Time Bomb Y2K Movie Review – Book and Film Globe

Documentaries editorialize. No one likes to admit it, but it’s true. With the right emphasis and the right omissions, a documentary can make nearly any kind of partisan argument while pretending to be objective, and these days most of them do. So Time Bomb Y2K from Max is a remarkably pleasant surprise in that it copiously avoids trying to making any kind of clear thesis statement. Instead, the documentary relies entirely on nineties-era archival material to present the situation of what exactly Y2K was, why it was such a big deal, and why nothing came of it.

 A short primer: Early computer programs in the 70s tended to assume that the date of the year consists of only two digits as a sort of space-saving measure for limited operating systems. So when the internal calendars on these computers hit the year 2000, they’d actually roll over and assume they were back in the year 1900. While the problem sounds cosmetic at worst, computers are finicky devices. Y2K stress tests conducted throughout the 90s showed that many important systems, like timed sewage-release valves, would react unpredictably and often disastrously in response to this simulated time travel.

Actual computer engineers were well aware of the problem, and even in the earliest days pushed for a full four digits, but  managers who mainly needed software that worked until the end of their six-year contracts, and needed that software as quickly as possible, bullied them out of permanent solutions. The flawed software became the foundation for later software, magnifying the potential scope of the problem.

There was a lot of panic about Y2K, much of it deliberate, that nearly anyone who was alive during this time period at least vaguely remembers. The famed Y2K Czar Peter de Jagar was constantly out on the media telling anybody who would listen about the Y2K bug and the need to fix it. Here’s where the story gets muddy–Peter de Jagar actually succeeded in getting major corporations and governments to listen to him. Much of the footage in Time Bomb Y2K is of then-president Bill Clinton and then-vice president Al Gore talking about Y2K, and what they and others are doing to fix the problem. News reports also discuss the small armies of bug hunters who test Y2K simulations and, in the end, manage to solve nearly all of the potential knock-on effects.

We should see what happened with Y2K as one of the greatest success stories of the information era, of humanity identifying a potentially major problem, treating it seriously, and ultimately solving it. Yet Y2K lives on in the modern zeitgeist as an example of extreme hysteria over nothing. Much of this is justified because in the final days of 1999, Y2K was a bunch of extreme hysteria over nothing. Peter de Jagar stops being an alarmist and instead goes on television to say that yes, all of this could have been very bad, but it won’t be now.

But the news media didn’t take this approach. Alarmism was the far more popular story. So it is that, come 2023, we remember Y2K far more for the negative outgrowths of this hysteria, showing up in shows like The Righteous Gemstones as a cause of extreme religious militancy. Everyone remembers the doomsday prepper industry that got a boost due to Y2K. Nobody remembers how people manufactured the Y2K crisis in 1999 by rehashing the arguments Peter de Jagar made in previous years without contextualizing the ultimate responses to these arguments.

Time Bomb Y2K is very careful not to editorialize. But it’s difficult to watch Time Bomb Y2K and not make some very obvious takeaways about the crises of yesteryear and the crises of today. For starters, it feels bizarre that Bill Clinton and Al Gore could go on TV just looking and sounding like normal people with a basic layman’s understanding of how the bug works. We are, in this country, very far removed from a political situation where our leaders could sound basically cogent, and at the current rate, it’ll be at least five years before there’s even a chance that could change.

But more than the image of political and corporate leadership, the actions of nineties-era leaders to Y2K stands out as being a bit incomprehensible. The status quo of our public life right now is that we acknowledge a crisis exists and…that’s it. We argue about whether or not a crisis exists. And even the people who claim to believe the crisis exists don’t seem especially interested in actually doing anything about it. Whether our imminent demise is supposed happen because of climate change, or COVID, Russia winning the war in Ukraine, or Trump retaking the presidency, the people making the strongest claims support remarkably weak measures when it comes to preventing these crises, and prioritize attacking so-called deniers over pushing any kind of actual proactive agenda.

Contrast this to Peter de Jagar in Time Bomb Y2K, asserting simply, and forcefully, that crisis will come unless an army of bug testers  assembles to repair all the flawed code. The argument this documentary makes, entirely passively, is that crises are solvable as long as we’re willing to put in the hard work to actually solve them. This statement is so tautological it’s easy to see why the memory of what exactly happened with Y2K has fallen by the wayside. By contrast, we live in an era where of unsolvable chronic crisis; the notion that we can solve problems seems like sheer magical thinking.

Indeed, the sheer mundanity of Time Bomb Y2K’s archival footage underscores how alien the ideas of yesteryear seem to us today. Peter de Jagar scared people, but he wasn’t an alarmist, nor did he much care about the limelight, disappearing from public life entirely once we averted the crisis he was warning people about. Does Time Bomb Y2K fail to interview Peter de Jagar in the modern day because he refused, or because the documentary’s concept is to focus on how society perceived Y2K at the time, rather than in retrospect? Did Peter de Jagar disappear out of humility, or because in the wake of nothing really happening, he seemed like a fraud?

Time Bomb Y2K doesn’t answer questions like this. Instead, it makes two simple assertions. Y2K was real. That didn’t make it unstoppable.