Apocalypse Lost - Brief Article

While the world at large is quite relieved at having survived all the threatened computer system crashes, financial meltdowns, and collapses of public services that had been prophesied for Y2K, there is a keen sense of disappointment on the part of the prophets of gloom-and-doom, even a sense of lost opportunity.

The Web site of fundamentalist authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins (www.leftbehind.com), whose best-selling Left Behind thrillers describe what happens to the rest of the world after The Rapture carries off the true christians, used to carry alarums about the Y2K bug triggering "financial meltdown," making it possible for "the Antichrist or his emissaries to dominate the world commercially until it is destroyed." However, when the deadline was fast approaching, Jenkins was downplaying the doom, telling the Washington Post (December 27, 1999) that "we regret having talked about [the prediction]." Fundamentalist evangelist Jerry Falwell had been distributing a packet and video on "The Y2K Time Bomb," urging people to stock up on supplies and foodstuffs. He warned that "Y2K is God's instrument to shake this nation, to humble this nation." However, by December Falwell had withdrawn the video, and stated "I don't anticipate any major problems."

By the end of December, fundamentalist-survivalist author Gary North, who as recently as October 1999 had been thundering that the Y2K bug would bring about "the breakdown of Western society" (see this column, January! February 1999) had toned down his flaming Doomsday rhetoric. Instead of warning of an imminent return to a nineteenth century style of living, North could only threaten the eventual collapse of the banking system: "Things will not break down all at once in early January unless the power grid goes down and stays down. But the domino effect will create ever-increasing institutional noise and confusion throughout January and beyond. Your check will not be in the mail." By the second week in January, North, ever hopeful, was still warning of looming "cascading cross defaults" in the banking system, which somehow failed to materialize (see www.garynorth.com). To keep the flames of Y2K panic still burning, North was reduced to compiling a Y2K "Glitch report" on his Web site. It chronicles such world -shaking events as accounting problems in restaurants and other businesses, failures in university and government computing systems (many of which seem entirely unrelated to Y2K; computer problems were not unknown in the years leading up to 1999). Whenever any computer system anywhere failed in anyway, North saw in it a flicker of hope for his post-technological theocratic utopia.

Software guru Ed Yourdon is co-author with his daughter of the best-selling Time Bomb 2000, which Dr. Dobbs Electronic Review of Computer Books characterized as "600 pages of absolute nonsense. Open anywhere, shake the book upside down, and out billows a smothering cloud of horsefeathers." On the quiet morning of Saturday, January 1, 2000, Yourdon wrote on his Web site, "Some, and perhaps many, Y2K bugs have nor become visible yet." When time passed and the threatened Y2K calamities failed to materialize, he replaced the Web page that used to promote his the-sky-is-falling book with the following note: "Now that Y2K has come and gone, we've removed the material that was posted here about our Time Bomb 2000 book." Yourdon, attempting to regain the solid reputation he had before he became a Y2K Cassandra, now has this to say on his Web site: "For many, Y2K was truly a 'bump in the road,' or BITR--nor only in terms of technological disruptions, but also in terms of the impact it had on our personal lives and r elationships. But for at least a few, Y2K wrought a profound and permanent change: Even if the computer systems didn't collapse, the Y2K-relared threat of such a collapse has made us reexamine our lives, redefine our priorities, and re-focus our energies for the future." Amen, brother.

But lest we grow complacent, the Year 2000 Institute warns that we're still not home free. For one thing, the conversion of European currencies to the euro is supposedly headed for computer-induced disaster: "At least 25 percent of the ten million euro applications are expected to fail between the years of 1999 and 2004, causing major economic upheaval." For another, we still had not (as of this writing) made it safely through Leap Year Day of 2000: "It has been estimated that more than two million applications will experience this particular Leap Year problem. Most such problems will be resolved, but several hundred thousand are likely to fail. In the case of COTS spreadsheet applications, this could translate into billions of individual failures, a handful of which will prove catastrophic to those using them."

And these doomsayers also warn of yet another looming cyber-catastrophe. The Year 2000 Institute warns that on September 8, 2001, the dock will roll over on millions of systems installed worldwide running the UNIX operating system. "This is an event of Epoch [sic] proportions--quite literally!" they warn. "It is estimated that twelve million applications will be affected, more than one million of which will not be repaired m rime."