Imagining catastrophe

In the late 1990s the French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, wrote a short essay, ‘In the Shadow of the Millennium’ (1998), concerned with the historical significance of the approaching year 2000. Given what has happened since what was called Y2K, it is hard to properly convey the low level panic that accompanied the impending arrival of the new millennium, but Baudrillard captured this through reference to the Beaubourg Clock, housed at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. In his piece, he explains that the Beaubourg Clock, which counted down the time to Y2K by the millisecond, is a symbol of impending catastrophe and millennial panic. Although Baudrillard does not provide details of the catastrophic imaginary that accompanied the approach of Y2K (probably because the arrival of the future produced endless narratives about the ending of this, that and the other), the panic centred around the belief that the world's computer systems would be unable to handle the turn from 1999 to 2000 and so might shut down completely. On the basis of this idea, the fantasy was that the world would be thrown into chaos. Nuclear launch systems would break down leading to the start of a potentially apocalyptic automated World War III. Even worse, the world's banking system, which had already made the leap into cyberspace, would collapse and ATMs would run dry. In short, Y2K would consume our lives in a scenario that would resemble the horrors of Arnold Schwarzenegger's 1984 film The Terminator, when the machines turn on humans, or Danny Boyle's post-millennial 28 Days Later, when humans start to eat each other in a destroyed world.

Of course, the master of cool postmodern irony, Baudrillard, saw that the panic about year 2000 was really a traumatic projection of an event that had already happened and that had been endlessly replayed by Hollywood cinema and other narratives about ‘the end’. In Baudrillard's (1998) view Y2K was really about the end of history, which had been announced by Francis Fukuyama (1989, 1992) a decade before we imagined the computers turning off, and that the countdown to Armageddon was simply an attempt to work through the end of modernity that had already happened.