Editorial: How Y2K Helped to Shape My Skepticism Towards Moral Panics

Drew Wilson talks about how his experience with the Y2K bug helped to shape his thinking when dealing with moral panics.

One of the things that was always fun to talk to younger generations is the Y2K bug and the absolute panic that it somehow caused. Recently, NPR did a writeup on it and I thought it would be fun to take a trip down memory lane myself and talk about my experience with this – even if it does age me by quite a bit.

Rewinding back to 1999, I was still in school still unsure what I was going to do with my life. The internet was still in early stages of development, but I knew I was interested in writing. Funnily enough, the idea of writing news sounded boring to me (how little did I know about news back then), so I was looking towards writing fiction novels (mainly science fiction), though I wasn’t entirely sure on that career path. Truth be told, writing news online was generally an unheard of thing at the time, so it was hard to really blame my younger self for not thinking of it at the time.

At the time, there had been plenty of films out in the public. Many depicted the years somewhere around 1998 to 2002 as being the end of times. Whether it was alien invasion or robots causing the apocalypse, there were plenty of predictions about how the 2000’s were basically the end of times. Yes, some writers took a more technological optimistic look on the new millennium by saying that we would have things like flying cars, space travel, and an overall much easier life, but the fear generally sold more. This actually fuelled fears that something was going to happen somewhere around then.

That managed to tee up the major moral panic surrounding the Y2K bug. To be sure, there was actually such thing as a “Y2K bug”. Software prior to the year 2000 was designed to simply display “19XX” with the last two digits being whatever year it was. The idea of anything past 1999 felt like it was a whole lifetime away, so some programmers didn’t think too much of this system. After all, it was always 19 something something anyway. The problem, obviously, was that once you reach the year 2000, then the date will be displayed as “1900”. That’s… it. That’s the Y2K bug in a nutshell.

Yet, that didn’t stop the moral panic surrounding it. Even I knew that this was the bug back then. Yet, people honestly believed that planes were going to fall from the sky, everything was going to explode, massive number of people were going to die, and so on and so forth. I can only imagine just how many scammers managed to cash out on the moral panic as well.

Media reported on the Y2K bug like it was an impending apocalypse, religious leaders were adjusting their sermons to acknowledge this impending predicted doomsday and people I knew were telling me how this one is, for sure, real. One even went to great lengths to explain how someone she knew was skeptical about anything bad happening, conducted a test expecting everything to run “tickety boo” only to find that things were failing spectacular fashion. I don’t recall how things supposedly failed, but things, according to her, failed, so therefore, this one is real.

I still remained doubtful that things were going to end badly on the year 2000 because nothing about that made sense. Unfortunately, I was told that there are probably things I didn’t understand in the world, so just trust people who knew better. I didn’t say much to that, but my skepticism was still strong. After all, none of this was making any sense.

Well, January 1st, 2000 rolled around. The new year was ushered in, and, go figure, the national nightmare that was so widely predicted never came to be. People carried on with their daily lives, though there was plenty of confusion as to why the world didn’t end. In the days since, the fears gradually faded.

In the years since, there were plenty of so-called “doomsday” people predicting a new date, but it didn’t have anywhere near the same impact as the fears surrounding Y2K. The only one that came even remotely close was the Mayan calendar ending on December 12, 2012. While it did have a number of believers that this meant the end of the world (something even the Mayans rolled their eyes over), the date came and went without incident. People still remembered what happened with Y2K and the doomsday predictions were met with more skepticism.

Ultimately, though, Y2K was an impressive object lesson in trusting the logic and sober second thought on situations where panic was high. It was a teachable moment that served me well when I did ultimately get into news writing in September of 2005. At the time, organizations like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) was screaming about how the entire music industry was on the verge of failing because of file-sharing. As the years progressed, however, those moral panics, which the mainstream media took at face value without question, skepticism grew about the moral panic. How can something be on the verge of failure for many years? Was there a better business model to be had that works with the internet?

Another moral panic I’ve heard at around the same time period was how rock n roll music was supposed to be satanic and turn people into psycho killers. The theory, of course, being that subliminal messages were inserted that play backwards and trick the mind into believing it (nothing about that makes any sense). A favourite target was Metallica songs at the time.

In the late 2000’s to early 2010’s, there was the moral panic about how the terrorists were winning and the US government needed to have warrantless wiretapping on everyone. If the spy agencies missed one phone call, another 9/11 terrorist attack would happen. In fact, some pushing the warrantless wiretapping nonsense blamed 9/11 specifically on a “missed phone call”. It was all nonsense, of course, but the government pushed to trample people’s right to privacy anyway to cover up the unconstitutional nature of various spy programs.

