There was actually a time when we didn’t need social media to drum up mass hysteria, and the new HBO documentary Time Bomb Y2K is ready and raring to take us back there. This superbly edited dash through pre-millennial anxieties is a time capsule of archive footage — no narrator, no talking heads, no new interviews — from the years and days leading up the year 2000 that had millions worrying a computer glitch could lead to government takeover, nuclear catastrophe, cats and dogs playing together, and any other kind of mayhem you might imagine. Folks were scared. And fear has seldom been so funny.
Some of the names and faces you might remember. Like Peter de Jager, the bearded computer engineer who graced seemingly every talk show on the planet to explain why we should all be worried (but that we would probably be OK if we followed his advice). Many of them never went away. A fresh-faced Matt Damon hopes the nukes are properly locked down. Busta Rhymes isn’t saying anything will happen, but if something does happen, we shouldn’t be surprised. Bill Clinton and Al Gore are pumped for the spread of high-speed internet, as are Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and some youngster named Jeff Bezos. Both Rudy Giuliani and the Backstreet Boys are ready for anything. And Militia of Montana founder John Trochmann says they’re coming for your guns. Because of course.
Directors Brian Becker and Marley McDonald (the latter of whom also edited along with Maya Mumma) keep it all humming along, starting in 1996 and finishing in the early days of 2000, when we realized everything would be OK, at least on the computer-glitch front. Meanwhile, on New Years Eve 1999, real news was unfolding. That was the day Boris Yeltsin announced his resignation as President of the Russian Federation. His successor? Some guy named Putin. And here we were, worried about how a couple of numbers could cause chaos in international computer systems.
Time Bomb Y2K serves as a reminder that opportunism needs little impetus to blast through the roof. We visit a “preparedness expo,” where guns, knives, camo, and other survivalist goods were selling like there was no tomorrow. Gun sales were sizzling in the days leading up to Y2K, as industrious citizens planned in advance to meet the threat of violence with… the threat of violence. Fundamentalist Christian broadcasters were on fire, too. One warns that “certainly Satan could take advantage of such a situation.” But who would ever want to do that?
But the film isn’t all hucksters, all the time. It’s also a vivid flashback to the heady days of the early internet, when the idea of email for everyone was truly mind-blowing. We see one man marvel that he can store a movie on his hard drive and watch it on his computer. Going back further, we spend some time with computer pioneer Grace Hopper, one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I, who explains that, once upon a time, people were afraid of electric lights and telephones, too. Hopper died in 1992, which is a shame; she would have gotten a kick out of Y2K.
Time Bomb Y2K works mostly because it keeps a straight face, acknowledging that, even if a lot of the hysteria seems silly now, the anxiety was quite real back then. It was a more innocent time, before the flowering of surveillance capitalism and the days of other countries using the internet to interfere in American elections. Just imagine what Y2K panic would be like now, when the means of spreading rage, lies, and conspiracy theories are so much more efficient and accessible. In this sense, Time Bomb just might elicit a feeling that feels inappropriate but perhaps inevitable: nostalgia.
