Today, Explained - The truth about Y2K

Episode Date: December 6, 2024

Kyle Mooney dreams up a New Year’s Eve 1999 apocalypse. Historian Zachary Loeb explains why the real Y2K wasn't one. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Anouck Dussaud, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Rob Byers, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Kyle Mooney in a still from "Y2K," the film he directed and starred in. Photo credit: Nicole Rivelli. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

25 years ago, if you were alive, you or someone close to you was wondering what would happen when the clock struck midnight on New Year's Eve. Would the power go out? Would planes crash? Would ATMs start spitting out money all over the world? But then, nothing happened. But what if something did? I was 15 when Y2K happened. And for those of us who were alive during Y2K,

it was a letdown. Nothing really happened. And I think I've always been sort of minorly obsessed with that. So one day, the idea kind of struck me to make up a movie about teenagers go to a party and Y2K actually happens. On Today Explained, Kyle Mooney is going to tell us about his new movie, Y2K, and then we're going to hear why Y2K didn't happen. Amazon Pharmacy presents Painful Thoughts. The guy in front of me in the pharmacy line is halfway through an incredibly detailed 17-minute story about his gout.

A story likely more painful than the gout itself. Next time, save yourself the pain and let Amazon Pharmacy deliver your meds right to your door. Amazon Pharmacy. Healthcare meds right to your door. Amazon Pharmacy. Healthcare just got less painful. 3, 2, 1. Today is clean. Sean Ramos from You Might Know Me From Today explained. Kyle Mooney, you might know from his pitch-perfect Inside SoCal quick hits.

All right, love is your boys. Without them, you might know from his pitch-perfect Inside SoCal quick hits. All right, love is your boys. Without them, you are weak. They give you strength and believe in you and are always down to let you be who you are. Even if sometimes you're not down to drink and smoke. Let's face it, you're always going to be down to drink and smoke. Or from his flexing Baby Yoda on Saturday Night Live. Baby Groot, do me a favor. Keep my name out your little tree mouth before I stab you like a

twig! Or maybe you heard he made a movie called Y2K that opens in theaters today. Y2K is real! We asked Kyle what he was doing on New Year's Eve 1999. I hung out with my friend Mark. We watched the MTV New Year's Eve special. So I would have, I guess, been enjoying Carson Daly riffing with Kathy Griffin.

Carson Daly with Kathy Griffin. I just talked to my folks in California. Got to say Happy New Year to them. Hi mom and dad. I don't know that I was like particularly super nervous or frightened as to what could happen when midnight arrived. It is officially the year 2000. If you can hear my voice, the Y2K bug is certainly not around and what a historical moment. But my mom prepped and she got some goodies just in case, I guess, the world was destroyed in some way or another.

I guess, I mean, in the moment, it just sort of came and went. I don't know what thought I gave to it until I just started minorly obsessing over it. It would just hit me every once in a while. The story we were always interested in telling was, to a degree, a riff on teen culture of the era. Specifically, like, all of these movies were coming out

that were geared towards us. It was She's All That. Did he ask you to the prom? Can't Hardly Wait, American Pie, 10 Things I Hate About You. Number one, no dating till you graduate. Number two, no dating till you graduate. Number two, no dating till you graduate. To a degree, I don't know that I thought in terms of like,

this is speaking to teenage-dom as to like, this is sort of like the culture that was like kind of being blasted to me. And I wanted to return to that. Of course, unlike all those movies you just named, this movie takes a fairly dark turn. As much as you're willing to share with people what happens when the clocks strike 12 in Y2K, your movie. At midnight, the machines go crazy and start killing people, essentially. Oh, shit.

