Bunker fever

Y2K never quite happened. When you're paranoid, that's a tough pill to swallow.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Feb 12, 2001 | Cynthia Beal, a natural-foods grocer in Eugene, Ore., assures me that she was never one of those "Y2K doomers" -- the Chicken Littles predicting the end of the world as we know it. Instead she counted herself among the "alarmists" -- people who were "working to fix the problem, and admitted they had no idea how bad it would be but were erring on the side of caution."

And as concern about the year 2000 computer bug grew throughout the buildup to New Year's Eve, "it became increasingly clear that the problem was larger than anyone was admitting readily. It was a formula for grounded paranoia, and put me in mind of the old saying 'Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you,'" Beal says.

Grounded or not, paranoia was our collective reaction to the year 2000 problem. You didn't have to cower in a bunker with your kerosene and gun stockpile to feel a jittery unease at that weird moment when the government, the media, all the experts and even geeks admitted that they just didn't know what was going to happen. But after the rollover passed without planes falling out of the sky, mass power outages or nuclear meltdown, Y2K fears just faded into a fond memory of laughable "millennial hysteria."

But not for everyone. Beal's of the opinion that we still don't really know what happened and we may never: "With Y2K, we still don't know if we fell out of a plane and walked away from a haystack, or simply tripped over a crack in the sidewalk. Heck, we don't even know if we're still in free fall or not," she says.

More than a year after the rollover, it's not over for some of the community activists, organizers and technologists who dedicated themselves to confronting the Y2K bug for months or years of their life. For the Y2K faithful, it wasn't over on Jan. 1, 2000, and it wasn't over on Jan. 1, 2001. Many think that, today, the Y2K bug still walks among us, and as a society we haven't even begun to realize the damage it has caused. The absence of utter chaos on Jan. 1, 2000, didn't assuage their fears -- it just confirmed their convictions that the truth about Y2K is still being kept from us.

The Y2K faithful are a great example of just how deep paranoia runs in our culture. They want to believe that there's a coverup, that the real truth is being hidden from us by a corrupt media, government and business elite. Even when confronted with hard evidence that the world is intact -- and not just evidence reported by the media, which scoured the globe in search of Y2K meltdowns -- they refuse to give up the fears.

Today, if you're a little bit paranoid, you're normal. If you're very paranoid, you're a prophet or a philosopher, a seer standing in a cloud of burning sulfur, speaking the dark truth that no one wants to hear. Paranoia has such cachet that it often ceases to be paranoia.

On message boards at TimebombY2000, a conversation rages about how much damage Y2K really did, and what lengths companies and the government have gone to keep the real costs of this calamity from the masses. On Jan. 31, "Mountain Mike" invited fellow visitors to the site to rank on a scale of zero to 10 what they think the ultimate impact of Y2K will be, with zero being "no real impact" and 10 being "collapse of the U.S. government; possible famine."

Many of the respondents, some 38 percent, answered in the five-to-seven range, indicating that they think Y2K will ultimately be responsible for recession, political crisis and supply and infrastructure problems. But others put the fallout from the Y2K bug at Armageddon levels -- giving it a full 10 or, as they put it, "Total Doomer!"

Mountain Mike wrote: I "cannot understand those who pontificate that there has been zero impact. I ask myself if they really believe that, or if they are just trying for a reaction. Sure, impacts have accumulated slowly, and in ways some of us didn't expect, but they are real. Frankly, I think the worst is yet to come."

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