The Y2K Trap

Talk about depictions of the future in science fiction and other sources
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Yuli Ban
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The Y2K Trap

Post by Yuli Ban »

Anyone remember Mother Meki/Babylon Today? Especially the later days of it circa 2019-2020 when it started really becoming a sort of technist story. This is some mulling in that verse about something known as the Y2K Epoch and the Y2K Trap.

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What if the world ends with a whimper after all?

That is, what if we suffer a Y2K Trap, rather than a cataclysmic setback like nuclear war or runaway climate change.

Imagine the possibility that the Y2K technocultural epoch is it. This is as far as it's physically possible to go technologically without something approaching actual magic, which we certainly can't make happen. We are approaching the limits of engineering; AI can only get faster but remain perfectly narrow and brittle; spaceflight beyond Earth's corona is a pure thrill-seeking suicidal novelty; it's impossible to combine biology with computers; nuclear fusion is the absolute best energy source we'll ever see and it'll only just barely become possible in a deeply unprofitable way; molecular nanotechnology might as well be magic and we're out of mana; quantum computing is a niche sideshow of regular computing, which maxes out after Moore's Law dies— the rest of the future is just endlessly recycled 1980s-thru-2020s.

That's probably one of the most cursed futures. At least with an apocalypse, we will know we've lost everything, and with a dystopia we'll know it could have been good. A Y2K trap is a species-wide Tantalus. It's so close, yet so far. A glorious future left dangling just barely out of reach— forever.

We'll look up at the stars at night and dream of worlds thousands, millions of light years away, knowing in our hearts that it's all forever beyond us into the reaches of eternity. All that's left for us is a world of neoliberal post-capitalism, video games, low-Earth orbit space projects, endless culture wars, and the forever inevitable future apocalypse.

Every year, we'll lay in wait of a future that seems to be just round the corner. It's almost here, heralded by smarthomes, sleeker smartphones, cutesier social robots, autonomous machines, virtual reality headsets becoming goggles, and other such gizmos. Yet it never comes. We'll just play pretend as we have for decades. Transhumanists will badly stick radio implants under their skin to pretend that the biological era is coming to an end. Futurists will exalt the latest statistical modeling algorithm as a new step towards artificial general intelligence. Constant "breakthroughs" in propulsion keep teasing us with the possibility of going to Mars in a week. Corporations keep showing off the latest in driverless car technology. Social media trends cycle in and out. Synthetic media creators show off AI-generated pictures of inhuman faces. So it is in 2020, so it shall be in 3030, until the final decline of humanity ends us all.

Every year, we'll lay in wait of a future that never comes.

The Y2K Trap describes a global cultural era that began around 1979 and came to a crashing end in 2020 (though its pieces lingered until 2025) known as the "Y2K epoch". Framed by the rise of neoliberalism and the 4th Industrial Revolution, the Y2K epoque is known for a few notable traits that define it as this intermediate period between the Old and the New. It was an era of skyscrapers and rose-petal highways, SUVs and bicycling for the environment, of color TV becoming HD TV, the rise of the internet and internet culture, the consolidation of big banking and corporate culture, the postmodernization of culture, video gaming as a hobby and then an art form, of cellular phones and smartphones, of commercial air travel for the masses, of ridiculously stark income inequality masked by ridiculously advanced technology by historical standards, of old sins suddenly becoming publicly shamed and new vices becoming celebrated, and the commodification of demographics, of an openly diverse world regime of governments beholden to corporations and the United Nations seeming more competent than they were due to there being no major threats to the global geopolitical order, of the Web and Web 2.0. The stereotypical image of this era is that of the yuppie banker checking his stocks on his smartphone while a Boeing 747 flies over the metropolis in which he lives and works.

