Doomsaying and conspiracy theory

Ten years ago, to the day, I posted a comment on the Year 2000 discussion board of the UN Development Programme, with copies to the International Year 2000 Cooperation Center and other interested parties, that I thought to reproduce here. This was in response to a thank-you note from the Yugoslav government, followed by a comment from Leon Kappelman, a professor at the University of North Texas who had been active in the work leading up to the successful transition of the world's computer systems to the current millennium. (Hi, Leon!)

Y2K generated by far the largest number of conspiracy theories in the history of the Internet. Today, we have the end of the world in 2012, the collapse of the US dollar, civil war and the disintegration of the US, RFID chips as the Mark of the Beast, a Muslim Antichrist, and what have you, but volume-wise, they don't compare. Even the 9/11 truth movement pales in comparison with Y2K. People actually moved to the hills and expected civilized society to end. The lessons from Y2K make interesting reading even now.

To quote:

Y2K was a special challenge, because its worldwide complexity exceeded our human capability accurately to predict its consequences. However, it was well known in advance, and there was ample time to prepare. Hence, all went well: no systemic failures occurred. A lot of money was spent, and, clearly, it was well spent. It's also clear that unless the effort had been made, there could have been systemic failures, which would have been bad.

Some isolated Y2K glitches have appeared, as could be expected. Due to the nature of the systems involved, such problems will keep surfacing for some time to come. This is normal and can be handled. IT staff and engineers do this for a living. If our tools break, we fix them. What we avoided was an avalanche of problems all at once, which would have exceeded our capability to fix them.

An interesting thought is whether we've learned anything about doomsaying in the process. Most of the doomsayers have gone quiet, perhaps preparing for Leap Day or the next New Year's. Those with a wider reputation to salvage are now doing their explaining thing. Next time around, I believe we can look out for the following characteristics so as not to lose too much time and effort on dealing with them:

• All the doomsayers had something to sell, and public apprehension increased their sales. The goods included the message itself, consulting services, their own writings, emergency supplies, and worthless pieces of land. It's to be hoped that those who bought will find a way to profit from their investment.
  
• Doomsaying, by its nature, looks at a trend and extrapolates it linearily until a disaster scenario is found. In real life, everything goes in cycles. When a dubious trend has continued long enough, common sense kicks in, and resources are applied to correct it. But meanwhile, somebody gets rich on describing the havoc we were headed for.
  
• Most of the criticism of the perceived inaction in the non-English-speaking part of the world came from the United States. There's a correlation between the lack of language skills of English-speakers and the failure to understand the actual effort expended elsewhere. Further, as even the CIA admitted by way of explaining its own misjudgment, Americans tend to project their own society and infrastructure on everybody else, ignoring the fact that no other country is as dependent on money and technology as the US.
  
• Some doomsayers strongly touted the domino theory, multiplying the likelihood for interconnected systems to cause a compounded failure even where the risks to individual systems were low. This theory assumes that the world is run by an incomprehensible, uncontrollable web of robots where any glitch will snowball into a major failure. Reality is different: most IT systems deliver their results to humans who can see if they are wrong. People do the work; the systems are their tools, and can be fixed if they break. Interdependent systems were subject to intensified integration testing. Embedded systems were replaced if there was reason to believe that they were doing something date-dependent.
  

Nevertheless, the doomsayers did us a great service: we got more money and resources for the work than we'd have got without them. So congratulations and thanks to them, too!

Leon responded and said that (lack of) responsiveness to new data should be added to the list of characteristics of doomsayers. (Thanks, Leon!)

Today's conspiracy theorists and doomsayers seem no different from those of the run-up to Y2K. Guns, MREs, emergency supplies, and land in the boondocks are still being pushed ahead of December 21, 2012. The US dollar will collapse; it's been the same story for a long time--at least since the first oil crisis in the late 1970s. I think that those who push this idea are trying to drive down the dollar so they or their backers can buy up American assets cheap. Wake up--the national debt is still small compared with the resources of the US. The world won't end on a date known in advance. Well over a billion Muslims want nothing more than to live in peace with everybody; the fundamentalists on all sides are just helping drive up the defense budgets and enrich the arms makers. Even Rudy Giuliani admitted, albeit inadvertently, that 9/11 was an inside job, not a terrorist attack. The world is still going its regular way and the rich are getting richer. Read my free e-book Walkabout: The History of a Brief Century and find out where we'll be going from here!

Happy New Year!