You're Wrong About

The Y2K Bug

May 04, 2020 You're Wrong About
You're Wrong About
The Y2K Bug
Show Notes Transcript

Mike tells Sarah how an obscure technical glitch became a nationwide mobilization. Digressions include Twitter beefs, “The Net” and VHS pricing. We spend much of the episode roasting our own work from the relatively recent past.

Correction: It seems the women in Britain didn't terminate their pregnancies due to the false positive test results. We were wrong about this and we're sorry!

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Sarah: You're talking about the awfulness of this episode so much that people are going to want to hear it and it is going to be like the last show, like that Holocaust movie that Jerry Lewis made. 

Welcome to Your Wrong About, the show where we go to the year 2000. I believe in keeping it simple.

Mike: It's funny how that still sounds magical, 20 years later. 

Sarah: Yeah. Well, it is magical because it is the distant past now. 

Mike: I am Michael Hobbes. I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post.

Sarah: I'm Sarah Marshall. I'm working on a book about the Satanic Panic.

Mike: And we are on patreon@patreon/you're wrong about, and we're on PayPal and we sell cute t-shirts and our listeners have been making incredible designs for us.  And as usual it's quarantine, we know it's tough out there. And so do not feel remotely pressured. 

Sarah: It's tough in here also. And it's tough on the insides and the outsides. 

Mike: It's tough everywhere. 

Sarah: I would like to give a special shout out to all our listeners who are listening to this show on one earbud right now because they have children.

Mike: Oh yes. 

Sarah: We love you guys.

Mike:  And today we are talking about Y2K the millennium bug.

Sarah: Yes. I'm excited. 

Mike: This is a throwback episode. Although our listeners probably don't know that. This was the first episode we ever recorded when we were first doing the show almost exactly two years ago, May 2nd. Right? 

Sarah: Well, that was when we started releasing the show, but we recorded this, early March of 2018. 

Mike: Yeah. A little over two years ago. And it was so bad that we to this day have never released it. And whenever we tell people that they always think that we are being modest, like, oh, I'm sure it's fine. No, it is really bad, I listened to this week.

Sarah: I have not listened to it since we originally edited it. I choose to believe that you are being modest. But I also choose to not attempt to confirm that independently, which speaks for itself. I bet it is like the pilot episode of 30 Rock where there is like a lot of weird long silences and really what does it show like normally, what is the secret sauce that happens later that I can't identify, but which I know isn't here. 


Mike: But we thought it would be a good idea to wait awhile so that Sarah would forget everything I told her. 


Sarah: Yeah, we decided we would wait two years and two months, and then we would take another crack. 


Mike: Yes, and there's actually been a lot of new weirdly, a lot of new academic research on Y2K between 2018 and now, so there's actually some like a bunch of new stuff that we're going to talk about. This is not all going to be familiar to you.


Sarah: I probably won't remember anything. 


Mike: Okay. Well, I think now is a good time to return to Y2K because Y2K has become this weird thing that people only bring up when they are talking about something else.


Sarah: Right. And I feel like it comes up as a metaphor for like something that did not happen. Something we all thought was going to happen, but then ha-ha we never reacted.


Mike: When we are talking about climate change, people will bring up, oh, we were worried about Y2K too and that turned out to be a hoax and somebody else will respond to that by saying no Y2K is an example of us coming together and fixing a problem. Both of those arguments are kind of detached from what really happened in Y2K. 

Sarah: And since we have now had two years of doing this show since then, I am able to extrapolate that perhaps the answer is no one is right. 

Mike: Yes. Both of those arguments are correct in some ways and both are incorrect in other ways.

Sarah: Right. Because they contain elements of truth, but don't grasp the truth. 

Mike: But so now is the point in the show where ordinarily, I would ask you what you know about Y2K so I can myth bust you, but we have tape, we have live footage of Sarah describing this two years ago. I thought it would just play you the clip and you can decide a how bad, A, you want to tell me the editing is, B, if you want to add anything to your description.

Sarah: Ah, I was in my twenties then. 

Mike: Let me send you this thing. Can you see it? A little skype machine.

Sarah: Yes. 

Mike: Three, two, one.  

Mike: “So tell me about what you what you know about Y2K?”

Sarah: “The fear of it was that all of the computers and like automated things and electronic things would break and then all of our systems would fall apart and then we would just not have a grid anymore.” 

Mike: The amazing thing about that is that you’re understanding now is about as good as like the U.S. Senate's understanding back then. 1999 was kind of like the beginning of dot com stuff.

Sarah: Yeah. It has got that weird grading quality that the podcasts that people put no effort in to have, whereas we put in minimal effort.

Mike: I did this thing in our first couple of episodes where it, when one of us would say a joke and the other would laugh, I would turn down the volume on the laugh really low, so it sounds like you're all of a sudden 60 feet away and laughing at one of my jokes. I don't know why I did that. 

Sarah: Yeah. It is like a little late with Lilly Singh it's like one person laughing their ass off far away, eerie. 

Mike: But do you want to add anything to your explanation of what your understanding of the Y2K bug was?

Sarah: I do not know if I could add anything to what I said. I was 11 when we reached the year 2000 and I remember understanding that people were concerned about the fact that basically the machines that ran society were programmed using dates that gave you only three digits. And therefore, when it reached the year 2000, they would all go to 0,0,0 or something.

Mike: It was two digits. Yeah, two digits.

Sarah: Two digits. Okay. And because of that, everything would break, and it would be like Jurassic park basically, yeah. 

Mike: Yes. But the first myth to bust is that the millennium bug was not a bug.

Sarah: Was it an arachnid?

Mike: It was actually, it was a design choice. It was a way of saving space completely, of course, forgotten about all this now, but in the early days of computing back when they were like punch cards and when computers took up an entire room. 

Sarah: Which is what, the early mid-sixties. 

Mike: Yeah, the sixties to seventies basically. I interviewed a researcher about this and one of things he said is that, you know, in these old programming languages, they very easily could have had the date at eight digits and had all four digits of the year in there. It would have taken up too much space. 

