Forget the year 2000, the Mbug is already upon us. If you
thought Michael J. Fox was just a figment of the silver screen
you'd better think again – this time we really are going back to
the future. Forget what all those postmodernists told you
about the arbitrariness of the sign, this time the nought means
business. Confused? Why not let Mark Fisher upgrade your
theory chip for the Y2K. When was that again…?
Within the course of a year, Y2K has passed from being a
non-event to being, briefly, a scare story (complete with a
government awareness campaign) to being a
taken-forgranted commonplace.
Curiously, but perhaps predictably, 'cyber-culture' has had
little to say about Y2K. Most commentary on Y2K has treated
it as simply a technical glitch to be eradicated, the trigger for
an empirical event that may or may not happen come January
1st. Treating Y2K positively, as a cultural event involving
semiotics and calendrics, gives a somewhat different picture,
one offering a way of radically rethinking the last half century
of computing culture. Here, Y2K appears not as an accident
but as a fated occurrence.
Y2K plugs into the fears that have haunted Science Fiction
since its inception, confirming anxieties that, as technological
integration increases, human control lessens, and the
possibility of something crashing the entire system grows.
Here, SF disintegrates into cyberpunk. Where Science Fiction
can be defined as the implementation of the project of
Progressive Technology – a vision of uninhibited
technological growth spreading out into a far future that has
been speculatively planned – cyberpunk lurks in the near
future, building itself out of the unanticipated consequences of
technical development. It is essentially improvisational,
feeding on glitches, interference and coincidences: as the
runaway AI Wintermute tells Case in Gibson's Neuromancer,
“planning's not my thing.”
In the Terminator mythos, the megacomputer Skynet begins
its assault on Human Security at the moment it switches into
sentience. In Terminator's anthropomorphic and moral vision,
it was still necessary to posit some malign will on the part of
machines. But Mbug is spreading without will, planning or
sense of purpose on the part of the machines which carry it.
Far from there being any deviation from human control, it is
the very 'literal-mindedness' of machines in their execution of
human commands that has produced Y2K. In the 1950s,
Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics, warned of the
demonic dangers of this literal-mindedness.Referring to the
stories of “The Sorcerer's Apprentice” and “The Monkey's
Paw,” Wiener compared modern cybernetic machines to
genies and other magical beings who follow their instructions
to the letter, and only to the letter. Give ourselves over to the
machines, Wiener counselled, and they will likely as not give
us exactly what we asked for; but what we asked for may not
be what we wanted, nor what we expected. In “The Sorcerer's
Apprentice,” famously, a factotum seeks magical assistance
with his domestic chores; but when the chores are complete
the magical labour-saving devices continue their work and the
apprentice, ignorant of the spell that would tell them to stop, is
left helpless as chaos ensues. In “The Monkey's Paw”, a poor
family wish for money, which they duly receive – but with
tragic costs. The money, it turns out, is in the form of an
insurance payment for their son, who has died in an accident.
For Wiener, the point of these stories is that technical
machines do not possess any capacity for interpretation. They
operate on code, not signifiers. And, in a delicious irony,
Wiener was already too late: Y2K was already in place when
Wiener wrote his words of warning.
>> All illustrations by Laura Bangert
SF conceives of machines in terms of human use-value,
thinking of them as (temporarily troublesome) tools with which
humanity is ultimately destined to be reconciled. The famous
jump-cut in Kubrick's 2001 – from caveman's primitive weapon
to gleaming space vehicle – gives you a handy summary of
the Science Fictional version of history. From the point of view
of Y2K, of course, 2001 never happens. It is almost as if the
popular Unconscious and Y2K have colluded in the elimination
of any date after 1999. In the early to mid 90s, when Y2K
began to emerge as a problem, the year 2000 still seemed as
far distant as it did in the 1950s, when programmers agreed
upon the two-digit date protocol. In the popular Unconscious,
the year 2000 and beyond belong to the far distant time of
Science Fiction – with the ironic effect that SF's long-term has
suddenly collapsed into cyberpunk's near future.
