Eleven Fifty-Nine

Y2K as the Mystery of the Mind

By Eric Francis

IT'S PROBABLY too good to be possible, but let's pretend. Imagine if, at the stroke of midnight on Jan. 1, 2000, thousands of computers scattered throughout the global network fail to comprehend the meaning of the century changing. In the Geekish language, years are usually indicated in two digits, such as "99" as shorthand for 1999. Then one day it becomes "00," and Big Brother loses his mind. How?

Some computers in our sprawling, inexorably interconnected network could think it's 1900 again, since they haven't all been told there's such a thing as "2000." And then kind of cyber-insanity could take root. Within those systems, people born in 1950 would become "­50 years old," and people who have bills due on Jan. 10, 2000 won't be expected to pay for another century or so. Some systems could seize up, like a video camcorder I heard about that just basically croaked when its owner turned the internal clock to New Year's Eve 1999, and electronic rigor mortis set in at the stroke of 12.

Others, the more intelligent klunkers, could attempt to solve the problem on their own, and start deleting the names of the "unborn" from their files -- and then conveniently updating the world with the fact that these non-people don't really exist. Oh, to be among them!

Hypothetically, as this chain-reaction spreads, chunks of the almighty, ubiquitous information- surveillance- selling- tracking- collections- hyperlinked- propaganda web could take one another down like dominoes. All your favorite people -- The Cops, Motor Vehicles, the IRS, the Electric Company, MasterCard and the AT&T marketing onslaught -- might not be able to function normally. Antiquated electronic clocks built into the brainstems of 20-year-old mainframe systems could be impossible to find. Dumb little ROM chips the size of peanut slices buried in systems as big as warehouses would sit there and giggle, permanently thinking it's the dawn of the prior century.

Like in an Ayn Rand novel, the known universe could come to a slow halt.

This little doomsday scenario is known variously as "Y2K," the "Year 2000 Bug," or the "Millennium Bug." Lots of companies are advertising their process of becoming "Y2K compliant," meaning "we've allegedly dealt with it." Religious web pages are touting it as an aspect of "The End" and asking everyone to stay calm and pray. Johnny Asia, a guitarist who bills himself on the Internet as a "write-in candidate for Messiah," is sure that Y2K is God's gift to humanity, and he makes an excellent case that it's the ultimate in poetic justice being levied upon the people who think they can conquer the world.

It's not a pretend problem; in fact, it's extremely expensive and annoying one, and many people have been working full-time and at rather high wages toward a pseudosolution, which some estimates have placed at around half-a-trillion dollars (the cost of the Vietnam War). Part of the problem arises from the fact that a widely-used programming language called Cobol is itself obsolete, and there are not enough Cobol programmers left alive or in business to deal with the situation they created. Some are being called out of retirement to solve the problem.

The fix works a little like this. First, non-compliant hardware and software must be located; then it must be repaired with software "patches" or replacement equipment; then it must be tested to see if it meshes back in with the rest of reality. And then we wait and see. The problem is that the defective gizmos don't just jump up and yell, "Me! Me!" They have to be found one-by-one, they will not all be found, and we won't know what that means till some time goes by. It might be relatively harmless, or it might be a huge pain in the ass.

Think of it this way. If you've ever tried to solve a computer problem, like making your printer go when it doesn't quite feel in the mood, you know that when one tiny little thing in the programming is wrong, the system acts like someone went inside and slashed all the wires. Hence, it could be a real problem if a few computers inside the control-obsessed, everything-must-be-exactly-right-or-else electronic network don't know what year, century or millennium it is. And computers run our cars, our sewerage plants, our food distribution networks, our phones and our stoves, among other things.

Some people have the idea that this is going to become some kind of civil defense emergency. In Boulder, Colorado, a citizen's committee established to deal with the Y2K bug recently said in the newspaper that people should prepare for up to one year without normal food distribution. That's a lot of Spam. Some reliable sources have called for stockpiling of cash, in case all the Money Magic machines keel over or the bank forgets about your $245,098.00 in checking.

