Who's Afraid of the Y2K? November 03, 1998 12:00 AM ET by Geoffrey James

http://www.upside.com/texis/mvm/story?id=363e09320

By next January, we'll all know whether the dire predictions about the year 2000 have come true. If you listen to the doomsayers' forecasts, civilization is about to experience a disaster of epic proportions: Power plants will cease to function, cars will stop dead in their tracks, airplanes will fall out of the sky, and our entire financial infrastructure will collapse. There will be widespread food shortages, riots and social chaos. It will, quite literally, be the end of the world as we know it.

"What will happen when people in cities like New York, Boston, Minneapolis, Chicago, Philadelphia, etc., suddenly find themselves without power in the dead of winter?" grimly asks one Y2K Web site. "How long will it take for civil unrest to begin when millions of people have no way to stay warm?"

Oh, woe is me. Are we truly headed for a computer bug-induced societal meltdown? Hardly.

Sure, some large corporations with older software are expending a lot of time, money and effort cleaning up programs that take shortcuts with dates--those that only use a two-digit year field can mistake the year 2000, or 00, for the year 1900.

But while there may be some problems on the fateful day, the likelihood of any major social upheaval resulting from power outages or financial system failures (if any indeed occur) appears exceedingly small--it's the national hand-wringing that has gotten out of hand. The doomsday predictions run from the semivalid to the patently absurd; unfortunately, fringe groups and scam artists are adopting the most shrill forecasts. And the overblown paranoia, and Y2K-related spending spree, could ultimately have a negative impact on high tech. Does anyone remember the phrase crying wolf?

Fact vs. fiction

See Y2K Doom and Gloom The truth is that blackouts are possible, according to Dick Mills, a computer scientist with more than 30 years of experience in power plants and power systems. He believes, however, that it's highly unlikely there will be any long-term outages. Power failures resulting from software glitches are typically fixed within 24 hours, Mills says, and a power grid can be brought up and run without computers. "Worst case, it will take 72 hours to get the grid back online, though we may have some recurring blackouts on a local scale," he explains.

And even if power outages occur, it's highly unlikely there will be massive social unrest. On Jan. 7, 1998, a huge, once-in-500-years ice storm rolled into Maine, and within two days, half the state was without power. Major pockets of the state were also without telecommunications and water service. Cars were stranded on the roads, and airplanes couldn't fly. "Most of the state was down anywhere from six days to three weeks," says Phil Lindley, public information coordinator for the Maine Public Utilities Commission. But contrary to Y2K expectations, there were no food shortages or social unrest. "No riots; sorry to disappoint," says Lindley, who seems bemused at the idea. "To tell the truth, it was all pretty boring."

Of course, technology failures do affect our lives. As evidence, note the Galaxy IV Satellite's recent failure--the worst outage in the 37-year history of communications satellites. However, this breakdown appeared to have little impact on people's daily lives, even though it interrupted millions of financial transactions, clobbered hundreds of television and radio broadcasts, and prevented pager messages from being relayed to 80 percent to 90 percent of the country. It was such a nonevent, in fact, that when a popular talk-radio program in the Boston area solicited comments from listeners inconvenienced by the outage, not one caller complained. "It was nice to be out of touch for a few days," was a typical remark.

Another commonly predicted Y2K disaster is the collapse of our computerized financial infrastructure. In the words of one typical Y2K Web site, there could be "bank runs, [a] stock market crash, hyperinflation or deflation, joblessness and the massive emergency centralization of power ... rationing, curfews ... rapid changes of currency, seizure of stored foods, guns and gold."

However, this impending collapse appears even more unlikely than power outage riots. The Securities Industry Association recently tested 28 securities firms and 13 exchanges by setting up a mock year 2000 environment that replicated their production systems. "The biggest problems we had during the test were setup issues having to do with starting the testing process," says John Panchery, VP and director of systems and technology at the SIA and year 2000 project manager for the organization. "By the fourth day of the test, there were very few issues." While Panchery believes that industries that don't address their Y2K problems may suffer financially, he considers a global shutdown of the financial infrastructure extremely unlikely.

The professional doomsayers

Despite such reassurances, dozens of computer-industry experts are feeding the apocalyptic frenzy by making all sorts of dire predictions. Russ Kelly Associates, a systems integration company currently focusing on Y2K solutions, polled 21 self-identified experts about the "seriousness" of the Y2K problem on a scale from zero (representing "absolutely no concern") to 10 (representing "major worldwide social, economic and technological disruptions"). Only one "expert" rated the problem lower than "5"; the bulk of the answers were in the 8-9 range.

The SIA's Panchery takes a charitable view of the alarmist chatter, believing some pundits are taking extreme positions to alert IT staffs to the possible dangers so that the bugs get fixed. "We owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. Ed Yardeni," he explains, referring to one of the people quoted in the survey. "Ed has raised awareness around the globe just by citing all the things that may go wrong."