Sarah: Right. And if you are trying to put dudes on the moon, you need all this space, you can get. 

Mike: Exactly. I mean, one of the things I cannot get over the original Super Mario brothers from 1985 it is 40 kilobytes.

Sarah: Wow. And this file that you just sent me that I listened to is 681 kilobytes. 

Mike: Yeah. There was not space for anything extraneous. So they made the choice that we're only going to do dates in six digits.

Sarah: So, like year, month, day. 

Mike: Year, year, month, month, day, day.

Sarah: Okay. Yeah.

Mike:  And there were people in the seventies writing papers in magazine saying this might be bad, let's proceed with caution here, guys. This might not be such a great idea, but then everybody is just like, whatever, it's 30 years away. 

Sarah: Right. Everyone as everyone always does, whatever, that is a problem for our kids or something, which is what every generation says. And they're like, why aren't our kids buying real estate? Maybe because you made choices that we're dealing with right now. 

Mike: And so it was only in 1993 with the publication of an article called Doomsday 2000 that the country started to get worried about that.

Sarah: The movie where Robert Duvall is on death race across this American Southwest. 

Mike: One of the quotes from it is we and our computers are supposed to make life easier, what we have delivered is catastrophic. 

Sarah: Doomsday 2000

Mike: This was the beginning of people starting to get nervous about it. And it was not actually that all of the software would crash. It was more about the hardware, the phrase that became really important in the panic about Y2K was Embedded Systems. The idea is that all the infrastructure of modern life has chips within it. Most of these chips have a little clock inside of them. They have very basic, very rudimentary systems inside to just like, make the thing work.

Like clock radios have little chips in them with like the dates in them. This is a list from one of the articles that came out in 1999 of all the things that have these Embedded Systems in them, in these ways that are like kind of murky and kind of difficult to sort out. So personal computers, surveillance equipment, lighting systems, entry systems, barcode systems, clock-in machines, vending machines, switchboards, safes, and time locks, elevators, faxes, production line equipment, ATM machines, military command control systems, IRS tax computation. 

Sarah: Hmm, vending machines and military command control systems. Things I am would be concerned about.

Mike:  And so, the idea was basically that everything from, you know, traffic lights to MRI machines have these chips embedded in them. And it wasn't clear at the time sort of what it would take to fix it because you don't even really know what the problem is, but you don't really know, well, is my clock radio going to stop working? Or is it just going to think that it is 1900 for the rest of its natural life? And who cares? 

Sarah: My understanding is an 11-year-old was at the clock radio would think it was 1900 and be like, oh my God, I shouldn't exist and then burst into flames or something.

Mike:  Like Back to the Future, it would start disappearing, like I don't exist yet. 

Sarah: Yes. Yes. That is what I thought would happen. 

Mike: This is an excerpt from a really interesting oral history that was published a few years ago, this is a quote from the guy that wrote the Doomsday 2000 article. What he says is, 

“Most people didn't seem to understand the depth of the programming we depend on. It's not unusual for a bank to have an excess of 50,000 programs. So, when you say we have a two-digit problem, why don't you just expand it to four digits? Okay, fine. Where are they, in which databases? And by the way, which ones are you going to fix first? To fix this one, you have to fix that one. And to fix that one, you have to fix the other one and to fix the other one, you have to fix the vendor.”

And so another one of the phrases that went around at the time was this idea of ‘cascading vaults’. If one of these systems breaks, well, all these other systems are dependent on that one system. 

A really interesting example of this by one of these guys in this oral history of a computer researcher at The Co-Intelligence Institute. He talks about how this was in the mid-nineties he was riding an Amtrak train, and the train stopped. And below the tracks and it sat there for four hours and it turned out that the computer system that runs the Amtrak train had to reboot for some reason. In rebooting, it also shut down the air conditioning system and shutting down the air conditioning system, it also shut down the ventilation system. So, people are sitting there in the heat, in these cars with like bathrooms in them and it started to get smelly and it starting to get stuffy. 

Sarah: And you cannot open the windows. 

Mike: Yeah, and people are getting really on edge, and so there was this realization that first of all, Amtrak trains have computers?

Sarah: Right? I know I would not have guessed that, it's a choo-choo train. That is as far as my thinking goes on the matter. I guess it's not a choo-choo train though. There is no choo-choo on it.

Mike: There's a bleep bloop. Yes. These were the kinds of stories that went around. But it's like, guys computers are everywhere. Computers are in cars now, computers are in airplanes, and we don't really understand the architecture of these systems. 

Sarah: Computers are in hot dogs. You guys didn’t know that? Hot dogs are going to stop working.

Mike:  I also think a really important statistic from the time was that only 50% of the population had personal computers. It was like computers were normal enough that people had them, but they were also new enough that people didn't really understand how they worked.

Sarah: I have been thinking lately about the fact that it is very interesting that millennials have been branded like the first-generation online. Millennials are also the last generation with any living memory of what it was like before the internet had taken over American infrastructure. And before online reality was as real as Meet Space reality. 

Mike: In that weird transition period too, where computers weren't everywhere yet, but they were like here. 

Sarah: The exa stense period. 

Mike: People didn't really know what to be afraid of, right. Like The Net comes out. 

Sarah: There's also the thing and this is a way that The Net is silly, but it's a way that every mid-ninety movies was forced to be silly. Also Mission Impossible really jumps to my mind. Where they are like, okay, we're using computers as a plot element, but everyone knows that a computer is this like weird, slow dusty thing that comes and it can barely play games, it overheats if you play Myst on it but Tom cruise is going to hack into the CIA in about five minutes from a dial up internet connection in Europe. 

Mike: And so Dylan Mulvin, who's this one of the only researchers who specializes in Y2K, he's writing a book and I interviewed him. He said, what was interesting about it was Y2K had a definite deadline, we knew exactly when the Y2K bug was going to happen, but it had indefinitely effects. We knew that like these Embedded Systems were everywhere, but we didn't know what was going to be affected or how, and that was one of the things that drove a lot of the paranoia about what was going to happen. 