There's two words that summarize the Y2K epoch better than any other: "Capitalism Triumphant"

It was the "end of history." People's lives were more flexible than usual, largely thanks to technology and the victory of the 8-hour workday (though this is also an era where that 8-hour workday began becoming fuzzier and fuzzier), but people's lives still revolved around their jobs and professions. You could always be that commune-dwelling rebel playing bongos and eating granola as long as you got those time-sheets in on time. There was no major ideological rival to neoliberal capitalism in this era, nor was there any real evolution of it. This was after the fall of communism and before the rise of technism and the Hypereconomy. Business was big and it was everywhere. And not everyone was happy about it.

One of the chief clichés of the Y2K epoch is that of digital alienation, perhaps no better distilled than on British band Radiohead's Y2K opuses, OK Computer and Kid A. In an era before neurotech, humans' very limited wetware bandwidth was being pushed far past its limits by the hyperaccelerated pace of modern life. Distractions flashed everywhere. Everyone vied for your attention. And the human spirit had never before been so totally controlled or thoroughly demoralized even compared to when the spectre of nuclear extinction hung over all heads. The glorious past was gone and proven to be an ur-fascistic delusion, while the glittery future seemed ever more distant no matter how transparent and tiny our electronics became. All that was left was a present filled with slogans and self-help books to cope with the unending sense of alienation. For as pleasant as the time was compared to the harder edges of history, no one who lived during the Y2K epoch wanted to live during the Y2K epoch. Ask anyone who lived during this time, and they'll tell you the same thing: "I want my jetpack!" or "I want to live in a log cabin!"
Romanticism became appealing once again as a new wave of Luddites longed for that rough past, while techies and transhumanists sought to live in a future yet to come. A trend that had existed during the Third Industrial Revolution returned with gusto as, early on in the Epoch, marketers and developers desperately tried to sell the Future™ as a current reality. Later in the epoch, these designers backtracked and instead tried selling modernity as something quaint and old-school. Never did anyone accept the present as what it was. It was either too modern or not modern enough. We were on the cusp of everything we wanted while living just past the times of everything we needed. No wonder no one wanted to live during these times. This wasn't the future we asked for.
But alas, the Y2K epoch matured right between two industrial revolutions, the third and fourth. This sense of stagnation is where that angst was birthed. People began to fear that we had gone as far as it was possible to go and worried increasingly that, if the fall of civilization didn't kill us, we'd be stuck here forever. We'd be stuck with Silicon Valley techno-grifters trying to sell useless horrendously impractical solutions to nonexistent problems as "the Future™ we were promised." No flying cars, just barely functional driverless ones that you weren't going to own. No Rosies and ASIMOs, just deliberately useless social robots that completely missed the point of why anyone would want a home robot in the first place. No texting-by-thinking, just endless social media cancel culture trolls.

As has been mentioned, the Y2K epoch is the era of P2P, voice over IP, enterprise instant messaging, e-payments, business rules management, wireless LANs, cryptocurrency, search engine optimization, stock market automation, enterprise portals, chatbots, infrastructural development, HR automation, social media, environmental awareness, Big Data, and more things that are familiar to anyone who's lived in the 2000s and 2010s. It's not what people wanted out of the 1990s and 2000s by far. To a devout futurist, the Y2K epoch is the most boring possible future, one that seems exciting only to middle-level managers and Wall Street brokers who lust for profit charts and graphs. It tries so hard to be futuristic because it isn't futuristic, despite a few fleeting flirtations with ultra-high technology.

Immediately following the Y2K epoch, the thing that breaks us free from the Y2K trap, is the Anteacceleratio and what I like to call the "Diamond Society." This is the era of artificial general intelligence, AI-accelerated scientific discovery, synthetic media, brain-computer interfaces, mass automation, the realization of nuclear fusion and renewable energy, in vitro food and products, advanced computing, microrobotics, mixed reality, the Metaverse, massive space operations, early space colonization, human augmentation, genetic engineering, cures for deep-diseases like cancer and diabetes, anti-aging, lethal autonomous weapons systems, advanced robotics, global rewilding, remote working, drone industry, and so many other aspects of the Future™ that are now brought into commercial fruition. The traditions will begin to break down around us, and the way things used to be will begin fully giving way to the future condition of mankind. It will be as scary as it is exciting. But the one thing it won't be is indistinguishable from the Y2K epoch. We will begin realizing soon enough that we have avoided the Y2K trap and are now in a new technocultural era of humanity.