I could go on and on about different moral panics being pushed by lawmakers, the mainstream media, and others over the years, but it is a very familiar pattern. Some nonsense is made up to scare people, different people come up with ways of selling the story, the mainstream media and politician’s spread it among the population to achieve whatever scam-like goal they are trying to achieve, the media gets the ratings, the politicians may or may not achieve what they are hoping for, and the cycle repeats.

It’s these kinds of patterns I see repeated again and again to this day. In fact, there are a number of examples I can point to.

One example is the moral panic surrounding video games. This involves the idea that video games are training people to be psycho killers or getting people to become hopelessly addicted to harm society as a whole. In response, there are efforts to ban it. No amount of research finding no connection is going to convince people that the fears are greatly exaggerated.

A second moral panic example is how social media is somehow poisoning society with bad or evil thoughts. This includes somehow fuelling FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), brainwashing people to do the bidding of the Chinese government (through TikTok), or otherwise causing societal decay. Yet, the scientific literature never really conclusively found that at all.

Another great one is how AI (Artificial Intelligence) is going to be ending the human race and cause everyone to lose their jobs soon. The many failures of AI from people who legitimately thought that and tried to make a business out of AI generated slop and how AI is just a glorified auto complete never seems to be enough for some people to be convinced that such things are overhyped to all heck.

Of course, the difference between when I was reacting to the Y2K bug to my reaction to today is that I’m not afraid of expressing my skepticism. Whether that is talking with people in person or doing writeups online, I lay out the facts of what each issue has and why the fears are massively overblown. When people who are invested in the fear as opposed to the facts push back, I do things like ask for evidence or what train of logic leads that person to that conclusion. More often then not, it usually involves something along the line of, “but [insert moral panic here] is for real! It really is that bad!” This while simply repeating the same talking points as if that is somehow evidence.

Truth be told, I wish more people would take the lessons learned from these “end of the world” predictions like Y2K or the Mayan Calendar and apply what they learned to these other moral panics. If the media just stuck to reporting the facts and stopped spreading disinformation and fear, I think people would be much better off in this world. Instead, rather than learn from the history, I see the same moral panic patterns emerge over and over again over some of the most ridiculous nonsense.

This, of course, is not to say that there are not real threats that exist out there. For instance, the previous iteration of the Online Harms Bill in Canada was a very real threat to websites operating in Canada. The evidence was the 24 hour time window to take content down deemed “harmful” by any anonymous user or face multi-million dollar fines was very real. This was a direction expressed by the Canadian government itself in their consultation by notice where they indicated that this was the direction they intended on going in (before mercifully pulling back after the backlash). There was actual logic and concrete evidence to back up the reasons to be worried, though.

Another great example is the Online News Act. The fears were that platforms like Facebook would drop news links in response to this bill. What was the concrete evidence? The text of the bill, the research into how little social media platforms really rely on news links for their business models, and, oh yeah, the platforms themselves directly saying that they will drop news links in response. While the pushers kept arguing that this is all just a big fancy “bluff”, the evidence was there to say that this was a legitimate likely outcome. The counterarguments were wafer thin on evidence, relying on techniques like cherry picking data at best and “I have a good gut feeling about this” at worst. Go figure, Meta dropped news links afterwards, causing very real and measurable harm to the media landscape as a whole. This as Meta experienced little to no disruption to their traffic and revenues afterwards.

I know there are people out there who are baffled as to how I come to some of the conclusions I do come up with. Well, years of experience has taught me to follow the facts and evidence, not the moral panic flavour of the day. If I was just spouting off what the popular opinion of the day is, I would not be doing my job. This has earned me quite the helping of anger from both major sides of the political divide. Some days, I’m a stupid dirty Liberal. Other times, I’m labelled as a Conservative whackjob. Why? Because I examine some of the policies pushed forward by both and realize pretty quickly what dumb ideas they really are. It’s not looking at the policies and legislation and saying they’re bad for the sake of saying they are bad, it’s examining the evidence, knowing various implications, and understanding what things like the bills do to realize what a horrible idea they really are.

While some of my examinations aren’t particularly popular, the goal is to understand what is correct and what is the truth in various matters, based on available evidence. It may be a reason why so many other news outlets are far more popular than my site. After all, it’s much easier to sell comforting lies than it is to tell inconvenient/unpleasant truths.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.