Interestingly, the single "expert" in the survey who rated the Y2K problem a "1" happened to be the one with the most bullet-proof credentials: Nicholas Zvegintzov, a 35-year veteran of the software business. He's also the only expert not deeply involved in selling Y2K services or building career points by talking about Y2K's dangers. "I've certainly never made any money by claiming things aren't going to go wrong," he quips.

While Zvegintzov doesn't deny there are Y2K bugs that need to be fixed, he believes the notion that there will be vast social turmoil is absurd.

Why, then, are so many experts predicting such dire consequences? Zvegintzov admits to being puzzled by this. "I'm disappointed to see people I respect taken in by Y2K [hype] and even promoting it," he laments. Zvegintzov points out, however, that making Y2K predictions has become a small but profitable industry. He believes much of the alarmist Y2K buzz is just another example of the computer industry's tendency to exaggerate.

"It's been an open secret for 20 years that the computer industry is full of hype," Zvegintzov observes. For example, "A large number of so-called research analysts are in the business of predicting that the market for your technology is billions of dollars," he says.

William Zachmann, president of Canopus Research in Duxbury, Mass., concurs with Zvegintzov. And as the former senior vice president of corporate research at Framingham, Mass.-based International Data Corp., he knows a thing or two about the validity of massive market predictions. "The alarmists run the gamut from outright scammers to IT consultants who have jumped on the bandwagon with varying degrees of delusion and cynical manipulation," he says. Zachmann considers much of today's Y2K effort "a scam on the part of people who hope to make money or are making money on it."

By contrast, saying virtually anything that runs counter to the Y2K mania is an open invitation to having your work attacked by hordes of true believers. For example, on June 25, Zvegintzov published an article titled "Don't move to that Y2K commune just yet" on the IntellectualCapital.com Web site suggesting the Y2K problem may be overstated. The ensuing discussion included a string of semigrammatical tirades, and Zvegintzov quickly found himself quoted on a Web site created specifically to ridicule anyone who questions Y2K dogma. Mills was also quoted on this site and has taken lumps for daring to post the results of his research. "I got a lot of criticism ... for saying blackouts aren't the end of the world," he notes.

Which brings up the phenomenon of "social proof," the tendency to believe something merely because many people assume it to be true. Much of the criticism leveled at Y2K skeptics is voiced in comments such as "How can so many experts be wrong?" But the truth is that computer-industry pundits, even when taken en masse, are often seriously off base. Widely spouted predictions that have never panned out include the paperless office, the PC-TV and computers that can think--a breakthrough that for the past 35 years has been predicted will occur "within the next 10 years."

Zachmann compares the Y2K bug to the Michelangelo virus scare of 1992, when an anti-virus software vendor appeared on CNN to alert the world that the disk drives of 5 million PCs would be erased on March 6, the famous artist's birthday. But when the fateful day came, few computers were stricken. "There was a certain validity to the concern about the virus," Zachmann says. "But reality is a lot thinner than the scare."

Interestingly, the impact of the fake scare was to reduce the virus-protection industry's credibility, according to Graham Cluley, a senior technical manager at the virus labs of Santa Clara, Calif.-based Network Associates Inc., a network security and management software provider. If the same holds true for the Y2K scare, there may be a backlash against some parts of the computer industry should the great disaster fail to occur.

The doomsaying tendency may also be related to the fact that there's little downside risk to making gloomy predictions. Doomsayers will come out winners whether or not the dreaded Y2K problems actually surface. If problems occur, they look like prophets; if not, they still did a good job of warning the population.

If the pundits have little reason to restrain the hyperbole, the hardware and software vendors have none. Nearly every company in the computer industry has jumped onto the Y2K bandwagon, often using the image of an imminent apocalypse to sell their products. Oracle Corp., for example, ran a full-page ad with a giant Y2K logo in the Aug. 27 issue of the Wall Street Journal, with the promise to "solve a problem that took 2,000 years to create."

IT departments, too, have little incentive to talk sense. As Zachmann points out, the Y2K brouhaha is a perfect excuse for IT managers to increase their budgets. And fixing Y2K bugs also has enormous technodweeb appeal. At the Year 2000 Conference and Expo held in New York in March, a truly Dilbertesque moment took place when a speaker, wearing a stars-and-stripes necktie, exhorted the IT attendees to consider themselves "generals" and "field marshals" in the war against Y2K bugs. Their mission: "To save the world" and then "look back and say, 'This was our finest hour.'" Dogbert would have been proud.

1, 2: Signs of 'The End', S, http://www.upside.com/texis/mvm/news/story?id=363e4aee0

Who's Afraid of the Y2K? page 2: Signs of 'The End'

The problem with all this Y2K hyperbole is that it's rapidly filtering down to the rest of the populace, which lacks the BS filters one acquires from working in the computer business for a few years.