And then as it accelerates ever faster and faster towards the era of high-end transhumanism and artificial superintelligence, we will begin looking back at the Y2K epoch with ever-greater fondness and nostalgia as a time when certain aspects of modernity embraced us but not in such an overwhelming quantity. We'll wonder "What if we were caught in a Y2K trap?" more and more, imagining just what if the future really was just more of the past extended into eternity...
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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erowind
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Re: The Y2K Trap

Post by erowind »

Thankyou for the writing Yuli!

An important takeaway i’ve gotten from this finally is that postmodernism is dead. I’ve known for some time this is the case as the philosophical reasoning of postmodernism eats itself in its rejection of metanarrative as postmodernism itself is a metanarrative. Even so, it is about time that the form of that death become apparent.

And so, welcome in the Anteacceleratio.
Tadasuke
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Re: The Y2K Trap

Post by Tadasuke »

Y2K wasn't a thing outside of around 1996-2004. See https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Y2K

The world has changed considerably since the year 1980. In many areas. Culture is different, fashion is different, architecture is different, design is different, food is different, entertainment is different, job market is different, technology is different, people are different. Ask someone who lives in a large Chinese city whether their lives have changed since 1980. Or even someone in the rural areas.

Today many people learn and work via the Web, order various things on-line (I order almost everything), talk to other people on-line, play on-line and sometimes even talk to their computers. This is vastly different from life in 1980, even in the most advanced and prosperous cities.
In the year 1980 there were only 3 (!) buildings over 200m tall completed (all in the USA). 71 (!) in total between 1909 (Metropolitan Life Tower) and 1980 (AT&T Building). In 2022 there will be 2131 (that's 30x more!) buildings over 200m tall in total (most outside the USA) and very differently looking than 42 years earlier.

1980 was before PC, before MS-DOS, before NES (Famicom), before the Space Shuttle (way before the ISS and way way before Starship), before mobile phones, before the Web and before lots of other things. There is no Y2K trap, but it's an idea for a novel maybe. It's impossible in an exponentially growing civilization for things to remain the same for long.

2020 World GDP was about 4x higher than 1980 World GDP and that is actually below the trendline, so we can expect going back to the trendline, which will mean extra fast growth. England and Holland started this exponential growth in incomes in the XVII century (the so called Industrious Revolution), which was copied by other countries in the 1800s and 1900s. Today all countries are growing exponentially.
Global economy doubles in product every 15-20 years. Computer performance at a constant price doubles nowadays every 4 years on average. Livestock-as-food will globally stop being a thing by ~2050 (precision fermentation and more). Human stupidity, pride and depravity are the biggest problems of our world.
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R8Z
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Re: The Y2K Trap

Post by R8Z »

I've dumbly read a chunk of the text and was ready to criticize it on things that weren't true just when I saw that I was in the fictional future section of the forum...

Lurking while working is dangerous sometimes :lol:
And, as always, bye bye.
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Klarine
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Re: The Y2K Trap

Post by Klarine »

AI as we know it is far from having deployed the full extent of its capabilities, and that's what's so wonderful and dangerous at the same time. We're actually living IN the future right now, or very close to it. I'm sure 3/4 of what was mentioned in the big post will probably be true too, we'll see hahaha :lol:
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Powers
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Re: The Y2K Trap

Post by Powers »

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Yuli Ban
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Re: The Y2K Trap

Post by Yuli Ban »

Tadasuke wrote: Tue Jan 25, 2022 1:13 pm Y2K wasn't a thing outside of around 1996-2004. See https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Y2K
Y2K Epoch ≠ Y2K aesthetic

