Clinton and Yeltsin to ask them to stand down the 2500 nuclear missiles each has at his disposal. Just in case.

Yardeni believes that the oil industry, part of our ‘global just-in-time manufacturing system’, could fall victim to Y2K and thus precipitate a re-run of the 1973-4 energy crisis. But for our Green letter-writers, the Bug won’t so much make power supply or transport grind to a halt, but rather produce inaccurate early-warning data. ‘The combination of hair-trigger force postures and Y2K failures could be disastrous’, they chortle.

It’s a wonderful thing, panic. Next month, the State Department will start a campaign throughout US airports warning that travel to Afghanistan through to Zimbabwe is fraught with dangers. Back here in Britain, the government’s campaign is more reassuring: its website (www.bug2000.co.uk) confides that planes won’t fall out of the sky, but that you should take a combination of currencies, travellers cheques and credit cards with you and expect to be a little late. There’s also no need to worry about your home kidney dialysis machine, but it would be wise to register with your GP if you haven’t already.

It looks as if we have a panic not only about Y2K, but about the panic caused, among supposedly ignorant people, by the Government’s own campaign. Either way, Y2K means jobs not just for the IT boys, but also for all manner of therapeutic counsellors.