Y2K fever was a long time ago, but today online disinformation campaigns are tipping the scales of elections, extremist groups are turning YouTube into a radicalization pipeline, and mass murders are being livestreamed on social media. Reappearing after her apparent destruction in 1994’s System Shock, SHODAN was the ultimate 1999 villain: a faulty computer program that turned on and slaughtered its creators. Office Space satirized it, The Matrix rode it to total cultural dominance, and System Shock 2 gave it a face with SHODAN.
The most enduring pop culture of that era reflected this paranoid technophobia. Fearmongers and tech-illiterates convinced people that computer networks were going to freak out, crash and end civilization when the calendar flipped from ’99 to ’00. At the end of the ’90s, Y2K panic gripped the world.
0 kommentar(er)