It's something I created in Mother Meki/Babylon Today, which takes place decades/a century from now.
In retrospect I figured we'd call this whole techno-sociocultural epoch the "Y2K Epoch" as a throwback to how the French dubbed 1871 thru 1914 the "Belle Époque." Concurrent with the Gilded Age, the Gay Nineties, and Edwardian Era.
I see the era starting around 1979-1980 as the start of some sort of "neoliberal globalist Renaissance" after the stagnation of the 1970s and chaos of the 1960s. And clearly we had our own "Gay Nineties" that many consider to be the peak of this era.
While we might consider 1991-2001 to be its own era in contemporary history, I'm thinking further out— how someone on the late 21st century would parse this era of history. Outside oldtimers (who might now be youngtimers again), no one has any attachment to the 90s or trauma of 9/11/War on Terror. Just like how we don't see much difference between pre-1894 depression and post-depression, someone decades hence isn't going to see a great difference between 2006 and 2012 like we do. 9/11 will become the new "Remember the Maine" by then. 50 to 100 years from now, 1999 and 2019 might as well be the same year with different numbers. "90s Kids" and "Zoomers" are just designations for two different flavor of old people (or rejuvenated people if the tech exists), and the haranging about if the Nintendo 64 or Nintendo Switch was the better console will make as much sense as whether the Ithaca Kitty or Raggedy Ann were cuter dolls to us.

Generally between 1979 and roughly the present day, there's been a clear air of global stability and general confidence in the corporate system— Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Syrian civil war, Mexican drug war, etc. will likely be remembered akin to the Spanish-American War, Boer War, Native American conflicts, etc. The first big shocks to the system were COVID-19 and the Russo-Ukraine War, and I tend to get the feeling we're on the precipice of some great event that will take root sometime between 2024 and 2027, whether it be a world war calamity or transition to early AGI or a severe economic implosion or better yet all three at once, it won't be fun. Either way, I feel historians will say that the Y2K Epoch came to an end around this time. I just don't know how, but it seems multiple flashpoints are starting the arise that could provide the close.

And to be fair, no one in the Belle Époque knew they were living in the Belle Époque. I'm sure many in 1913 assumed that the best years were decades behind them, and that it had been a disaster for years by that point, or as mentioned, all recent history was split into many more eras than we commonly consider today. It's something we'll only really recognize in retrospect. The only reason I'm talking about it at all is because I've tried again to peer beyond the milky walls of the future to look back at the present and noticed this stretch of history that, should a calamity strike at any point in the next generation, we will give it a cute little nostalgic name. "Y2K Epoch" is what I chose. Evokes "Belle Époque;" the pivot was the year 2000; everything else sounded a bit lame or try hard to me, whereas this sounds exactly like what a memetic summary of the 80s, 90s, "and Today!" i.e. 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s would be labeled.
"The Digital Age" is already taken; the Investor Age is way too indulgent in "Capitalism Triumphant," the Online Epoque is ehhh; I liked "Trans-Époque" but nowadays that would have much different connotations; the Silicon Epoch sounded pretty cool too, but kinda leaned too hard on just information technology; and so on. Y2K Epoch was the least awful/corporate PR department-sounding. Also, the technological future meme map already labeled it "Y2K Trap" so running with that for this era being the Y2K Epoch just made sense.

(And per the OP, if that calamity never comes and there is no transition, we're stuck in a Y2K Trap).

We fogheads might complain about the youths lumping 40 very different years into the same cultural era... but we do the same thing to older, deader generations, so we have it coming.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
Tadasuke
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Y2K "era" is a fictitious idea, not fit for the real world

Post by Tadasuke »

I am depressed and anxious, but I still consider this to be a complete total nonsense (outside of fiction ofc).

