As 1999 faded into historical oblivion and the year 2000 came
on stage in this arbitrary game of measured time, anyone
observing the media spectacle of the official millennium
celebrations was witness to a vulgar display of
self-congratulatory smugness. The technological
infrastructure and the social consensus of faith in this
infrastructure had held. Everyone was happy, looking with joy
and hope to the next millennium and the new “wonders” that
it would bring. Or so the plastic faces on the television, the
monotonously insincere voices on the radio and the empty
phrases in the press told us.
Of course, there were moments of tension. When it was
announced that three missiles had been launched in Russia,
Sam Donaldson’s face expressed something faintly
reminiscent of mild concern. Fortunately, a military expert
reassured us that these missile launchings were
“non-reportable”, because they had travelled less than 500
kilometers. And furthermore, these were scud missiles that
Russia had launched quite intentionally at Chechnya. So all is
well—except for those Chechens caught in the crosshairs of
these missiles.
It was shortly thereafter that blackouts hit several
neighborhoods in Los Angeles including downtown L.A.,
South Central, East L.A., Silver Lake and the neighborhood
where I was staying. A battery operated radio kept my
friends and I informed of the smoothness of the Y2K
transition. These blackouts, like those in Philadelphia were
apparently caused by foul weather, which also affected the
communication between the various radio personnel. So
though technology was breaking down on small levels here
and there, all was well. The Y2K bug had been averted.
These were just the normal crises of this cumbersome
system.
When the electricity came back on the television presented
images of the first ATM user in New Zealand (one of the first
nations to “enter the new millennium”, starting its new year
many hours before Los Angeles) to show the triumph of
technological banality. And the announcers regularly
contacted the Y2K emergency center to inform us that there
were no major problems: the planes kept flying, the ATMs
continued spilling out cash, production and consumption
carried on apace. It was business as usual. Indeed.
Over and over, the media brought the same message home:
Technology and capital have once again overcome a crisis
(which, of course, they themselves created). The world is
getting better everyday. And everyone who is in their right
mind is happy with the present social order.
But in these same events, and even in the images used to
portray them, I see something different. Whatever arbitrary
change has occurred on the calendar, existence itself has not
changed—not in any fundamental sense. States still launch
bombs—and this is “non-reportable”, of no real concern,
certainly nothing that should upset our celebration. Capital
continues to implement technological systems of social and
biological control increasingly eroding the bases of individual
freedom and self-determination. And the technological
monster lumbers on never quite under anyone’s control, not
even that of its supposed state and capitalist masters. Thus,
we are kept perpetually in crises which have no element of
adventure, on the edge of disasters too banal and pathetic to
call forth any sort of heroism.
The Y2K story served the powers that be well. It kept
people’s minds focused on one particular possible disaster, on
one glitch in the system. But the most significant disaster of
this social order, the one we all live through every day, is not
a glitch, a mere malfunction in dating. It is the fact that we
have all been made dependent on an enormous, lumbering
juggernaut that none of us can control, and that every day it
destroys more life and erodes more freedom. In such a
situation, those who want to create lives based on their own
self-determined desires and passions can find no joy in any
future based on the continued development of the present
reality. Rather our joy is found in the struggle to destroy this
present reality and, in the process, to create new ways of
being in which individuals can make their own lives freely as
they desire.
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