Let’s hope climate change turns out to be just like Y2K
I’ve been comparing climate change to the Y2K bug for a long time, but not in a climate change denying way, more in a, ‘Look we actually got our acts together and solved the Y2K bug, and patched or upgraded pretty much every computer in the world,‘ kind of way. Take this story in today’s The Australian, “Heating beat-up has echoes of Y2K“. Frankly I’m surprised that it’s taken the Oz this long to make a connection between these two widely misunderstood events. First, here’s The Australian:
REMEMBER Y2K? This was the new millennium bug that we were told threatened to throw the world’s computer systems into chaos as we entered the year 2000.
Aircraft could fall from the sky and businesses crash in a global digital catastrophe, we were warned. Panic set in and billions of dollars were spent across the world to head off this impending armageddon.
In this mad rush there was no room for sceptics. The evidence of the looming danger was overwhelming and undeniable, regardless of the fact that it sounded like something out of a science-fiction movie. Action had to be taken and no price was too high.
Well, the tsunami turned out to be nothing more than a ripple in a pond, if that.
[T]he tsunami turned out to be nothing more than a ripple in a pond
because the world got its act together and said, uh-oh we should have seen that coming, and collectively spent about US$2 trillion dollars on the world’s first major system update.
It didn’t matter what operating system your computer ran on, what chips, what anything. If it stored the year of a date as a 2-digit number it got upgraded or junked. Cobol programmers were saved from an early retirement for about 5 years as they milked their, in many cases former, employers checking and fixing millions upon millions of lines of code. In many cases whole databases needed to be ported over to something new that supported improved dates. DBAs made a fortune.
Many companies saw in this potential crisis an incredible opportunity. Sun Microsystems, who had for years been nerding away on a system called Star7, had a lightbulb moment in 1995 when they started looking at the growth of the internet and realised they had a computer language that could run on anything that itself ran a ‘virtual machine’. And a virtual machine could run in a web-browser as a plug-in. Sun renamed its toy language Java and pimped it as C++ without the nasties, designed for the networked age. Within mere months Sun had engaged the imaginations of hundreds of thousands of people, had carved out a niche for Java as serious rival to C and C++ and had made Sun Microsystems the darling of the emerging tech-world.
In 1996 the Y2K bug came early for some people, but alas too late to save their lives: Computers that were looking forward to the next leap-year started sending mail to dead people. Several Australian Federal Givernment Departments and Banks were hit by this and that drove a sudden spike in awareness of Y2K. That spike attracted the hype that always surrounds such a catastrophe. It’s our fault? We asked. How? How could those programmers in the 1970s and 1980s and, um, 1990s for many institutions, have not seen the consequences of that design flaw earlier and averted such an obvious problem while there was time?
The tabloids ranted and raved. Editors put big pictures of giant spider-bots on the front of papers and magazines. Money started to flow and only a fool would have stood there and denied that Y2K was a serious problem. Even if, in quiet, you believed it would all be okay, no IT manager on Earth would have said that in public.
Sun’s genius was to step up to the plate with new hardware, (Sun Servers so big you could walk into them to change cards), and a radical new way to develop software for the internet age, Java 2 Enterprise Edition, or J2EE. Now it didn’t matter that J2EE was a dog, a big black dog, that drove many a good programmer insane with either fury or tedium, it was what the corporate world, IT budgets soaked to the gills with ‘fix Y2K in our systems’ money, wanted to hear.
Microsoft and Apple, Oracle, Quicken, MYOB, and so many more also rode this wave, some better than others. A thousand startups bloomed. The optimism in the technology world was naked and unbridled. When pretty much nothing, and certainly nothing significant or life threatening happened on 1 Jan 2000, the tech world gave itself a massive pat on the back. The world was saved from Y2K, the internet was saved from the tyranny of the operating system, a new ecosystem of ways of viewing the world flourashed with it. Now instead of simple, raw data we had ‘object’, ‘event’, ‘message’, ‘tuple’ views of the world. Books like ‘Thinking in Java’ became all the rage. And as it soon dawned on many a startup, the corporate world was awash in Y2K contingency funds. To say this accelerated the dot.com boom is too anaemic a statement. This heady mix of optimism, money and a purposeful new way of looking at the world was to the 00s as LSD was to the 70s.
Of course it all crashed. And this is the point of making the comparison between Y2K and climate change in the way they do in the Oz. Y2K was a fizzer and then the dot.com boom burst is what they’d love you to keep in mind. But out of the wreckage of the dot.com boom we got Google, and Amazon, and Net-A-Porte, and Facebook and Linkedin, and eBay and Skype and we got Apple back. Java dominates now in business, for better or worse. So much of our lives, and a vast amount of the global economy is all about online now. Pretty much just as futurists like Nicholas Negroponte (Being Digital) or Bill Mitchell (City of Bits) suggested. Even Neil Stephenson’s ‘Snowcrash‘ is looking more and more like the world we know. William Gibson made the point once that we are now living in Sci-Fi. The year 2000 was the transition point between past and future for me.
The world’s response to the threat of the Y2K bug was a multi-trillion dollar global system upgrade. We upgraded the nervous system of capitalism in response to an uncertain series of threats. Responding to climate change is an entirely analogous upgrade to capitalism. This time we are recognising and eliminating bugs in the structure of the free-market itself. Externalities, those costs that never quite make it into the price of a good or service because someone else bares that cost, are being hunted down and eliminated. Carbon emissions are the first cab off the rank. Let’s hope the outcomes to properly accounting for, and minimising our GHG emissions drive as much prosperity, as much raw economic transformation as did the response to Y2K. That would be an achievement to be proud of. — DS