A Tamagotchi just drilled through a chick's head. Come on, we gotta go. It's weird. I don't feel like I've ever made anything that has maybe been so violent, but I was really excited by just taking left turns and doing something that elicits reaction. I really hope that if people see it,

there are some laughs, there are some tears, and there are some moments of like, oh my shit, that's fucking crazy. Did I say oh my shit? Oh my shit. That's actually not, I kind of, I don't hate that. I think you should run with that. You mentioned there are a lot of movies when we were teenagers that came out that were for and about teenagers. We've also got a long lineage of movies in which technology turns on us and terrorizes us. And Y2K, your movie, is the latest in a long line. Why do we love to watch technology try and kill us? Did you think about that while you were making this movie? I mean, I think that fear is constantly present. You know, it's like Hal 9000 or something like

that. Open the pod bay doors hal i'm sorry dave i'm afraid i can't do that i feel like with the introduction of electronics and robotics like there's always been that thought that like when is the point that these things are going to turn on us and like even in the course of working on this movie we started writing in 2019 and now it's 2024 that it's coming out like we've seen an evolution of ai and like it's seemingly become more threatening and more real than even it was when we were first started talking about this. A lot of the actors in your movie weren't even alive on New Year's Eve, 1999. Did you have to have like, you know, Camp Y2K where you kind of gave them the essentials of what life was like

back then? We made playlists for them. We sent them lists of movies to watch and, you know, any phrase or reference they didn't know, obviously we'd fill them in it was really on them to decide how much they wanted to invest in learning about the culture and the time like i think the characters like even though they are these archetypes of the period and like some of them are very distinctly late 90s earlys, there is a universal quality to them. And I think that even our young actors, I think, could relate. I know a comp to this, and I know the vulnerability of being this age.

I say let's go to the party. I don't know, dude. Listen, okay, in a few hours, you have a built-in excuse to kiss the newly single girl of your dreams. And some of our older listeners might be listening to us reminiscing about 25 years ago and be like son it wasn't that different but it feels especially true because y2k beyond your movie even is having a moment i mean they're like y2k vintage clothing stores

charlie xex who had a huge year has a song on her album called Von Dutch Did the fact that like Y2K is back in so many ways you know kids using digital point and shoot cameras again

help you sell this movie to the studio that ultimately made it, A24? I think so. I mean, I can't say that I'm the king of the zeitgeist by any means. You know what I mean? Unfortunately, I'm not incredibly aware of what's happening in the moment at times, but you kind of got a sense that Y2K as a fashion aesthetic was coming back, but it's grown in the time from like the conceptualization to now. And now I feel like now I'm just like lucky that we're getting

it out sort of in time. Cause I feel like we're probably at a moment where people will be sick of it after this, you know what I mean? And we could be like a month or two away. Yeah. And then we'll see what comes back next. Do you think we can learn anything from Y2K from your experience making this movie? You know, Y2K was something that we were overprepared for. And

like we said, nothing happened. And that's also not to say, I mean, I feel like every time I say that or anyone says that, there were people doing stuff. You know, there were people doing stuff, you know, there were people working on these computers and like making sure that we were ready. So like there are these sort of unsung heroes that I, who knows what would have happened if they hadn't done the work that they did. But, um, you know, I think we've seen in our fairly recent culture

and history that like, there are moments that we were not prepared for and that then like kind of shifted our lives and so there is something to always being thoughtful about like okay we should maybe take this somewhat seriously and think about it and make sure we're all good if something bad were to happen. I think let's not be super obsessive about it, but let's be smart about it. Kyle Mooney's new movie is Y2K. See it wherever you see your movies, except at home. I don't think you can watch it at home just yet.

When we're back on Today Explained, we're going to find out why the machines didn't turn on us 25 years ago. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an aura frame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday, and she's very fortunate.

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Up to $1,000 in non-withdrawable casino bonus funds that require 10-time playthrough within 7 days at different contribution rates on select games. Terms at GoldenNuggetCasino.com slash welcome. Zachary Loeb teaches history at Purdue University, and he's especially into the history of Y2K. You can find him on campus trying to convince his students that Y2K is still worth thinking about 25 years later. I think that it's important to continue thinking about Y2K because at the core of Y2K is really a confrontation with how reliant we as a society and we as a world have become on computer technology. Far too often, the dangers that we expose ourselves to, the risks that we expose ourselves to, they only become things that we really confront. They only become things that we really deal with in these moments of crisis. And so Y2K is this moment of crisis that forces us to think about how reliant we had become on computer technology. And I think it would be a good

thing for us to be thinking about and aware of these issues as they persist today without needing something going horribly wrong to make us pay attention to it. But the deadline probably helped. Oh, of course. I mean, there's nothing like having a discrete deadline to which you can count down that really, really drives the issue. It really builds it up. For all of our listeners who are too young to remember, or who maybe just didn't care about the hysteria in 1999, Can you remind us when exactly it was that someone said, hey, you know, there might be a huge computer glitch on New Year's Eve 1999?