How, you may ask, is this even possible? Did someone forget the year 2000 was coming right after the year 1999?

Or is the real "Millennium Bug" something living in our brains?

That's my theory.

On the computer level, the Millennium Bug is the result of engineers, programmers and business men living like there's no tomorrow. This problem is the byproduct of an effort to skimp on bits and bytes of programming code, the usual rush to "get the job done," and working under the typical capitalist assumption that greed is holy, that there is no Karma, and that everything was already obsolete last week. We see many examples of this kind of thinking in our world, and it's quite deadly.

We may point to big institutions for their idiotic behavior, but in important ways, this thinking functions on the most personal levels as well. I was recently speaking with a friend about some long-term business projects I wanted to begin working on, and she said, in all earnestness, "You mean you think we'll still be here?"

You laugh. I did. But her casual statement helped me identify the Millennium Bug in human programming. It's a line of mental code that reads: "It's not going to matter anyway." This is the little glitch I think is responsible for smoking, piling up huge consumer debts that can never be paid off, blatant self-abuse, and treating other people like they are expendable. This is the sponsoring thought behind the idea that there's no point getting our lives together, or living our dreams, and especially the idea that says there's no point in working for positive change or making a commitment to anything.

After all, "It doesn't matter anyway," because, hell, we might not be here. So as a result, we live in a permanent state of noncommittal non-life, and what is not life is death, or in this case, living death. Unable to deal with death, we make death a permanent state. In actual fact, there will come a time when we will not be here. Everyone who lives, lives despite this; yet many people do not.

As a direct result of this reversed thinking, we have manifested and consented to live in countless doomsday machines. Even if you don't believe in Earth Changes or the End Times, it's clear that the path of "economic progress" is consuming the planet's ability to sustain us. Environmental toxins are so pervasive that most of us will get cancer or some other immune disease as a result of them. End Timers point to this as evidence for their case. I recently toured a Jehovah's Witness printing plant that pumped out two million booklets a day advertising The End. Well, just keep chopping down those forests and let's see.

Most of us grew up in the shadow of the nuclear bomb. I was born in the mid-1960s and didn't even get the worst of it, though I was constantly aware that Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) could be invoked by The President pressing The Button in 12 minutes flat. In elementary school, I spent a lot of time drafting detailed plans for underground nuclear bomb shelters; years later, I learned that you could actually buy houses with bomb shelters similar to the ones I was inventing installed in the back yard or basement.

In the early '80s or so, everyone in the country watched a heavy-duty TV docudrama called The Day After, which portrayed the aftermath of a full-scale nuclear war that breaks out one fine afternoon for no good reason. Teachers assigned it as homework. Everyone did their duty and tuned in. It's main propaganda content: some of us survive. But in what world? So why bother?

Even more fun, if you grew up in the 1950s, you were subjected to repeated "duck and cover drills," during which you practiced hiding under your school desk on two seconds notice at the sound of an alarm bell because the world might end. And you probably had inflicted upon you relentless Cold War propaganda in newsreels, convincing you that total danger was necessary for a little safety.

Once the ideas of threat and security are confused, it's hard to get any peace, because what you think will lead to peace really leads straight to terror and disaster. Meanwhile, life, that thing for which we are supposedly all here, ends up on permanent hold. There is no tomorrow, and we live like there is no tomorrow, but without the fun this normally suggests. Most people would say that this is because we're too terrified. I would say the goal of living in terror is to guarantee that we don't have any fun, because fun is risky. It just might end. See if you can catch yourself at this one; you'll be very glad you did.

There is one technology that has never forgotten tomorrow comes, and that is astrology. Though It's most often abused as a tool for predicting events, one of its greatest strengths is its ability to both acknowledge the future and be in the present moment at the same time. So, naturally, I checked the chart for Y2K, the alleged Turn of the Millennium. My chart is for New York City at 11:59:59 p.m., Dec. 31, 1999. Remember that this date is highly arbitrary. We are creating its meaning as we go along, but that doesn't make the astrology any less meaningful; we create the meaning of astrology as we go along, too.

