<nettime> Ccru datastream1: y2paniK

[katasonix <data@katasonix.demon.co.uk>]

Ccru: Cybernetic culture research unit
http://www.ccru.demon.co.uk
it@ccru.demon.co.uk

Y2k+ datastream 
Dec KO99


Y2paniK 

On receiving an interrupt, decrement the counter to zero.
- William Gibson Count Zero

Millennial Mania reaches a certain peak in the Jerusalem syndrome, which
exhibits eschatourism as one element in the programmatic fulfillment of
prophecy. Whilst TV evangelists in the USA are exhorting viewers to sell
all possessions and flock to Jerusalem, and a papal blessing is promised
to those visiting the holy-land at the beginning of the new millennium,
the israeli tourist board, security forces, and the psychiatric
profession are preparing for the arrival of up to thirteen million
christian pilgrims. An abnormally high rate of psychotic disturbance is
confidently anticipated, perhaps succeeded by episodes of mass suicide
amongst disillusioned believers. 

At Megiddo (the biblical Armegeddon) they are planning the ultimate
sound and light show, involving frog-monsters, the greatest earthquake
in history, and toxic hail from heaven (Rev-XVI:16). Such incendiary
visions dove-tails neatly with existing regional tensions. In
preparation for the  millennium, various jewish and christian groups are
plotting to demolish the El-Aqsa mosque  and the Dome of the Rock. This
is seen as the necessary prelude to rebuilding the third and final
temple of Solomon, which would lay the mundane foundations for the New
Jerusalem, and induce the coming of the Messiah (completion of
Oecumenon). 

Running counter to such enthusiasm is the fact that as an instrument of
propaganda the gregorian calendar is intrinsically flawed. Apocalyptic
hopes for AD 2000 systematically confuse millenarian expectations for
Christ's thousand year reign (Rev-XX) with millenialist investment of
neat calendric intervals. The midnight of December 31st 1999 does not
coincide with a christian festival (christmas),  has no historically
defensible commemorative relevance, and does not (as gregorian year MM)
even mark the beginning of a new millennium. 

Meanwhile, infotechnics is carried by Y2K into millennial spasms of its
own, returning to 00 and digitally erasing the twentieth century
(reducing data to MMbo-jumbo). Since Cyberspace dates are incapable of
counting above 99 they have surreptitiously installed the first
intrinsically apocalyptic calendar in history, unconsciously produced
within a planetrary electronic registry, starting from Year Zero (= 00).
Y2K condenses out of the mechanomic unconscious and its nonarbitrary
calcular functions, attesting to a raw decimal delirium indifferent to
creed. 
 
Post-tribulationist eschatology slides smoothly into Y2K survivalism,
orienting its volatile mixture of stock piling, micro-militia activity,
technophobia and apocalyptic theology towards the self-fulfilling
dynamics of millennial threat. Pre-emptive response produces reality
(panic is creation). The more you know about it, the worse it looks.

It has always been integral to capitalist organization that science-
fiction functions as a factor of production, relating it intimately to
panic-phenomena. Y2K takes things to a new level, as a disaster that
comes from the future, scheduled by accident, and thus precisely
anticipated in time. If it proves effectively ineradicable it is because
it is trickling back, from the self-confirming inevitability of its
occurrence. Something is about to happen, and we know exactly when. 

The contours of the expected calamity are being continuously upscaled in
conformity with an  interlocking technopanic syndrome, involving
innumerable accidents, various network crashes, and elements of medical
overstretch, financial chaos , transport, telecommunication and power
failures, food and water shortages, disruption of government services,
hoarding, rioting, and terrorism. 

A number of governments have openly expressed their willingness to
oversee millennium celebrations in conditions approximating to martial
law. Army and police leave is being cancelled, and emergency services
prepared for exceptional conditions, including large-scale disruption of
their own command, control, and communications systems, compounded by
widespread equipment dysfunction. 

In the West, large government and corporate bureaucracies are triaging
their Y2K vulnerability: writing-off the most expendable sectors,
accepting incalculable risk in others, and concentrating resources
solely on the most critical areas (such as nuclear installations,
strategic control, core information functions and financial records).  

Forecasting the pattern of Y2K devastation is complicated by its
(artificial) nature, which explodes in spirals. As a highly chaotic
singularity it is characterized by extreme sensitivity to
microvariables, the absence of precedent, and anticipatory looping
through its own potentials. It occurs in advance of itself, punctually
switches to an unknown climate, and spreads contagiously through
networks. Modelling it adds complexity and noise (which feed it). Though
entirely semiotic, it already amounts to the most expensive accident in
history (whatever happens). $3.6 trillion and counting.

Y2K produces a traumatic mutation in the information economy, involving
an explosion of IT emergency services (analysis, debugging, integrated
solutions), massively accelerated hardware replacement, global
restructuring, and a crisis of confidence in computer-supported
services, with the potential to runaway into general market collapse.
It interrupts the smooth upward curve of doubling microprocessor
density, falling prices, and increasing market-penetration with a
singular cyberspace-shock that is discontinuous (or nonmetabolic) in
nature. Junk-shops stack-up with prematurely discarded infotechnic
hardware, providing the material-base for a computer-age skip-scavenging
cargo-culture. Electronics must be subsocially recycled to release its
frozen machinic potential. Cyberpunk begins with Y2K. 


Outside the public sphere Y2K excitement is not only higher it has
changed phase entirely. As hysterical hyperlooping  twists the
millennium into a panic storm, it  builds explosively on itself,
producing an artificial destiny. Techonomic power splinters across
schizophrenically juxtaposed time-systems, spawning monsters (the first
true counterculture). 

Lurking predominantly in the datacombs of the crypt, numerous shadowy
groups now proclaim themselves Y2K-positive.  These AYettuk cults@ have
begun building a mesh of  massively decentralized subcultural impulses,
directly investing ethnotronic time-catastrophe, and aggressively
promoting chronodissidence throughout and beyond the web. They celebrate
Y2K as a threat to the order of time: a cultural event that is not
textual, ideological, representational, intentional, or phenomenological
but rather machinic and numerical-subtractive (n -1).  

Y2K designates a crisis of calendric culture: a time-bomb so perfected
that the timer is the bomb. It simultaneously adopts the zero-function
of 24-hour digital time-code, induces convergence with the calendric
zero of count-inception, dismantles clock/calendar segmentarity into
flat scales of duration, and triggers Teotwawki.  Even when it operates
pre-emptively (in any number of ways) it refers itself  to the punctual
Great Midnight that cuts hyperhistorical time-continuum at 00:00 ,
doubling the retro-virtual chronogenesis of the century.  

Y2K is as old as computers, all that changes is the panic intensity.
According to the Yettuk cultists - or K-Goths - the total
chronopolitical immune-response to Y2K constitutes a program for
Gregorian Restoration, with the bug-hunt masking a neoroman
sociopolitical agenda. Far from being a mere technical glitch, the
millennium time crisis indexes the first neutral calendar in history,
which escapes the numerocultural legacy of the Romans by beginning with
a year 0 (= 00). The demand for Amillennium compliance@ attempts to
enforce the abandonement of an existing calendar, that of cybernetic- or
K-Time,  and suppress its associated time-anomalies (sealing the
calendar against zero). In the now notorious words of crypt denizen
Count S Zero: A..so Mbug resistors think MATRIX needs a new calendar--
totally steam-punk. Wake up-ITs already K-Time. Count-O=Greg Date
1900..@. 
-- 
katasonix

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net