So pretty much from the beginning of this problem, and it has its origins in the 1950s and 1960s, the computer programmers who are making the decision which eventually is going to become the Y2K problem, they're aware that eventually this is going to become a problem. Nobody really anticipated that we would be worried about a hundred year span, but people from 1900 are still alive. One of the most fateful cost-cutting measures was to deliberately leave out the first

two digits of the year date. The source of the year 2000 bug is this. Older computer programs have a two-digit area to store the year, 85 or 97 for instance. But it's always something that it's very far distant. It's down the road. Starting in the 1970s, you start to see people talking about this a little bit more specifically. The computer scientist Bob Beamer writes an article in 1971 talking about this future problem that it's going to represent. The worst part is the embedded chips. Those little things that run your coffee maker, open and close the security gates on a bank or a plant. You can actually find the first coverage of this in the New York Times in 1988.

Huh! 1993 is really the point at which the IT sector really starts waking up to this issue, really starts working on this issue, really starts talking about this much more internally. The point at which the government really starts paying attention to this is actually 1996. Without the conversion to the four-digit date as is needed for the year 2000, our entire government computer system could potentially fail. And as we know in today's world, computers throughout this nation and around the world are interrelated and interdependent.

The potential problems are widespread. The systems impacted by this software glitch range from personal computers to the computer systems which operate at the Department of Defense. And by the time the public really starts to pay much more attention to this, the irony is those working in IT, those on the government side, are already pretty confident that the problem is like being handled. They are less concerned by the point that the public starts having its freak out to the extent that that happens. What was the extent to which people freaked out? Was there a panic? I'm not sure there really was panic. I think that there were lots of media outlets that were really, really eager to report on the end of the world because reporting on the end of the world is big and flashy and exciting. And in 1997, there's this cover story in Newsweek magazine that's like, the day the world crashes.

And it has like a computer monitor crashing through the magazine cover. And that's like big and exciting. And within a lot of that media coverage, once the public starts paying more attention, there's all of this effort to find the people who think the world is ending and to kind of elevate these people who are saying it's the end of days,

it's the end of time, buy a shotgun and head for the hinterlands. It's making people buy water, buy generators. You know, they're stocking up, you know, you got this big problem coming, you know. I know some people move to Alaska because of this. I don't know that it's necessarily going to be a computer problem. I think it's going to be a social and people problem. I think we're going to be setting ourselves back to about the 1800s. I don't want to sound like a wacko gun nut or

something, but you have to be able to hunt. You have to be able to protect your family. Because look, it's fun to imagine society collapsing in a way that it isn't fun to imagine a bunch of IT workers dutifully doing their jobs and repairing code. 60 Minutes did a good long piece on Y2K. If you want to, there are plenty of things to worry about as we approach the end of the 20th century. Global warming, biological warfare, meteors from outer space. And now, Y2K. And it's easy to look at that and be like, oh yeah, listen to these strange people who are preparing for the end of the world,

and then forget that in the next clip, there was some government official being like, no, we're taking care of this. Don't worry. The Simpsons' 1999 Halloween episode, their treehouse of horror. They had a segment called Life's a Glitch in which Homer Simpson was responsible for doing the Y2K maintenance at the Springfield nuclear power reactor, and he fails to do it. That's Homer Simpson's computer. Oh, God, it's spreading!

The world kind of ends, and it's easy to remember that, but it's The Simpsons. It's satirical. Well, look at the wonders of the computer age now. Wonders, Lisa, or blunders? I think that was implied by what I said. Implied, Lisa, or implode? Mom, make him stop. And luckily, the world of nuclear maintenance, the world of computer maintenance, isn't filled with Homer Simpsons. Sometimes it feels like the world is filled with Homer Simpsons.

