Lately I’ve been in an “end-of-the-world” paranoid survivalist phase. I guess all the doomsayers out there touting the end of life as we know it with the onset of the year 2000 (more fondly known as Y2K) are finally starting to get to me. So I’ve started stockpiling (hoarding? perhaps) non-perishables, bottled water and survival items. I figure by the time Y2K rolls around I should have sufficient resources to sit back and scoff at the ill-prepared, tearing at eachother in vain and desperate attempts to loot and hoard what little food remains in local supermarkets.

I imagine myself sitting on the front porch, leaning back on two legs of an old chair, enjoying a cigarette (which I am also stockpiling - will be a high-value bartering item, I suspect), shotgun in my lap, protecting the livestock and the property. I’ll be cooking up beans on a kerosene stove and drinking water from a bleach-lined plastic container. By day I’ll tend to the garden and feed the pigs, and try to keep the sick and starving from thieving. I’ll erect barbed wire fences and signs around my property that warn, “Intruders will be shot on sight, no questions asked.” And when the disbelievers dare trespass, and I shoot them dead, I’ll throw their carcasses into the street for the other starving people to eat. My neighbors, that is. I mean, I would love to help them, but I can’t support the whole neighborhood, right? At this point in time it’ll be every man, woman, and child for themselves. If you think this prescient vision of the future looks bleak, well, they don't call it the end of the world for nothing.

I will laugh at and pity people who make last minute withdrawals of their monetary funds and sell off their stocks and bonds, which will cause the collapse of financial institutions and the world-wide economy. I will laugh, because their paper money will be useless. What can it buy them when stores no longer function and shelves are empty? Reverting to a barter system, only those with useful, productive skills will survive. For this reason I am now learning to tan hide. I predict a strong revival in the demand for leather and suede goods, and I’ll be just the person to provide these items. I just have to get a couple cows first... but I’ve still got some time left.

In Nevada somewhere a massive “long-time” clock is being constructed which will give the public a sense of longevity when it comes to timescale thinking. The clock will “tick” once a year, “gong” once a century, and “cuckoo” each millennium. But all of this is for naught. In Paris, on the Eiffel Tower, the French have erected a large digital screen which counts down the days until the new millennium. Ironically, once it hits zero it will most likely blow its fuses and cause an explosion that crumbles that most famous tower. Because what I'm talking about here is not a Revelations-type armageddon. I'm talking about the breakdown of computer systems world-wide as their clocks turn over to the double zeros, and resulting consequences which will impact virtually every aspect of our lives. Pack up your things and head for the hills, we’re in for a rough ride. Social chaos, economic depression, the breakdown of public services, cultural atavism, hunger, disease. Perhaps it is almost biblical. I find it all terribly ironic; the greatest advancements of the 20th century will prove to be the ruination of a society.

Remember when Orsen Wells, that doomsday prankster, frightened a nation with the threat of space invasion? Remember when those who were afraid of technology envisioned a future where robots complete with artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic turn on their human creators, make us their slaves, and rule the world? How naive these fears were. The computer chip will be the end of us, but in such a simple, non-intrusive way. They will simply cease to function properly and throw everything we know into chaos. The problem is that technology has surpassed our understanding. We know how to use the fruits of technology, like computers and cellular phones and fax machines, but we don’t know how they work. There are a few highly skilled but socially inept people who intimately know how the computers operate. But there aren’t enough of them to fix the problem. Around September 1999 they’ll all be in Montana forming the Geek Squad Commune. And if you don't have a healthy ration of dry goods and shotguns saved up, you'd better be there, with pocket protector and duct-taped glasses in hand, trying to infiltrate the compound.

See, I like to think that I’d be one of the survivors. But perhaps only the people at the two extremes of the technological skill spectrum will make it out unscathed. The very technologically skilled, and the very technologically ignorant. There is a thick swath of people that fall in between that will just be wiped out. The highly skilled will be the best prepared, since they have long been aware of what will happen when we roll over to the double zeros. And they are the only ones who know how to restart systems, salvage and rebuild. The technologically unskilled know about survival, how to live without conveniences most of us take for granted. These are the ones who have always found the trappings of technology, communication, and convenience unnecessary and even threatening. These are the same people who never trusted banks and stashed all their money under their mattresses; the ones who never got computers or cable television or answering machines; those who have about 5 big American cars sitting on their front lawns jacked up on bricks and slowly rusting. But in order to get back to some semblance of pre-Y2K civilization, these two factions will have to cooperate with eachother, which could get ugly.

Based on the learning curves of the two extremes, my advice to you at this point would be to start your own little stockpile of non-perishables, learn a useful trade, and enjoy this webpage for as long as you can, before the computers crash and it all goes away.


Other millennial predictions:
  1. Eschatology will replace engineering as the most popular field of study at college campuses nationwide in the ‘98-’99 academic year.

  2. Survival for Dummies tops the New York Times best-sellers list in spring of ‘99.

  3. Incidence of drug abuse, random sexual encounters, STDs, as well as diaper-wearers, coprophages, and other social deviants emerging from closets all increase with coming of new millennium in final attempt to “whoop it up before we die.”

Copyright 11/98 Jennifer Chung
All rights reserved.
Pa, get my shotgun.




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