Janus, the Roman god who looks both back and forward.

3. Beyond Faith Popcorn
1/1/00 came and went with astonishingly little crystal-ball gazing. Oh sure, the tabs, the Sunday supplements, and the TV mags trucked in a few low- and middle-brow soothsayers, but their weak efforts seemed more like token gestures, something editors and producers felt they really ought to do, but their heart wasn't in it. Where was Marshall McLuhan when we needed him?

Big attention was not paid to the future. But plenty of attention was paid to 1) the past, and 2) the Y2K bug.

Everybody from Popular Mechanix to the New York Times got on the best-of-the-millennium train, exuding heaps of warm and cozy feelings about the expiring millennium. With often entertaining but hardly sage results.

The Times, for example, pulled out all its massive research and production stops to devote six issues of the Sunday magazine to a review of the millennium. (The only thing I remember from the delightful hours spent reading all six was one small essay by some forgotten pianist/writer who chose a three-minute piece by Bach as the outstanding musical composition of the entire 1,000 years. I decided he was aiming for a bit of deadpan, sit-down humor. Beware musicologists trying to be funny.)

The other point of attention, the Y2K bug, also affected everybody, from the most-wired to the absolutely unwired. The techno-doom predictions became so pervasive-- and convincing-- that even rock-bottom fundamentalist religionists were too busy stockpiling guns, Honda generators, and Hostess Twinkies to worry about Jesus' return. We were at least spared that.

In retrospect, it seems to me the lesson to be got from Y2K is that it was yet another hit of the Frankenstein Effect. Slowly we're learning that almost anything we undertake technologically, no matter how neat on the drawing board, no matter how much good it does at first, can rise up and bite back really hard.

Allow me a few yanks on the old memory chain, please: DDT, nuclear energy, uh, cars, and so on. And then right at the end of the millennium, suddenly we found out computers might just do us in. Computers? I mean, you do get mad enough at them to slap their lovely little screens, but computers-as-Ultimate-Godzilla really took us by surprise.

Result: A very nice, restrained, sort of sigh-of-relief millennium party, as if we were all saying, "Whew! We sneaked through that one!" Maybe we've crossed a threshold and have learned that futurists should be seen and not heard. The next time some new Marshall McLuhan, Jr. starts spouting off, just turn the volume down.

Future Tensed, page 4

Magellan's Log IX

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