Sarah: So would it be accurate to say there are a lot of unknown unknowns? 

Mike: Yes.

Sarah: It's like the thing where Pablo Escobar buys hippos for his private zoo and then they go feral and now they just live in Columbia, and they are just there.  What are the Escobar hippos in this scenario going to be, we don't know. 

Mike: And so, it basically became this thing that anything you could imagine, wasn't like totally outside the realm of possibility, right? It's like it might be all of the traffic lights stop working, or it might be all of the traffic lights turned green.

Sarah: What's going to happen to all the audio animatronics at Disney World, for the love of God. I remember seeing an item of significant national concern. I remember people talking about this a lot and for a long time. And so is that like me being in kind of a liberal bubble? Was this a bipartisan concern also?

Mike: I mean, it's actually one of my conclusions about this is that it is the last example of all of us coming together and doing something. 

Sarah: And then concluding that it was not worth it when we should not have bothered.

Mike: But it didn't really take on a partisan valence, but it was a huge deal. It was only really in 1996 that people started to get nervous about it. That is when the government efforts ramped up, that is when the corporate efforts ramped up and between 1996 and 1999 congressional committees held 100 hearings. The GAO issued 160 reports, guidance to companies and assessments of how the government was doing.

The estimates now are that the US government spent $9 billion on fixing it and the private sector spent around a hundred billion. They put together a task force of CEOs, they passed a law saying that large companies had to be public about what they were doing and had to issue guidance to small companies.

Sarah: Oh wow. 

Mike: They appointed a Y2K czar. The federal reserve started printing a bunch of extra cash just in case there were bank runs. It was huge. 

Sarah: Yeah. It is interesting that this also led to corporate regulation. We took this so seriously that we were like, the federal government is going to tell the private sector what to do. And that was acceptable enough to everyone that had actually happened. Cause I'm not shocked when companies are told to stop poisoning children and they're like, but at what cost. 

Mike: One of the members of parliament in the UK called it the greatest mobilization since WWII. This was also one of the things that Dylan Mulvin told me is that he figured out that this was one of the first times we got large scale gig work and large-scale outsourcing. 

Sarah: Wow. Millennials have been marked from the moment that we started preparing for the millennium.

Mike: Yeah man. One of the vulnerabilities in the US tech sector was that we used an old coding language called COBOL and by some coincidence, a lot of programmers in India, also use COBOL or learn COBOL. And so this was one of the first times at big companies were like, well, we've got like millions of lines of code that we need to update.

There are all these people in India that know how to do this. They are like let's set up some outsourcing infrastructure. This was a huge ramp up in outsourcing technical grunt work style labor to developing countries in the tech sector. This was the first time they realized they could do this. 

Sarah: This is outsourcing actual skilled work.

Mike: Yeah. And by 1999, 51% of Americans were saying they would avoid air travel in the months before and after wide Y2K, 42% were saying they would stockpile food and water. And 6% of Americans said they were planning to withdraw all of their money from the bank. And this of course gave rise to all of this weird prepper community. I don't think it was the first time the preppers had used something as an excuse, but like gun magazines started doing special Y2K issues.

Sarah: I'm thinking about preppers a lot these days. I'm interested in the relationship between the prepper mentality, where you're like just waiting for the penny to drop so that society can crumble, and you can be in your compound with your ammunition and your canned cling peaches. And how that seems to go hand in hand with the sort of conservative mentality where someone is like, stay home, please. Just like watch some shows and get some dominoes and being like, how dare you?

Mike: Do you want me to remind you what you said in our show two years ago? Because I just listened to it the other day.

Sarah: Yes.

Mike: You said you get the feeling that some people are sort of looking forward to this. That people want something bad to happen. 

Sarah: Well, that was what I thought two years ago and I'm like, okay, it's happening. Why aren't people just like, I'm going to stay home. If you are waiting your whole life for an excuse to not engage with society, then why do you get so sad about it changing slightly? 

Mike: This is what’s, so I don't know, I just think this was the first cross-pollination of the internet and conspiracy theories and capitalism. But I think alongside this prepper community, there is always profiteering. 

Sarah: But you think a lot of it is like PT Barnum types.

Mike: The first times we saw websites pop up like Alex Jones style, right, where it's like one half of the website is, the government is trying to kill you, they're poisoning the water. And then the other half of the website is, let me sell you supplements that will cure the poison that they are putting in the water.

Sarah: Is this the beginning of supplements as we now know them, or like conservative supplements?

Mike: Food kits people were selling like gallon bucket, whatever things of food supplies, basically, so when the purge happens on January 1st, we will be ready. It got so bad, poor Bill Richardson; the governor of New Mexico had to warn his constituents. Do not stockpile, gasoline, gasoline explodes. Do not keep jugs of gasoline in your house because you're more likely to die from that than you are from the actual Y2K.

Sarah: Yeah. I was listening to a guy on NPR last night who was like, yeah, obviously we do not want you to inject cleaning supplies and it's like just yell at people a little. Just tell them no. 

Mike: Well, I actually think, the government, I mean, if you look at the old government warnings, they all say is don't panic, but kind of panic. Right? So, a lot of the statements that you read in old newspapers, you know, journalism course would call up like the secretary of transportation or whatever. And they'd say, you know, we don't expect any negative impact. We expect everything to be fine dot, dot, dot, and some traffic lights will probably go out. So you should be ready for them. It's like, well, if you're telling people not to worry, but you're also telling them the traffic lights might go out, a bunch of traffic lights going out is actually kind of A) a big deal and B) a sign that something much bigger is happening.

Sarah: Right. And as an American, you are going to assume that if a traffic light goes out, it'll be the one that you are interfacing with. I also think as Americans, the impulse to think that the government doesn't have your best interests at heart is not crazy. I think you can disagree with the logic of someone's misgivings, but it is unfair to tell them their perspective is meaningless, if it is based on the idea of fearing those in power. 

Mike: Right? Well, no, I mean, you are right in that one of the first things to happen is of course conspiracy theories. And I'm fascinated by the structure of conspiracy theories. That it is always the same four arguments, just phrased in different ways.

