"I love revisiting articles from around the turn of the millennium, a fascinatingly febrile period when everyone but journalists especially briefly lost the run of themselves. It seems strange now to think that the ticking over of a clock from 23:59 to 00:00 would prompt such big feelings, of excitement, terror, of end-of-days abandon, but it really did (I can remember feeling them myself as a teenager, especially the end-of-days-abandon bit.)"
"There's a very good podcast, Surviving Y2K, about some of the people who responded particularly drastically to the bug's threat, including a bloke who planned to sit out the apocalypse by farming and eating hamsters. It does seem funny and fitting in the UK, column inches about this existential threat were equalled, perhaps even outmatched, by those about a big tarpaulin in Greenwich. Honestly, it's staggering how animated so many"
Turn-of-the-millennium atmosphere combined excitement, terror and end-of-days abandon around the clock changing from 23:59 to 00:00. Fears about the Y2K bug envisioned planes falling, power grids failing and lost savings, prompting extreme responses and preparedness. Media attention in the UK amplified anxieties while fixating on the Millennium Dome, treating the white elephant as an existential concern despite its later conversion to a successful entertainment venue. The millennium prompted wide reflection on the previous thousand years and widespread, often wildly wrong, prognostication across politics, religion, sport, technology and culture.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]