Y2K confirms all the darkside prophecies of Marx, Wiener and
McLuhan, all of whom saw that, far from being a relation
between tools and their users, machine culture involves
human and technical components in a total mesh. Here,
'technology' – if such a reification makes sense any more – is
not a tool, it is an environment. And it seems that we are only
now coming to fitful awareness of that environment because of
Mbug. The shadow showing up the diseased organ. Any
attempt to think through the potential limits of Mbug infection is
also, effectively, an attempt to map human dependence upon
the technical environment. The more humans take computers
– and computerisation – for granted, the more they are
dependent upon them. In a prescient parable, McLuhan said
that the one thing fish don't see is water, just as the one thing
humans are unaware of is the technical environment from
which they are increasingly inextricable. Now, as the hunt to
find and eliminate potential carriers of Mbug is well underway,
human beings, like fish forewarned of a viral infection in the
water supply, are beginning to be aware of the extent of their
immersion in the electrocybernetic Matrix.
Y2K is not only everywhere computers are, but it is also
everywhere silicon chips are: it is a molecular bug, infecting
even the tiniest interstices of the technical environment, an
invisible invader into technical systems that have themselves
tended to shrink out of human sight. It is a global problem that
can only be tackled locally. Even if, say, airlines do manage to
root out all their Mbug infections, they are still dependent upon
agencies who may not have been so successful in debugging
their systems. So Y2K is not so much a catastrophe as a
hypercatastrophe. Y2K-os can be extrapolated from any
number of contingencies and their potential interexcitations:
traffic failure, food shortages, ATM malfunction, stock market
crashes, exchange of nuclear weapons – anything that is
dependent upon chips is potentially infected with Mbug. Which
is bad news for us, who are symbiotically intertwined with
them.
Back in the 1960s, McLuhan warned that the trauma of total
machinic dependence had brought about an anaesthetised,
somnambulant response in a human population whose
nervous system was incapable of processing the enormity of
the future shock it was undergoing. What has been called
postmodernity is one symptom of this psychopathology of
cybernetic life. 'Postmodernity' is a powerful narcotic,
screening out anything potentially catastrophic with its deep
conviction that nothing could ever happen. The dominance of
this type of thinking is such that it can be simultaneously
asserted both that nothing will happen in the Year 2000 and
that Y2K is imminent.
This kind of sleepwalking complacency once contributed to
Y2K; now Mbug also feeds on the opposite, but
complementary, state: panic. Anti-Y2K activity must now walk
the precarious line between the two. Too little awareness and
you risk slipping, unwittingly, into total social collapse; too
much, and you end up in the same state. Security response is
radically compromised by the nature of panic dynamics. Panic
about Y2K – leading to mass withdrawal of money from banks
or looting – could be as dangerous as any actual computer
failure. Y2 paniK? There are any number of reasons –
including the prospect of panic, which feeds, voraciously, on
itself.
It's ironic that Y2K should loom into view just as cyberhype
begins to fade, since Y2K not only fully justifies all the
cyber-hype, but is also an event largely constituted from hype.
It is only pre-cybernetic nostalgia that could think of hype as
something merely illusory; like panic, which it parallels and
bleeds into, hype is an immediately effective cybernetic
process, operating by intense feedback spirals. Hype and
panic cannot simply be thought of as precursors to events:
they are the event already happening. So it's not a matter of
waiting for Y2K. As a potential, it's already active. Even if not
one computer malfunctions on New Year's Day, Mbug has
already been a major disaster for capitalism, of an
unprecedented scale (estimates of the cost of Y2K to date run
into trillions of dollars.) Y2K is the most spectacular example
yet of the way in which capitalist reality is indistinguishable
from fiction: in capital's world of simulation and cybernetic
anticipation, all that is solid has melted into the abstract and
virtual. Which is not to subscribe to some melancholy
postmodern story about derealisation so much as to point to
ways in which virtual agencies – such as potentials – have the
most material effect imaginable.