It's almost inevitable that a large portion of the public will get caught up in the Y2K mania--if only because we live in a society where large numbers of people have a problem distinguishing fiction from reality. Television shows like "The X-Files" blend almost seamlessly into the pseudodocumentaries of "Unsolved Mysteries," and conspiracy theories are practically a national sport. We've all been raised on doomsday science fiction, Cold War ground-zero nightmares and years of relentless hype about how computers are changing the world. Let's face it: Our society is ripe to be scared spitless about this Y2K thing.

Nobody knows exactly what (if anything) will happen when the clocks turn over that night, but we know what occurred the last time the millennium changed. According to ancient tales, Europe's churches were filled with terrified parishioners on the final night of the year 999. Many had given all their possessions to the church, preparing for what people widely believed would be judgment day. Fields went uncultivated, business and trade ground to a halt.

Needless to say, the world didn't end, though some people may have died of fright when the final church bells tolled. There was some famine as the result of poor cultivation the year before. And there was a massive legal hassle in the following years as the former true believers tried to recover the worldly goods they had rashly given away.

It's easy to laugh at the naïveté of those who lived in an era we now call the Dark Ages. Still, there's little evidence that the basic psychology of humankind has changed much. Consider this, for example: A 1993 Time magazine poll revealed that 69 percent of Americans believe angels exist.

The notion that a major worldwide disaster is looming in the near future, it appears, is part and parcel of our cultural heritage. It dates all the way back to ancient Egypt and appears in one form or another about every 50 years, according to professional myth-debunker James Randi. And it's this set of irrational beliefs about the end of the world that seems to have grafted itself onto what many say is a manageable technical problem--fixing programs that don't calculate dates well.

One thing that's different about the current end-of-the-world mania is that it's the first to be spread by the power of the Internet. There are already hundreds of Web sites containing masses of advice, not to mention products and services, to help people weather what has been hyped as the inevitable computer-induced collapse of civilization. Many of these sites have a decidedly fundamentalist Christian flavor, such as www.shilhavy.com/y2k, the Y2K preparedness site sponsored by Brian Shilhavy, a computer programming consultant based in Minnesota. The site opens with a quote from the Bible warning readers to "be on guard" and "not be weighted down with dissipation and drunkenness" lest judgment day "come on you suddenly like a trap." It also contains links to "Y2K preparedness" groups throughout the country.

One of the groups recommended on Shilhavy's site, God's Wilderness, is sponsored by an organization selling plots of "safe" rural land in upstate Minnesota, presumably for those who don't want to be at ground zero on the day the earth stands still. Although the God's Wilderness site doesn't mention Y2K specifically, it has "gotten lots of inquiries and [has] sold a number of plots to people worried about Y2K" problems, says one God's Wilderness resident. Shilhavy declined to comment on his involvement with Y2K survival organizations.

But it isn't just radical Christians who appear fascinated by the Y2K problem. Other sites build upon what might loosely be called New Age philosophy, coupled with a healthy dose of conspiracy theory. For example, one site combines Y2K with "End Time Prophecy/New World Order Shadow Gov/Millennium Apocalypse," and includes photos of flying saucers and the face on Mars just for good measure.

How seriously are people actually taking this stuff? Many of them are putting their money where their mouths are, according to C.W. Nelson, owner of Sun Valley, Idaho-based Alpine Survival. His company, which sells freeze-dried food in large quantities, has seen business grow 500 percent since April, a fact he attributes to increased publicity about the Y2K problem. Nelson says his clients are worried that "if the power goes out at any time, there will be chaos and mayhem in the city, and people will be fleeing the suburbs to avoid marauding hordes."

Another booming Y2K-fed industry is alternative power sources, according to Wakeman Porter, CEO of Flippin, Ariz.-based Twisted Oak Alternative Energy, which sells wind generators, hydroelectric generators and photovoltaic solar cells. "People are nervous about doing without power," Porter says, "and so interest has grown" as Y2K has become more visible in the mainstream press.

All this may sound harmless, but there's an ugly side to Y2K mania as well. References to Y2K are appearing with depressing regularity in the literature for neo-Nazi, white supremacist and patriot militia groups, according to Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., a nonprofit hate-group watchdog organization. What's more, to prepare for the coming conflict, members of these groups are stockpiling weapons.

This phenomenon has already resulted in an upsurge of senseless violence. For example, on May 29, 1998, Jason McVean and his friend Alan Lamont Pilon allegedly went on a crime spree in Colorado, shooting and killing one police officer and wounding two others. Pilon is believed to have ties to an organization called the Four Corners Patriot Militia, a paramilitary organization that's latched onto the Y2K story and is acquiring munitions and weapons in anticipation of the fateful day. The duo later escaped into the wilderness after allegedly shooting at a National Park superintendent. At press time, both were still at large, according to a spokeswoman at the La Plata County Sheriff's office.