Sarah: Like the screenplays. What are the basic arguments of conspiracy theories? 

Mike: I mean there is this guy named Mike Adams, but he started something called Y2K Newswire there was, of course, you know, pretending to be like Y2K news. But was really just the panic digest. All he did was for reasons that you should be scared.

Sarah: All of these descriptions feel like they're from a very specific and charming moment. It is like the Y2K Newswire, Doomsday 2000. I love it. 

Mike: I know and so he put out a list of 39 quote unquote unanswered questions about Y2K and number 18 is if Y2K is a non-event, why did the federal government's been $50 million on a Y2K command bunker? 

Sarah: I realize it's tiresome that I continue to draw these comparisons, but again, it's the argument that we're seeing, and we'll continue to see of, if Corona Virus is such a big threat, then why haven't more people been dying and it's, presumably, because we've been making good choices and should continue to make good choices. But yeah, it is the successfulness of any attempt to avert danger will always be used by someone to prove that the danger wasn't really there. 

Mike: Right. Another one that shows up a lot in conspiracy theories is false premises. See if you can spot the false premises in this. Why are Californians urged to have a two-week stockpile of supplies for earthquake preparedness, but only a three-day stockpile for Y2K?

Sarah: Oh, they are saying the government is misleading Californians. 

Mike: Right? It is deliberately understating the threat, right. That we are taking earthquakes seriously, but we are not taking Y2K seriously. What people point out when they debunk this is that California doesn't tell people to have a two-week supply food for earthquakes. It says they should have a 72-hour supply. It is like, you are literally just making up this thing. 

Sarah: Well, yeah and I'm sure this guy is like, what are you going to do? Ask Jeeves? Are you going to go on Lycos and wait for 49 minutes to go to four web pages to try and fact check me? No!

Mike: This is my favorite one. Why is it socially acceptable to buy fire insurance, car insurance or life insurance, but not food insurance by having some extra food stored away? Through what mechanism did the Boy Scout motto be prepared, become politically incorrect. Will the Boy Scouts now be called extremists?

This is like one of my favorite moves in conspiracy thinking is that you say this thing that is kind of on some level reasonable. Why are you telling me to prepare for things like fires? And you are not telling me to prepare for things like Y2K.  Whatever, that is relatively reasonable, but then it's like in two more moves, he's like the Boy Scouts think I should be prepared. Why do you hate the Boy Scouts? 

Sarah: Right. It's like, when did you stop beating your wife? I'm also, I wonder about, you know, with conspiracy theories, how much of the work is being done with this kind of emotional hopscotch that happens inside of the person consuming this media or listening to the speech or whatever it's called the dog whistle for a reason.  You can present a phrase or an idea that puts someone in an emotional state. It doesn’t really matter what you say because you've got them kind of nicely whipped up. And at that stage in the emotional recipe, it is well, you've got whip now. Time to make meringue, it doesn't really matter what kind of argument you then present to someone because you've, they've reached this malleable state. Once again, it is very emotionally based system, emotionally saturated thinking. 

Mike: This is a classic move, right? All of a sudden, you're whipping up anger about these people won't even let me be in the Boy Scouts or whatever, which isn't true, but it's like, you're fomenting all this completely meaningless anger. When it's really, all they're saying is that it might not be super prudent for you to stockpile food, but also, it's not legal to stockpile food. If you want to go to the store. 

Sarah: Right. No one cares.

Mike: No one actually cares, but to get people into this emotional state where you can sell them things and you can convince them of things, you have to get them on this much larger distrust of society and distrust of the media and distrust of the government.

Sarah: I feel like there were a lot of Boy Scout related controversies in the nineties. We spent a lot of time on that. 

Mike: We should do that said about the Boy Scouts. Also, there was, do you want to guess? Who the person, remember, this is the late 1990s? Do you want to guess?

Sarah: Jesse Ventura? 

Mike: Close. Do you want to guess who was selling a videotape for $28 called A Christian's Guide to the Millennium Book? 

Sarah: Was it Jim Baker? 

Mike: No, Jerry Falwell.

Sarah:  Oh, okay. 

Mike: Do you know how much $28 was in 1999? That is so much money for a video. 

Sarah: It was probably a Star Wars VHS set at Costco. Yes, you could have gone to Endor and  back, but instead you got Jerry Falwell yelling at you. And also, I love how Christian media goes for these cash grabs of like a Christian guide to something it's impossible to do in a Christian way honestly. 

Mike: This is not explicitly branded as Christian, but there is also a book called Y2K for Women: How to Protect your Home and Family in the Coming Crisis. 

Sarah: Is it about how you have to keep putting out sexually, even after all the audio animatronics start rampaging through Anaheim. 

Mike: And so, I couldn't get the text of this, but I did find it on Amazon and all the reviews are five stars, except for one, one star review from a guy named Jim. This is written by a woman called Karen Anderson. Jim says, “I worked for a large utility on the West coast for Y2K and one of my jobs was to answer the questions of people about the power systems and Y2K. Karen and her band of ardent followers drove us nuts with questions about things that couldn't possibly happen. Because none of them had any understanding of how power systems worked. They also accused us of lying and being part of a vast conspiracy that still exists in their minds as part of a general anti-government sentiment.”

Sarah: Does Jim go into any specifics beyond that? 

Mike: No. I want to hear more from Jim. What have you been through Jim?

Sarah: Jim, we are waiting. 

Mike: This was a time of genuine grift Bonanza. 

Sarah: Genuine grift Bonanza. Yeah, good ole GGB. 

Mike: One of the things I love is Jerry Falwell and these other Christian right people started coming up with this idea. There is, you know, of course there is the divine rapture, which we all know is coming, but then there's also something that they branded as the civil rupture, which is like how governments are going to collapse.

Sarah: Okay. Of course, I mean, why not? Because they are similar sounding words so that makes sense. 

Mike: It's very good. There were also a lot of really good scams. There was a guy in the UK who was selling people CD ROMs that he said would make your computer Y2K compliant. People checked them later and apparently, they literally did nothing. The only thing they did was just make a window come up, they are like, bleep, bloop, bleep, it's compliant. 