There are no "epochs" or "eras", they are completely made up (to make games like Empire Earth easier to manage). Things (objects, infrastructure, society) are just slowly (but usually exponentially) changing (more often for the better, than for the worse). Y2K is either an aesthetic trend or a fictional idea for a book, a story or a video game. Nothing more than that.

You are writing this from your narrow perspective. Coincidentally, the "War on Terror" years (in the 2000s) had been the years, when there were the fewest war casualties worldwide (compared to the total world population at the time) probably in the whole history of the human race. And what about 9/11? It was a minor event in the global scale. Yes, really. It was just made to look much bigger by the scared people, the military–industrial complex and the media. Because New York and Washington cities are so important in many peoples minds.

Back in 1918-1920, "Spanish Flu" killed about 50 million people. "The Great Leap Forward" in 1958-1961 killed about 40 million people. Between 1994 and 1997, about 3 million people died of starvation in the North Korean Famine of the 1990s. Compare that to about 3 thousand deaths caused by the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In the Iraq conflict of the 2000s, about 200 thousand people died. A lot, but compare to 7 billion humans on Earth. Napoleonic Wars killed about 5 million people when the world population was nearing 2 billion for a comparison. Famines of the 1870s killed as many as 20.5 million people! Famines of 2014-2023 killed 150 thousand people for a comparison.

The so called "extreme poverty" is currently often defined as "living below 2.15 USD per day per person".
In China in 1989, 83% of people in the countryside and 40% in cities lived in extreme poverty! Today both are below 1%.
In India in 1989, 89% of people in the countryside and 60% in cities lived in extreme poverty. Today it's 3% and 1.6% respectively.
In Vietnam in 1989, 87% of people in the countryside and 58% in cities lived in extreme poverty. Today it's 1.7% and 0.7% respectively.
These have been great changes and improvements. But I myself would consider poverty as anything below 30 USD per day per person.

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There won't be any more "World Wars", there won't be any "Technological Singularity" [in the strict sense], there won't be any mass starvation, there won't be any supervolcano eruption, there won't be any mass resource depletion, there won't be a runaway climate change catastrophe and there won't be any aliens arrivals or huge disclosures about aliens. It's all just crazy talk in my opinion.
Global economy doubles in product every 15-20 years. Computer performance at a constant price doubles nowadays every 4 years on average. Livestock-as-food will globally stop being a thing by ~2050 (precision fermentation and more). Human stupidity, pride and depravity are the biggest problems of our world.
firestar464
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Re: The Y2K Trap

Post by firestar464 »

No more world wars? I'd argue that the situation in Ukraine has a dangerously high chance of heating up throughout 2025. However, I hope France's recent hard stance on the issue will deter Russia from doing anything nuclear. I truly hope your prediction is right, though I unfortunately ain't sure. :( It's worth emphasizing that any global nuclear war is going to cause a nuclear winter, resulting in mass crop failure and mass starvation.

No mass resource depletion? We're likely to run out of fossil fuels throughout the second half of the century. I'm unsure about the other non-renewables, but I don't expect the picture to look much better.

I'm not sure why you're saying that the risk of runaway climate change isn't high. Various experts are sounding the alarm bell louder than ever; scientists have warned about the risk of going over 1.5 C. Mind you, that was last year- if I understood the stuff posted in the climate thread correctly, we've breached that this year. We're only going to avoid catastrophe if we act fast.

It's also strange that you're saying there won't be a technological singularity. Unless something drastically disrupts the current rate of progress, we'll continue accelerating exponentially.

The only things I'd agree on is that there won't be alien disclosures or supervolcano eruptions anytime soon. Future Timeline, citing Forbes, places the next eruption in 900,000 AD. The posthumans are not gonna give a damn
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Powers
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Re: The Y2K Trap

Post by Powers »

firestar464 wrote: Wed Mar 13, 2024 2:32 am It's also strange that you're saying there won't be a technological singularity. Unless something drastically disrupts the current rate of progress, we'll continue accelerating exponentially.
Meteoric or something similar, not exponential.
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