Cyberpunk begins with Y2K, but when does Y2K begin? Y2K
transforms the dynamics of chaos theory into the logic of
fatality. At one level, you couldn't be more precise about when
Y2K will happen; at another, it's a massively distributed event,
involving the whole century. You could date Y2K at the point,
in the 1950s, when the 2-digit protocol was put in place, or at
any point since, when the decision to modify it was not taken.
As with any fatal loop, ironies abound. It was the military
forerunner of the internet, ARPANET, that established the
2-digit dating system. Now, with the Cold War ended, the
biggest threat to western security may be a – literal –
time-bomb planted by the US military itself some forty years
ago.
When The Economist questioned last year whether “two digits
can really mean the end of civilisation,” it expressed what is a
widespread inability to come to terms with the real and
effective (not merely signifying or representational) power of
signs in cybernetic culture. Y2K is a semiotic event, but it does
not belong to postmodernity's regime of signs. Rather, Y2K
signals the virtual termination of PoMo. The widespread failure
of a PoMo-saturated academy to offer any effective response
to Y2K (or any sort of response at all) is testament to the
bankruptcy of its theoretical commitments. It was one thing for
out-of-touch theorists to fail to anticipate the events of 1968;
but to be unable to respond to Y2K – an event which we not
only know will happen, but also when – is an oversight of
another magnitude entirely.
The problem is that Y2K scrambles the PoMo radar,
discomfiting the by now cosy set of assumptions on which
much thinking about postmodernism rests. Y2K is
culturally-generated, but it does not belong to 'discourse'; it is
a disaster, but it is entirely 'unnatural'. The notion of cultural
construction to which PoMo is so attached has always carried
with it the implicit idea that what has been constructed can be
taken apart again. The assumption belongs to a
pre-cybernetic opposition between Nature (as the realm of the
given) and Culture (as the province of the mutable) that Y2K –
like the cybernetic capitalism which has incubated it – is
effectively dismantling. Y2K is no less of a catastrophe, and
no less ineradicable, because it is totally artificial.
Against the PoMo dictum that signs are arbitrary (and
therefore effectively interchangeable), Y2K promises that
global disaster could be precipitated by a specific semiotic
trigger. When next some media pundit yawns about the Year
2000 being an arbitrary date, reflect on the fact that Y2K is
happening not on a date, but because of a date. At no other
point in history have semiotic dating practices themselves
caused a catastrophe: when people looked to the skies in
trepidation in 999, they didn't imagine that the date itself would
bring calamity. But with Y2K, the event is the date. Things
click together on the machinic unconscious just as they fall
apart at the human level. At the moment of Y2K, the twodigit
convention converges the date with the time: 99 becomes 00
at 00:00 hours precisely. This string of noughts should give
pause to PoMo relativists who insists that any sign will do; it is
the very precise function of zero that allows Y2K to happen as
(and when) it does, effecting a collision of the Hindu-Arab
numeric system with Roman numerals. Although ostensibly
translated into Hindu-Arab numerals, the Gregorian calendar
still effectively runs on a Roman numeric system ignorant of
zero. Y2K ciphers what will not happen in undebugged
cyberspace: the Gregorian Year 2000 (making literal
Baudrillard's prophecies that the year 2000 will not happen,
and that the 20th century is being erased.) Skipping SF's 2000
AD, computers will cyberpunk the date, counting what the
Gregorian calendar never has: zero. The effect is a calendric
revolution carried out entirely by the machinic Unconscious.
Unravelling the virtual computer calendar is complicated.
When is Y2K's year zero: the Gregorian year 2000, or
Gregorian year 1900? Both are candidates, since, in addition
to treating January 1st '2000' as year zero, the implicit
computer calendar has retrospectively coded January 1st
'1900' as its start-date. At the level of the Unconscious,
anyone logging onto a computer has been in complicity with
the computer-calendar. And, on the darkside of the Net, news
has broken of 00-cults dedicated to the computer-generated
calendric system...
At the Great Midnight at the century's end, signifying culture
will flip over into a numberbased counter-culture,
retroprocessing the last 100 years. Whether global disaster
ensues or not, Y2K is a singularity for cybernetic culture. It's
time to get Y2K positive.