Sarah: I bet people got genuine peace of mind from the bleep bloops.

Mike: There were also phone scans where people would call up and say, hi there, I'm calling from your bank, we're checking to see if all the cards are Y2K compliant. If you could just read me your credit card number, then I can tell you whether it's compliant or not, we'll send you a sticker to put on your card. People were like 5, 0,7, 2, they just started doing it. It is like, nooo. 

Sarah: Yeah, it's ?? sweetie 2000.

Mike: People would call you up and pretend to be banks and say, we are the only ones that have a vault that is Y2K compliant vault. So, we want you to move all your money to our bank. You just transfer your money to some random account. My favorite one is the Australian version of the SEC. They set up a millennium bug insurance company, as an April fool's joke, literally they are like we're setting up a millennium bug insurance company, come get millennium, bug insurance, to demonstrate how gullible people were like to troll the entire Australian population. And people deposited $4 million, people are offered, offered to deposit $4 million dollars. 

Sarah: And then they funded an Indie movie. 

Mike: So, before we get into what actually happened on January 1st, 2000, I think it's worth dwelling on, why this became such a big deal. You know, there's other threats out there, right? There is super volcanoes and earthquakes in Seattle. Why did we focus on this as the threat that we are going to spend billions of dollars facing?  One researcher who works on this named Lisa Vox, her theory is that basically after the Cold War, we had a apocalypse deficit. We didn't have nuclear war anymore. We kind of needed something because there was this vacuum.

Sarah: Right. And everyone spent the nineties cause like waiting for the other shoe to drop and buying ever greater sizes of khaki. 

Mike: There was also, I actually think this is a really important reason why it was bi-partisan and a really important reason why it got to the size that it did.  Fixing Y2K for 99.9% of people did not require any trade-offs. You know, climate change means that, maybe you don't drive to work anymore. Maybe you must take the bus or maybe your taxes go up. For Y2K, it was literally just like tech companies must spend more money and the government will give small business loans or print and more money, but you do not have to do anything.

Sarah: It was kind of that thing, do you remember as a kid, how you would collect the tabs from soda cans and there'd be places where you could deposit them, or you could mail them in somewhere and they were supposed to get people kidneys. I do not know; I haven't researched it. I'm curious about the actual ratio of soda can tabs to kidneys if there was one, but it was something that it made sense for people to do, because it feels good and it doesn't harm you. You are not like, oh, I had a plan for that soda can tab. 

Mike: And also this was the middle of the dot com bubble. There were billions of dollars flowing into the tech sector. 

Sarah: Right all that pets.com money.

Mike: Yeah. But so, I mean, people were working their asses off to fix this, but I mean, politics is basically the art of deciding who will feel pain. Right. Who should it be affected in a crisis? Should it be renters, or should it be landlord? Should it be workers, or should it be owners? 

Sarah: Should it be people who are accustomed to feeling pain and feel it all the time and know it as a way of life or should it be the people who are not used to it and will go ouch.

Mike: It just sort of, it's the last gasp of bi-partisan cross governmental togetherness, but it's also kind of a gimme and that it's not bipartisanship for something hard. It is bipartisanship for something extremely easy. 

Sarah: Right. It's like we are coming together as a nation to do routine maintenance because we have to. 

Mike: So now we get to December 31st, 1999. 

Sarah: I'm 11 years old, I'm super excited. 

Mike: Do you remember what you did that night? 

Sarah: Yes. I remember my parents lived in Hawaii, so I remember being at the beach that night. And I remember a couple having what looked from a distance to be like a romantic moment and I remember screaming it is the new millennium of the moment of midnight. I imagine ruining that moment for them. I do not know what I was excited about or why it was exciting. It just was like really big. 

Mike: It was one of the times, one of the last times maybe of optimism about the future. Right? Because we were like entering this new technological golden age and Y2K was the first example of maybe this golden age is not as gold. There is going to be some little blips along the way, but there was the sense of huge possibility.

Sarah: Oh yeah. There is this very retro futuristic feel about it. And by retro futuristic, I mean the kind of look and feel of like tomorrow land. I have an attachment to the kind of nuclear age utopian ideas about technology and what it can do of the sixties, where like the atom was going to take us into this clean, amazing power that was going to allow us to live like the Jetsons. And I feel like the year 2000 felt a little bit like that too, because it was this idea that we had. I think that technology would make humanity better cause the absolute candy colored optimism of the sixties feels to me like it is based on that kind of a belief. And now it feels like, yeah, the T-Rex has stomped out of the paddock and eaten enough children that I certainly do not feel that way. 

Mike: One thing I think is so striking about these big technological leaps forward is that every single time we tell ourselves that they are going to be uncomplicated good. And it never happens, it never happens. When TVs first came into homes, they thought that would be this era of mass literacy because you could beam education into people's homes directly and like, oh, kids won't even need school anymore.

Sarah: People will sit at home and watch Shakespeare. And that is why old TV is incredibly boring because it's Alcoa Playhouse, presents a man for all seasons. 

Mike: Okay. So I'm going to send you a clip from the BBC on the night of their first starting to see the little blips of problems that are showing up in other time zones. Here is this, okay.

Sarah: Okay. 

“Twenty-five- thirty-five minutes from now we will know what's happening in this country. What has happened over all the rest of the world? Those bugs are going to crawl all over our computers, make the planes fly the sky. Are they doing it or not? Well, let us talk about bug watch map. You know what it is. And the big threat really seems to be in Japan. Nothing much has happened in Southeast Asia. When you get to Japan, the bug seems to have struck, possibly struck in two places to rid them of a serious incident in Ishikawa and Onagawa. Both of them nuclear power plants and in Ishikawa, the radiation monitoring system has failed, just outside, the actual nuclear reactor itself. That happened at midnight. It has not been put right. They don't know whether its bug related. At the Onagawa power station, alarm sounded after midnight, but they seem to put that right. Also in Japan thirty-eight earthquake, seismic sensors seemed to have failed since midnight. Again, they cannot be sure whether that is bug related or not.”

