The Y2K Trap
Posted: Tue Dec 07, 2021 9:17 pm
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.
_______________________________________________
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...
_______________________________________________
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...