But I think you're getting at an essential point that I really want to stress here. Because our collective memory of Y2K is the ultimate nothing burger. But what you're suggesting here is that there are a lot of people working behind the scenes, unsung heroes perhaps, who made it a nothing burger. Did things actually go wrong on New Year's Eve 1999? Can we correct the record here? So I think that it's important to answer this question in two ways. When we talk about what the expectations were for what was going to happen, it's really important to note that by the time you get to 1998 to 1999,

most of the people in the IT sector, most of the people in the government who are working on this, are saying that Y2K is going to be a bump in the road. We do not at the moment expect that this will be, as the websites are calling it, Tia Tawaki. That's the acronym for the end of the world as we know it. People around the Clinton administration liked to particularly use the phrase,

like a winter storm. Prepare as you would for a heavy winter storm with possible ramifications and possible complexities. I would have certainly some amount of water in my basement. I would have some food in my basement, flashlights. Now, in terms of what actually happened when 1999 became 2000, well, I imagine some people drank champagne. Some people maybe kissed somebody. I imagine that as this recent film makes clear, there were some teenagers who were getting involved in hijinks, but the computers did not come crashing down. The lights did not

fail. But that doesn't mean that nothing happened. And if you look at, for example, the crisis averted report, which is the Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Problems final report that they put out in the early months of the year 2000, there are pages and pages and pages of things that went wrong that they're documenting. Issues with satellites, issues at nuclear power plants, lots and lots of issues that were Y2K related that did in fact happen. So one of the things that Y2K really drove home was the extent to which by the end of the 20th century, so much of daily life had become dependent on computer systems, computer-related infrastructure. Y2K wasn't just about people's new desktop computers. Y2K was

about the fact that the electric grid was relying on computers, that keeping the grocery stores stocked properly was also reliant on computers. And just as it's important for us to make sure that we are taking care of and maintaining our more traditional infrastructure, bridges, tunnels, stuff like that, as computing becomes infrastructural, we also need to make sure that we are maintaining and properly taking care of it. But the advantage of Y2K was, as we discussed at the top, the deadline, right? We are better at working together as a planet when there's an asteroid heading towards Earth. And when there's no asteroid, we hate each other.

We fight with each other. We're petty as hell. How do we address our biggest problems, be they technology, be they climate change, be they the asteroid that's just out there that might hit Earth, but it's not on a direct collision course yet without the looming threat? Yeah. If I knew the answer to this, that would be wonderful. I would sleep much better at night. I do think that unfortunately, sometimes it does take a looming threat with a hard deadline to push people to work together on something. And Y2K

certainly did involve lots and lots of people working very hard together. The level of bipartisanship in the U.S. government at the same time that President Clinton is being impeached, mind you. The bipartisanship around working on Y2K is really, really impressive in Congress. The work that companies are doing sharing best practices and information is very important. And the work that is being done internationally between countries sharing expertise is also really, really important. I think that one of the things that Y2K can also teach us is that sometimes when we see that problem coming and the experts are like, hey, we've got this problem coming, we can listen to the experts and we can marshal the resources that they are saying are necessary. And perhaps we can solve the problem before it becomes a catastrophe. Now, the result of doing that is that it often means that then 20 or 24 or almost exactly 25 years later, people wind up looking back at it and laughing and thinking it was funny and they don't recognize all of the

real serious work that went into mobilizing to fix the problem. But we are able to look back and laugh because luckily a lot of people at the time knew that this wasn't a joke. Zachary Loeb, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana. He's working on a book about Y2K. Avishai Artsy made our show today. He was edited by Amna Alsadi, fact-checked by Anouk Dussault, and mixed by Patrick Boyd and Rob Byers. The rest of the Dream Team, Victoria Chamberlain, Halima Shah, Amanda Llewellyn, Hadi Mawagdi, Miles Bryan, Andrea Christensdottir, Peter Balanon-Rosen,

and our power forward, Noelle King. Laura Bullard is our senior researcher. Matthew Collette is a supervising editor. Miranda Kennedy is our executive producer, and we use music by Breakmaster Cylinder. Today Explained is distributed by WNYC we use music by Breakmaster Cylinder. Today Explained is distributed by WNYC. The show is a part of Vox. You can support our journalism by joining our membership program today.

You can go to vox.com slash members to sign up, and you can rate, review, tell a friend about the show to help us out before the clock strikes midnight, preferably. Oh my shit.