Sarah: Ah, okay. That was stressful to listen to. Because he's like a nuclear power plant in Japan is having some problems as it related to the Y2K bug, we have no idea. But we're just going to keep talking about it real fast. 

Mike: I think it's a useful clip because it shows that first of all, there were actually a lot more glitches than we know about. This was not a complete nothing burger, but what's really interesting is that he's describing a bunch of glitches that seem like, oh my God, there's this avalanche of glitches happening in like nuclear reactors, it is so bad. But then also he is describing things like the monitoring system has gone down. 

Sarah: Right. He's like thirty-eight earthquake sensors. 

Mike: Right. So we get on midnight of January 1st, 2000 is a relatively sizable number of these kinds of glitches, but no glitches that are really consequential. There's a Senate report that's published in February of 2000 that lists maybe a hundred of these things, all the glitches that they could confirm. And so here, I'm going to read you a couple of these. Hundreds of Knoxville utility board bills were printed with incorrect payment due dates either in January 1900 or January, 2099, the power outage in Carson city, Nevada for 30 minutes. That is the only power outage we know of. 

Sarah: Really? 

Mike: Yeah. Medicare payments were delayed one day because of the Y2K problem with the electric fund transfer through a bank that handles the transactions. 911 systems broke down in North Carolina, long distance phone service was out in parts of central Montana for about three hours. Godiva Chocolate experienced total systems failure, including cash registers in its New York store, but they were back in operation within three hours. 

Sarah: This is like weirdly soothing to listen to because it's just like a nice list of consequence less list problems.

Mike: Exactly, yes. 

Sarah: Godiva couldn't run their cash registers for three hours and you're like, oh that's nice, that the news is about people being inconvenienced. 

Mike: There's for whatever reason, a lot of the ones that they've mentioned in the Senate report are about slot machines. 

Sarah: Yeah. It is just nice to have this national epidemic of very minor problems. 

Mike: So there's only one like real problem that's like actually extremely tragic. Let us do it now cause it's bad. The actual worst one that we know of is in the UK, the NHS sent out 154 false positive test results to pregnant women telling them that their children had down syndrome.

Sarah: Oh my God.

Mike: And two women terminated the pregnancy as a result before they figured out that it was a Y2K based error. 

Sarah: That's horrible. 

Mike: That's terrible, that is the only one we know of that it is like tragically, awful bad. Interestingly and I think this is really important, three of the glitches that they mention in the Senate report about why Y2K preparedness are caused by Y2K preparedness, not by Y2K itself. 

Sarah: And what are those?

Mike: So, the District of Columbia, Washington DC replaced all of its software and all of their budget reports basically got like wiped. The government listings and the Milwaukee White Pages, we're quote, so riddled with errors that the publisher has agreed to reprint that section and hand deliver it for free to consumers next month. The company updated its software last year to make it Y2K compliant, but the software had bugs and introduced errors into the system. They also, this is really weird, do you remember Lamonts? 

Sarah: No.

Mike: It was like a whatever Nordstrom, Macy's like any other department store, it was in the Pacific, it was only in the Pacific Northwest. They went bankrupt in 2000 and the Senate report blames their bankruptcy on Y2K because apparently, they spent $10 million installing new computerized registers to get ready for Y2K. And that was one of the things that contributed to their bankruptcy. But then it's also if you're a giant department store with 38 stores and you go bankrupt. I don't think it's like your new cash registers, son.  I don't think that's it. I don't know how it ended up in the Senate report. 

Sarah: But maybe its selves your wounded pride. 

Mike: I think it's those two categories of glitches I think are important because whenever there's a problem that you're preparing for. There is always the possibility that fixing the problem will cause more damage than the problem itself. And so, this one Senate report, which is called Y2K a Crisis Averted, is essentially the only assessment that we've ever had of whether this $100 billion that the US spent getting ready for Y2K was worth it.

There has never been an independent investigation. There's never been a task force, basically, as soon as it happened, nobody wanted to look back for it. Partly because this whole idea that it was a hoax, that it was bullshit all along, we didn't have to do anything about it. This understanding was already forming.

Sarah: I remember feeling like, oh, I really thought that like, something would happen.

Mike: Me too, totally. 

Sarah: Yeah. I at least thought the power would go out. 

Mike: I mean, this is, you know, since this happened, we've basically been locked in this debate of, was it a nothing burger to begin with? Could we have done nothing, or did we fix it like in the same way we're having this debate now of like, well, are the, not that bad effects, the results of our preparation or are they evidence that we never needed to prepare in the first place? Right. And so the rest of this episode is basically walking through the arguments, because I think, I mentioned at the beginning, both arguments have merit, but both arguments are also, I think kind of wrong. 

Sarah: As always it is truth and false had bridge mix. 

Mike: Yes. Okay. To walk through the argument that it was a hoax to me, the closest thing to a compelling argument is that there are essentially only four countries that made any significant effort to solve it. America, the UK, Canada, and Australia, there was a survey in 1999, that in Italy, only 15% of the population had even heard of the Y2K bug. So, Germany, Italy, Japan, there was no government efforts, there was no funding. There was no stimulus money for this, it was just full on, we are just going to wait for it to happen.

And then if there are any glitches, we're going to fix them. The counterargument to that is always that like, well, Germany and Italy are like not advanced as the US so like the US had to do way more of this preparation, because we're the center of tech where the center of the tech boom, for whatever reason, America also has more of this COBAL coding language, because it was mandatory to use it by the military and for government contracts for a really long time. So, for whatever reason, we have like a higher density of this programming language. So that does necessitate more efforts in America. But then to me, that doesn't explain why, the UK put a billion pounds into fixing this and Germany put zero pounds into fixing this.

And they both essentially had the same number of errors in January 2000. Even if America is uniquely poorly positioned for this problem, that's not really an argument that the UK was uniquely poorly positioned too There's also the argument that, you know, the kinds of glitches that happened on Y2K, those glitches happen all the time.

