JAMES KUNSTLER: The Twang Factor

[Tace]

James Kunstler -- Clusterfuck Nation

Readers all around the the blogosphere have been twanging on me this week on two counts: one, that seven years ago I took the Y2K computer scare seriously, and two, that I have so far failed to correctly predict the end of the world.

For those of you too young to remember, the Y2K scare was about an esoteric little programming glitch that existed almost universally in older "legacy" computer systems around the world. The glitch in essence would have prevented older systems from recognizing the date beyond 12/31/99, and this, it was widely believed, would have pranged the interdependent complex institutions and public services that ran on these computers. There was fear that everything from municipal sewage treatment plants, to international banks, to big electric grids, to government agencies would stumble, that equipment for running these things would be badly damaged in the process, and that financial records would be lost on a broad basis.

As it turned out, very little happened on New Years Day, 2000. Scoffers exulted in their righteous rightness. The truth, though, was that immense sums of money had been spent -- hundreds of billions worldwide -- and countless work hours put in by programmers to avert the problem. It was a problem with a very definite deadline, and they made the deadline.

The Y2K event would have been a harsh lesson in the diminishing returns of technology and especially over-investments in complexity. Ironically, the work done, and the new equipment purchased by companies, institutions, and agencies may have played a major role in the tech boom of the late 1990s -- which, of course, eventuated in the tech bust that immediately followed.

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