There are always many interesting factors in these power-charts, but I'll share two of them here, and then give you my official astrological advice in question form.

First, we have an exact conjunction between the two major planets discovered in the 20th century: Pluto and Chiron. This is a rare conjunction of forces which are proven to have profound impact on human life, and it's exact on Dec. 30, 1999 (the last time was on the eve of World War Part II).

Pluto, the lord of the underworld, delegate from the unknown and unimagined reaches, represents the invisible processes that push society and our individual psyches forward. It's the death that leads to rebirth, Scorpio style. It's a kind of amoral, immortal energy, a lot like the Indian goddess Kali, destroying the old and obsolete and making way for new developments. Since most people resist this process, and steadfastly refuse to grow or change or surrender to the next stage of life till the last minute, Pluto is usually experienced as painful or disastrous. If you believe things have to be this way, you will be subjected to your belief. There are other ways to live.

Chiron works the opposite way -- by bringing everything to full consciousness right now. Chiron is a kind of cosmic trigger. It is a magnifier of whatever it comes into contact with, and an intensifier of events, a kind of focusing lens. This conjunction (an exact alignment), in Sagittarius, to me says that Pluto's deep, hidden processes of change and evolution suddenly come to the surface. Sagittarius is about our world-view, our relationship to culture, religion, academic knowledge, justice, and most important, our relationship to our higher selves. Pluto in Sagittarius has signified enforced changes in all of these aspects of life for the past three years, and many more to come. Bring in Chiron, and something, or many things, previously hidden may suddenly erupt. This could represent a very wide-scale change in world-view brought on by some kind of event that shows us that we live in one little world no matter how small we try to chop it up. I have no doubt that this conjunction represents both things that we would not normally look forward to, and other things that will be pretty amazing, but whatever it represents, we will have no control over the events themselves.

But whatever happens, we will get to face it.

Second, Neptune sits exactly on something called the South Node. Neptune, the ruler of Pisces, is about spirituality, dreams and inspiration; and also about delusions, addictions and denial. Aquarius, the sign where the conjunction occurs, is about the state of our community and our culture. The South Node is either what we are obsessed over, or what we are dealing with from the past and releasing. Translation: Are we ready to let go of our lies and self-deceptions and addictions to conformist ways of life? Or will we wallow in the swoony mists of fake spirituality and denial into the next age of humanity? Or more simply, is our Aquarian vision of the future real, something we are willing to actually live for, or is it pure bullshit? What would it mean to tap into real vision and real inspiration?

Here's another take. The South Node in Aquarius represents the intense psychic and emotional crystallization that we live within. You could call it the terror of freedom. Most of us fear that if we make one change in our lives, everything will collapse. Most of us are so busy with our anxiety, our anxiety meds, our boring or tormented relationships, our jobs, our schedules, making this payment and that payment, that never do we have a "spare" (!) moment to actually live the life we work so hard to sustain.

The fear (or reality) of the global computer network crashing, the financial system bottoming out, of the world ending, or of our lives collapsing in a heap of glass, are all the same thought. They are all forms of the thought otherwise known as death. We attempt to adjust and manipulate the symbols of reality, and hardly ever immerse ourselves in the reality of reality. For example, we are all here temporarily, and we have to live with that.

"The Millennium" is an arbitrary date and time. It is a symbol of death, or better still, the symbol of our refusal to make the choice to live. But what we are living through now, far from being arbitrary or symbolic, is something we have created, and it is actually happening. Perhaps it's blind faith that says it's better to live than it is to die, but I say it's a choice worth making with your eyes open. I would say this one is worth a confrontation.

If you want to be here, why not live that way?

If you're not sure, perhaps try living this coming year like it was your last. Maybe it's not. You never know. ++

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