I found myself thinking about the turn of the century recently; about the way that culture felt at the time, and the way that I felt inside that culture, and about comparing that to today.
I didn’t buy into the idea of “Y2K” or “the Millennium Bug” or anything similar; although I knew that it was a Big Deal that we were about to cross over from years starting with 1 to years starting with 2, and that it was going to be odd thinking of the next 12 months as being “00” instead of “98” or “99,” or whatever, I wasn’t really paying attention to the increasingly panicked suggestions that disaster was around the corner for any and all technology. Someone will figure that out, if it’s a real thing was pretty much my attitude towards that.
My thoughts, instead, were caught up in the idea of a societal collapse. Not in the traditional sense of that phrase, but instead the idea common in a lot of things I was reading at the time that popular culture was falling in upon itself as self-reflexiveness and self-parody combined and everything seemed to be inspired by, or copied from, something else. I was reading a lot of cultural theory at the time — I had, after all, just graduated art school just a year or so earlier — and it felt as if something was ending all around me, leaving space for something new, and entirely unknown.
I think about that when I consider the internet today, a space filled with ideas and references and commentary that I, bluntly, don’t understand. It’s not just the number of memes or shared jokes that I’m not privy to, but the shared languages of communities I can’t comprehend on almost any level. For all that the internet makes me despair on a regular basis, especially when it comes to social media spaces and the communities and cliques found therein, there are times when I think about such things in the abstract and realize that, in so many ways, this is what I was expecting almost a quarter of a century ago. This is the future I wanted, even if I didn’t know that at the time.
My favourite Millennium Bug related moment came on the Millennium edition of Later With Jools Holland, where the host asked a clearly inebriated Ron Wood what he’d be doing at the turn of the century.
“I’ll tell you what I won’t be doing, ” slurred the rooster-haired guitar wrangler, “and that’s going anywhere near a hospital or an airport”.
“Why’s that then” asked Holland.
Wood, clearly not expecting to be asked this then replied “cos, err… there’ll be queues”.