Millennial groups and others forecasting apocalyptic scenarios have scaled back their predictions since Jan. 1, though they’re not necessarily out of business, reports the Skeptical Inquirer (May/June). As might be expected, those groups and individuals who closely tied their forecasts of apocalyptic events to the year 2000 have revised their views significantly as time has passed.
Software guru Ed Yourdon, c-author of Time Bomb 2000, has taken citations from his book off his web site, but adds that for a few “Y2K wrought a profound and permanent change; even if the computer systems didn’t collapse, the Y2K-related threat of such collapse has made us reexamine our lives, redefine our priorities.”
Christian Reconstructionist thinker Gary North, who made perhaps the most extensive forecasts of Y2K apocalypse, is less repentant. He removed the forecasts of an imminent return to a 19th century style of living from his web site, but still features a regular Y2K “Glitch report.” . Computer failures of any scale still provide North a “flicker of hope for his post-technological theocratic utopia,” writes Robert Scheaffer. Others have fastened on to other key dates.
The Year 2000 Institute foresees the conversion of European currencies to the euro as leading to computer-induced disaster. Scheaffer notes that the institute also “warns that on September 8, 2001, the clock will roll over on millions of systems . . . running the UNIX operating system,” affecting 12 million computer applications, and will be an “event of Epoch proportions — quite literally!”
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