You know, things like the 911 system going out, that's literally something that happens every day in America. Some states, some cities 911 system goes down and then gets brought back up again. These casinos where the slot machines turned off and turned back on again, they all say they are like, yeah, this happens like once a month, when Dave trips over the cord.

Sarah: Fucking Dave. 

Mike: My favorite one is that in 2019, relatively recently, a raccoon caused a power outage for 10,000 people in Ohio because he got into one of the circuit breakers and chew through one of the wires.

Sarah:  It was the raccoon. 

Mike: It might not have been great for the raccoon, I don't know. At any given time, 1% to 2% of the ATM's in the country are out of order. 

Sarah: Right. Little things always go wrong in America and were there even more little things at this moment than there are normally. Was it just that we were looking for little things? 

Mike: I think, I mean, the Senate had a reason to spin this as a crisis averted because they spent $9 million on it. No one wants to put out a report afterwards. It's like, oh, we really fucked up here guys and Germany did nothing. This is my theory for why they included the fucking Lamonts bankruptcy in the Y2K glitches was, they just wanted any glitches they could find. So that is basically the it was a nothing burger that we could have done, nothing about.

That's like the argument for it is basically comparing us to other countries and saying like the kinds of glitches that it caused, we could have just waited for the glitches to happen and fix them, which is what Germany and other countries did. They were just like, yeah, we're just going to wait, and if something happens, like we'll just turn off and on slot machines. 

Sarah: And then that argument is like more or less persuasive, I think, based on what is the potential financial and human cost to waiting for things to go wrong. And then dealing with it then and how much can we estimate that? And to the extent that we can grasp it, how much does it compare to the difficulty of what we would have to do to prepare in advance?

Mike: Exactly and you don't want to wait, if there's a chance of like an airplane falling out of the sky, you can't be like we are gonna wait, there is clearly, there's some disasters that you can wait for and there's some that you can't. But so now we're going to do the argument for no, it was something that was real and we came together and solved it.

And so I think the first and the biggest argument for this is just like talk to anyone who worked in IT in the late 1990s. And they will tell you, we worked our asses off, we worked overtime. The code was janky as fuck. All these systems needed to be modernized anyway. 

Sarah: Oh, this is interesting. Is it like, everything was kind of hanging by a thread in a lot of significant ways, but the only way to motivate, to update the nation's technological infrastructure was to generate support for this big push around this one specific thing that people could get really worried about? I mean, that makes sense. I feel like the only way to get people to execute routine maintenance work is to scare the shit out of them about what could go wrong. 

Mike: At the time a lot of companies had sort of sleepwalked into having some technology associated with their business. One of the articles that I read talks about how very few companies, even large companies had chief information officers at the time, someone really high level in the company.

Who is like I'm in charge of all of our technology. And so what Y2K did was it made CEOs who were like, you know, dads in sneakers who didn't really know that much about technology. It made them all of a sudden be like, wait a minute, I'm kind of running a tech company. Whoever was running Amtrak at the time had to be like, hang on a minute. Our trains could shut down at any time because of like weird software shit. So, I need to take this stuff seriously.

Sarah: I feel like it's great that there can have been a phenomenon that forced people to embrace the complexity of the technology they were trying to use to generate profit and, you know, treat that with some respect. 

Mike: And the vulnerabilities that they had to. What Y2K really pushed companies to do was to start testing. Banks started doing financial forecasting into the future and we're like, okay, well let's do something from like 1995 to 2005 and see what the computers do. And the computers are like, nooo, we have to fix this. We cannot be running on this like jalopy ass mode anymore. 

Sarah: That's such a cute computer voice.

Mike: That was my computer voice. 

Sarah: They were like, oh, she's suffering.

Mike: Yeah. And so one of the things that one of these researchers points out is that in the 1980s, British grocery stores were noticing that the barcodes of some items wouldn't scan, and it turned out that they had expiration dates. They were in 2000, you know, some products you don't have like an expiration date of like 10 years in the future. And there'll be like bloop and they won't bloop, but actually they were catching those things and fixing them long before the public ever found out about it. 

Sarah: Okay. I want to try and anticipate a twist. Does it seem as if Germany has done nothing to prevent Y2K because they just finished their work early and are sitting quietly under a tree and reading in December 1999. 

Mike: That would be very Germany of them.  That is half the answer, but we will get there this. So, one of the, this researcher that I interviewed, Dylan Mulvin, also pointed out to me, this is fascinating that for years, one of the most vexing problems in banking IT was fucking leap years that try explaining to a computer that once every four years we have this extra day. Unless it is a century year, in which case we don't have the extra day, unless it's a century day, every 400 years and then we do have it. 

Sarah: And the computer it's like, why did you bring me into your illogical world? 

Mike: Exactly. And so famously the year, 2000 was a leap year. It should not have been because of the century year, but then it should have been because it is a, once every 400-century year. 

Sarah: Because the year 1600 was a leap year. 

Mike: Yes. So these kind of problems, especially in financial institutions, you know, your entire bank account gets wiped out overnight. These kinds of problems were being noticed and being fixed by bank IT people long before the rest of the country was figuring out about this stuff. So, you know, saying it was at this big nothing burger erases all this labor by IT people, who were like punk, we were working on this long before you read that fucking article in 1993, we've known about this. It's a thing. 

Sarah: So a story about what happens if you actually try, turns into a story about how trying is pointless and it's for nerds. That is not good.

Mike: It's not good. I also find those pretty convincing that a lot of companies that were testing their systems and finding massive glitches, it's not like they're going to tell the public about that. Right. If you're American Airlines and you're like, oh yeah, we tested something and all of our planes were going to fall out of the sky, just want to let you know. 

Sarah: Right. We're relying on companies to do their own disclosure of what could have happened. You chuckle heads would have been up the creek without a paddle if O’Brien here hadn't caught that line of code. 

Mike: Well, I mean, I still find it pretty compelling that some countries spent $0 and some countries spent many dollars and that they both had effectively the same number of glitches. So, I think when IT people talk about like, you know, look, we worked our asses off doing overtime, fixing these bugs.

