Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything (Essays on the Future That Never Was), by Colette Shade
Now that cultural and political analysts have thoroughly dry-pulped the 1990s, it is time to consider more recent history.
Y2K was the quaint-seeming, almost biblical fear that computer systems would be scrambled by the switch over from the 20th century to the 21st, causing planes to fall from the sky and banks to fail. Those three symbols delineate not just the year 2000, argues the journalist Colette Shade in a lean, nimble and profoundly depressing new book of memoiristic essays, but an entire era with its own identifiable, balloonish sensibility: stretching from approximately 1997 to the financial crisis of 2008, when banks actually did fail.
To write “lean” and “nimble” is a bit trollish of me, as these are terms of “late capitalist body talk,” according to the critic John Patrick Leary, one of many Shade cites. Her own straight-talking but peripatetic prose zags provocatively from Clintonian economic policy in Russia to her own eating disorder; from the gulf war to bling rap videos shot through a fish-eye lens.
She writes of how Starbucks went from kooky Seattle coffeehouse to nothing less than America’s lifeblood: pulsing angrily over disposable cups and labor conflict (last week, the company, which once promised to be a “third place,” announced a reversal of its open-door policy).
And of progressives’ outdated approach to change-making she nicknames “The Template”: moral wrong, press coverage, protest, government response. “That damn arc was supposed to be bending toward justice!” she jokes of their obviously ineffectual response to Trump’s first election. “What the hell was this?!”
Shade — “a Martin Amis name,” a colleague rightly noted — was born in 1988, placing her squarely in the middle of the most marketing-saturated generation in history, the millennials. In their tender formative years they were bombarded by magazines and TV and the internet; sans smartphones, their heads still tilted up curiously to billboards. Their Carson was Daly, not Johnny, and they were amused by babies and hamsters dancing online.
She resists her cohort’s most shopworn tropes, noting the sale of her great-grandparents’ 10-acre avocado farm in Southern California, which helped put her through college, without reference to that notorious toast. The pink under discussion here is Paris Hilton’s Barbie-derivative “bedazzled maximalism” and doesn’t extend to the denatured Tumblrish “pale dogwood” color so relentlessly pushed by Pantone..
Shade’s parents were white liberal boomers of the “Family Ties” variety: her mother a second-wave feminist who recommended Susan Faludi’s “Backlash” and her father an environmentalist engineer who denounced the S.U.V.s arriving on the scene as “Stupid Ugly Vehicles.”
The author’s Uncle Paul was a Stanford dropout who invested in startups, retired at 45 and also helped her through college with a gift of Nokia stock plus precise advice about when to sell it. In one of her earliest intimations of income inequality, he takes her on a tour of the Embarcadero in San Francisco and they play pickup soccer with a sourdough bread bowl. “Not everyone can afford to play with their food,” a homeless man scolds her.
Uncle Paul personified the era’s false promise of unlimited peace and prosperity, the supposed triumph of neoliberalism and meritocracy, Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” colliding with this bouncy new thing called the World Wide Web to produce a national mood that was “ecstatic, frenetic and wildly hopeful.” In Shade’s telling, 9/11 was not the end of the ’90s, as Chuck Klosterman and others have argued, but a dark chapter in an ongoing story of national triumphalism.
As the coming-of-age chronicle of a relatively privileged person during a peaceful and prosperous time, “Y2K” is unnerving. Shade liked watching birds but was also listening intently to the dial-up modem’s buzz. Her rainforest-themed fourth birthday party included plastic tree frogs in the goody bags, and oodles more plastic goods — butterfly hair clips, iMacs, inflatable chairs — float through her girlhood dreamscape.
She enters an AOL chat room at age 13 and “a guy claiming he was in high school” immediately wants to meet her. Reading her account of being sent porn by her actual male classmates, watching “Girls Gone Wild” ads and reading cruel gossip blogs makes you want to go full Amish.
If Shade were just identifying the Y2K aesthetic, this book would be quickly consignable to the remainder pile. Some of her narrative leaps do falter, like that modem straining to connect. (In nothing but a pop-hypnotized teen’s imagination could Aaliyah’s plane crash in the Bahamas foreshadow the attack on the twin towers.)
But her writing throbs with a vibrant political indignation: about climate change (the thought of which, for a time, made her almost suicidal); about racism, which she and her “comfortable white” peers were taught to believe was over; and about the way mushrooming media has made historically significant images like the Abu Ghraib photos far, far more obscure than they should be.
What is to be done? Shade has no answers, no new Template for Trump 2.0. But jumping back into the junk heap of our collective past, she kicks up a lot more than just body glitter.
Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything (Essays on the Future That Never Was) | By Colette Shade | Dey Street | 256 pp. | $29.99