Intimate chaos
For the second time in six months my wife and I set out on a Sunday morning only to discover our car had been hit-and-run in the night. After the initial jolt wore off, we aborted our usual plans, swept up bits of passenger-side taillight, called our insurance provider, spoke briefly with the police, and finally, reaching for a grace note, placed a takeout order from the Argentinean cafe down the block.
I have a belly full of omelette now but am still miffed about the car situation and might require the company of a lager here soon. In the meantime I’d like to say a few words about 1999.
Why? It was 20 years ago, 1999, and the publishing mills are taking notice. So far, though, I haven’t seen any content creators or professional hot takers revisit what was, for my money, the most significant event of 1999—and perhaps of even my entire childhood. I’m talking about the Y2K scare. Or as Wikipedia calls it, the “Year 2000 problem.”
Do you remember this thing? I do. I was barely 11 years old when the ball dropped and we rang in the new millennium. In the months leading up to 2000, Time published a cover story about Y2K. Will Smith released a hit single about it. The US Senate organized a special committee to prepare for it. And my parents, well-educated people not particularly given to fanaticism, stocked up on Kirkland-brand bottled water and canned soup—just in case.
Many of us feared that computers would malfunction when the date turned to 01.01.00, and that everything controlled by or connected to a computer would crash. Respectable people really thought this. For like a year.
And then nothing happened.
And then we, uh, never talked about it again.
Am I remembering this correctly?
The nation—the world—the Fresh Prince!—spent a year-plus half-expecting the modern world to stop working because of a decimal point problem. We truly believed this. But then when it failed to transpire, we never had a communal debriefing. We tugged at our collars a moment, maybe, and then it was back to business as usual.
Within two years 9/11 happened, then the whole Weapons of Mass Destruction bit, and that’s when the average American’s baseline paranoia level dialed up.
But are we sure the seed wasn’t planted two years prior, when Senators banged out a 150-page report detailing how to proceed if all the street lights short-circuited upon Dick Clark counting down to zero?
Is there a chance the root of our madness right now can be traced back to our neglect to formally address the fact that a lot of us spent the final year of the previous century preparing for civilization to collapse?
Nobody’s even bothered writing a book about this, and it’s wild to me.
“Why Hannah Arendt is the philosopher for now” by Lyndsey Stonebridge, New Statesman
The mid-20th-century writings of political theorist Hannah Arendt have enjoyed something of a resurgence since Trump was sworn in as president.
A Jewish woman writing in the wake of the atrocities of World War II, Arendt thought deeply and precisely in a time of great volatility. She was “good at thinking quickly and accurately about the politically and morally unprecedented. She distrusted easy analogies.”
The stakes of such thinking were—are—high: “When everybody is swept away unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes in,” Arendt said, “those who think are drawn out of hiding because… [thinking] becomes a kind of action.”
“Seeing and Being Seen” by Russell C. Bogue, The Hedgehog Review
“We desperately want to be seen,” Russell Bogue writes. “Just on our own terms.” He tries to make sense of this tension: our compulsion to confess and our instinct to protect our privacy at all costs. (Something my friend Chris calls the “intimacy paradox.”)
He’s talking about much more than just social media.
“Longing for an Internet Cleanse” by David Brooks, New York Times
Here’s a lovely, quick little meditation on the pace of things—but not in an Old Man Yells At Cloud way.
I’m prompted to do something slow today, something stupidly unproductive and without immediate gratification.
THANKS FOR READING HALGORITHM
Share this newsletter with a friend if you like it.
You can get in touch with me by replying to this email.
Until next time,
Hal