I think you could also look at that and say, well, a lot of those banks, a lot of those tech companies, a lot of those airlines would have done that anyway. I mean, banks have an incentive for their customer's accounts, not to go to $0.  Airlines have an incentive for the planes not to fall out of the sky. I find it pretty convincing that they might have just solved those problems on their own and we could have spent $9 billion, fighting against the enduring poverty glitch or other societal glitches that we spend less of our efforts on.

Sarah: It's interesting to have a story where it seems like the government over responded that isn't war. And also that work is a constant in our lives, systems need to be worked on in order to run. And the fact that we can't see with our own eyes where that work went exactly doesn't mean that it went nowhere. 

Mike: Yeah. And so this brings us to our final twist. This is basically the answer to the question. Why did only four countries fuck with Y2K? Why these four countries? So, when I tell you the countries again, tell me if anything stands out to you as being in common. America, the UK, Canada and Australia. 

Sarah: There English-speaking countries. 

Mike: Yes. 

Sarah: And I presume that that might have an effect on how we are writing dates.

Mike: Oh, close. They also have English legal systems. So one of the things that's common across all of those countries is that they're really big into legal liability and using lawsuits to fix social problems. Well, one of the major memory hold aspects of Y2K was how fucking terrified corporate America was of getting sued. So, there were articles coming out in 1999, I found a really interesting projection that said if Y2K ends up being a problem, corporate America is going to spend $1 trillion and one decade in litigation over Y2K. 

Sarah: And they were like, all right, let us update some infrastructure.

Mike: As early as 1997, companies were starting to sue each other. A produce store sued the manufacturer of their cash register saying we just paid 2,500 bucks for cash register. We know from the millennium bug that it's going to be useless in three years. So fuck you, we want our money back. And Quicken, you know, Quicken books, whatever that budgeting software. 

Sarah: QuickBooks.

Mike: Yeah. QuickBooks, they had six pending class action lawsuits against them by 1998. Because people were saying, well, all of my budget data is going to get lost if this goes down. 

Sarah: And also it's a nice thing to drag CEO's in front of Senate questioning for, right. You can just see it in your mind, there would have to be some kind of a big business whipping boy that could take the task for all this. And it could be you. 

Mike: Right. And this is actually the only aspect of Y2K that was partisan because Republicans wanted to pass a law saying let's protect companies from their own customers. If something bad happens, let us make sure they don't have to pay out anything in damages and Democrats who are pretty captured by the trial lawyer lobby wanting to make it easy for people to sue. And so they actually ended up passing a law that limited liability for companies, but didn't limit it, like all the way. There was some red meat in there for lawyers, and there was some red meat in there for companies. 

Sarah: This is a very meaty episode. Are you hungry? I’m hungry.

Mike: And so, as we know, from sexual harassment lawsuits, as a corporation, you don't have to actually prevent something from happening. You have to show the court that you try. So, if you are American airlines, if your planes crash, if a thousand people die, if you get sued, what you can then say to the court afterwards is say, well, we shouldn't pay any damages because we spent $60 million updating our systems. We sat on the task force with the White House.

Look how much we did. And so the companies in a place like Germany or France or Italy that don't have, they don't use liability to solve corporate problems the way that we do, they use regulation. The companies there could have just quietly updated their systems because they didn't have to say anything about it. They didn't have to push off all these lawsuits. 

Sarah: Because they weren't in a relationship with their government, the way that children are with their parents. And they're like, I am doing my homework now. I mean, this is the, in the very bones of America, Ben Franklin and his autobiography has an anecdote that I love about when he was running his printing press, he would then deliver, you know his pamphlets and things by hand. He knew that people would look at him and go there goes, Ben Franklin pushing his barrow around, look at that hardworking man doing it all by himself. And it's like, you can't see the workers that are in the shop, that is the point. Yes. 

Mike: And so, this was the calculation that companies in these four English speaking, common law countries made. Banks in Japan might've been having these problems too, and they were just like, no, no, we just quietly fix them. We quietly fix stuff all the time because we're not going to be fighting off lawsuits because we have a real government.

Sarah: Oh it is kind of a flux Japan. I would say that what we can learn from this is that as Americans, we are more likely to do things that we already need to be doing. If there is some kind of urgent reason involving our own safety or comfort, we appear also to be inclined after having done that, to say, well, that was a lot of work.

Not enough bad stuff happened, I didn't like that. And that is perhaps an unhelpful perspective to take away from a story from which you could alternatively take the lesson of it's good to update our systems so that they are functional. And if we have to cook up a reason to compel us to do what we need to do anyway, then like maybe that's okay.

I feel like this is a great example of the sort of gap between logic and emotion for a lot of us as humans, where like we can figure it out intellectually that if our systems are more functional than that averts the kinds of tragedies that do move us to take action. And yet it's harder to accept that as a felt reality of like bow chicka bow wow. I'm so excited about strengthening our filing systems efficiency. It is hard to really, this is why Virgos are so important.

Mike:  Is that another bug? Is that what you mean?

Sarah: It's a feature, it is a Virgo feature. 

Mike: So that's it, this is the story of Y2K. This is why we should all stop using it as a proxy indicator for whatever we're actually arguing about on the internet.

Sarah: There are some arguments that you can't settle over Twitter, so sorry.

Mike: Are there, Sarah? Are there? 

Sarah: I know this is like news to you, I also like when I went to call you to start this show, you didn't pick up. And I was, that's weird and then I looked on Twitter and I was, oh, he's tweeting about Corbyn.

Mike: I was fighting with somebody about Jeremy Corbyn. Doing the show with you is such a better use of my time, I'm sorry.

Sarah: I was very, that's my guy.

Mike: You were seeing me in my natural habitat. That's what it is, you're like looking inside the aquarium. You are like, oh, Mike's doing what he does. 

Sarah: Yeah. Like when you go see the iguanas eat its little bugs. And you are like, I don't like bugs, but iguanas like bugs. I don't like having Twitter arguments about British politics, but it is essential to Mike's mineral needs.