Incidents like this represent just the tip of the iceberg, according to Potok. "With this identification of the year 2000 as a critical date, there's been a big upswing in domestic terrorist conspiracies, including [attempted] bombings of federal buildings and oil refineries, all of which have fortunately been prevented by the FBI." Potok believes the overblown speculation about Y2K disasters by computer-industry "experts" and the mainstream press is only fueling these highly dangerous crazies.

Y2K crime wave

The Y2K mania is also expected to result in a plethora of Y2K-related financial scams, according to securities regulators, who are bracing for a spate of fraud cases. "Anytime there's any kind of real or perceived crisis, it raises the opportunity to scam someone, and Y2K falls into that category," says Fred Joseph, deputy securities commissioner for the state of Colorado. The possibility of widespread Y2K-related fraud has persuaded the Federal Trade Commission to open a public discussion of the issue, according to Jonathan Cowen, an attorney in the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection.

It's even possible that some IT groups will get scammed as well. Peter Neumann, one of modern computing's founding fathers and author of the book Computer-Related Risks (Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1995), points out that some year 2000 consultants are saying they have proprietary technology and "are asking their customers to hand over their code to be fixed while saying, 'Don't ask us how we're doing it.'" Neumann believes that "most of these guys will shut down their shops on Dec. 31, 1999, and there won't be anybody left to sue when the 'fixed' software doesn't run."

There may be other consequences to the Y2K panic, too. Worst case, there will be enough irrational fear and dread to affect the stock market, according to investment adviser Tony Keyes, author of the book The Year 2000 Computer Crisis: An Investor's Survival Guide (Y2K Publishing, 1997). While Keyes' book contains many popular Y2K myths, he says that--from an investor's viewpoint--it ultimately won't matter whether there's an actual Y2K disaster. "The mere fact that people believe there might be one will be enough to cause a massive upheaval in our financial systems," he explains.

In other words, the worst danger from Y2K is that it may become a self-fulfilling prophesy. If so, the computer industry must take a certain amount of responsibility for blowing the original problem completely out of proportion.

"This is the first time we've seen the great computer-hype machine focused on something entirely negative," says software veteran Zvegintzov. "For nearly 40 years, I've watched the software business blow the impact of technology all out of proportion. Now that madness is about to leap up and bite us."

1, 2, S,

Geoffrey James (www.geoffreyjames.com) is a Boston-based author of numerous articles and books on high-tech business. If you would like to submit a letter to the editor regarding this story, email online@upside.com.

-- Anonymous, August 13, 2001

Answers

As we have told you, you don't know JACK SHIT about Y2k or what went on. Send an email to Gary Duct Tape will be Money after 1/1/2000 for guidance. LOLOL

-- Anonymous, August 13, 2001

EPITOME' of "CIRCLE JERK":

Around and around I asked Jones where he got the $1 trillion figure. He told me the number came from another locally based industry analyst, Stephanie Moore of GIGA Information Group. While Moore admitted to using the $1 trillion number in her Y2K articles, she insisted she got the number from Capers Jones. In other words, nobody was willing to own up to the forecast -- despite the fact that at that time, the U.S. Congress was wasting taxpayer money by debating whether to put financial caps on Y2K litigation. In my view, these so-called Y2K experts, along with their many colleagues, were largely responsible for providing the intellectual underpinnings for the entire Y2K hoax -- despite the fact that they clearly didn't know squat. I might add that Upside magazine, alone among the major publications, was telling its readers as early as November 1998 that Y2K disasters were overwrought hype -- a position that resulted in a flurry of hostile letters from the true believers.

-- Anonymous, August 13, 2001

***But contrary to Y2K expectations, there were no food shortages or social unrest. "No riots; sorry to disappoint," says Lindley, who seems bemused at the idea. "To tell the truth, it was all pretty boring."***

Anyone aware of rioting Anywhere during cold weather? It seems to be more of a warm weather phenomenon.

-- Anonymous, August 14, 2001

Russia, Yugoslavia's assorted counties for openers

-- Anonymous, August 14, 2001

Send an email to Gary Duct Tape will be Money after 1/1/2000 for guidance.

cpr, ... ahh, I mean, "Loon" ... can you explain in a little more detail what you are trying to say, here? I'm sure it makes perfect sense in your world, but it's coming across a bit garbled in mine. (Maybe I have been stricken by a eyestrain meme....)

Have a good day.

-- Anonymous, August 14, 2001

Why not try your shiny new Search engine under Gary North and Duct Tape?

In fact, look it up on Brer Formerly Scary Gary's Y2k area. Its only 6,500 posts long.

Get back to us with the URL and some evidence that you understand ANYTHING.

-- Anonymous, August 14, 2001