Join us for a Culturico podcast about the end of the world with historian of technology Zachary Loeb. We discuss the history of apocalyptic ideas and modern technological scepticism through the lens of his own academic work. This focuses on the Y2K scare or “millennium bug”, a collective fear of global computer systems becoming suddenly unable to distinguish dates correctly from midnight on January 1st, 2000, with catastrophic consequences. Although these fears never materialised, they tell the story of our global reliance on computing and resulting unease, both of which have only increased in the decades since. This fear has found expression in popular culture, which we use – for example through the sci-fi novels of William Gibson – to ask whether computer risk poses a tangible threat to governments, and whether it is possible to imagine a future with less computing.
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