The year 2000 ushered in a memorable era. It brought us metallic clothing and a tech revolution, alongside generation-defining events: a housing and financial crisis, 9/11 and early public recognition of climate change. Author Colette Shade argues the socio-cultural shifts ushered in during the early 2000s remain significant today in her debut book, “Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything (Essays on the Future That Never Was.)”
In her book, Shade intertwines the history of the Y2K era, which she says started in 1997 and ended in 2008, with personal, memoir-style essays of her own coming-of-age, including her family’s experience with ground-shifting Y2K-era moments like the dot-com bubble.
Shade told GBH’s Under the Radar that the idea for the book came to her when she found a letter in her parents’ basement that she had written as a fifth-grader in 1999 — a school assignment that asked students to predict what would happen in the new millennium.
“What I said in my letter, which was dated April 1999, was that in the year 2008, science would have come up with cures for AIDS and for cancer,” Shade said. “There would be pills to help people stop smoking. Movies would be watched over the internet. Pop music would be created with the help of robots and technology. And then I also predicted that we will be starting to do something about our environment, like banning powerboats.”
Many of Shade’s predictions have come true in the 26 years since that letter was written. And though there was fear regarding the effects of the actual Y2K problem on technology, Shade says that was superseded by a sense of optimism for the future.
“There was this attitude within popular culture and news media and punditry that the 21st century would be a new era where we could all get rich in the stock market,” Shade said. “The internet, which had just become available to the public in 1991 and was really picking up speed and increasing its role in the economy in the late 90s — there was this idea that it would connect people, it would facilitate free expression and cross-cultural friendship and peace. There was just a lot of hope. The Cold War had ended in 1991, and there was an era of relative global peace. There’s just this feeling that history’s over and everything will be great in this new millennium.”
Although early aughts and Y2K trends are back in style today, Shade said many of the books and accounts about this period focus on the fun aspects of the time, like boy bands, space-centric fashion and teen movies, rather than a true look at what it was like to live through the era.
“I felt that a lot of the discourse around millennials and millennial nostalgia trivializes a lot of the very serious and horrific things that were happening at the time, whether this was the increase in mass incarceration or the torture that occurred under the global war on terror,” Shade said. “It just felt like the approach to the Y2K era so far had been like if you looked at the ’60s and you said, ‘Hey, all that happened in the ’60s was The Beatles.’ We’re not talking about Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. We’re not talking about the Vietnam War. And it just felt like it wasn’t a truly holistic portrait of life as it actually was.”
Colette Shade’s “Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything (Essays on the Future That Never Was)” is the March selection for Bookmarked: the “Under the Radar” book club.
Guest
- Colette Shade , author of “Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything (Essays on the Future That Never Was)”
