The Co-Intelligence Institute Return to CII home // Return to Y2K home

---

How to Think about Y2K

For those who realize it is going to be a pretty big deal and who've always wanted a better world

The first things you probably noticed about Y2K were:

a) It is unbelievably stupid.
b) It is unbelievably scary.

I mean, think about it for a minute: How could a bunch of geeks pull the rug out from under the most powerful civilization in the history of the planet -- and do it by accident, no less?! And how could such a bizarre catastrophe of potentially mind-boggling proportions be happening in the middle of your otherwise full and frustrating life, when you can't even find a few spare moments to think clearly about it?! It isn't fair!

I feel thoroughly confident in observing that this is not the life you signed up for.

But while you're doing the rumba with your overwhelm and denial, don't overlook the most obvious and powerful secret about Y2K: It is going to seriously mess up business-as-usual. If you look closely at this fact, you may notice a very big blessing inside that monstrous curse -- some intense gilding around that thunder-pumping storm cloud. Think about it:

Business-as-usual has two functions:

a) to keep most of us relatively comfortable and functioning and
b) to keep The Establishment established.

When business-as-usual is messed with, both us and The Establishement get messed with. To the extent business-as-usual comes apart because of Y2K, most of us are going to find ourselves notoriously uncomfortable and non-functional. And The Establishment is going to find itself pretty thoroughly disestablished. We're going to end up with a lot of seriously unhappy people immersed in a playful little vortex of chaos. It's enough to make Antidisestablishmentarianists out of all of us.

So how do we think about this?

As we contemplate the seriousness of our plight, most of us have one of two reactions:

a) I don't like this one bit: I want to go home now.
b) I don't like this two bits: I want to wake up.

Unfortunately, we're already home and this isn't a dream. We're kind of stuck here.

As water was flooding the Titanic's engine room, a passenger told the ship's designer, "But the Titanic cannot sink." The designer replied, emphatically: "It can. And it will."

Realizing, at last, that we're not going to be able to get up and leave the theater, we resolve to get practical. In a moment of clarity, we say to ourselves:

a) I'm heading for the hills!!
b) What will become of my mother/ job/ dream house/ career/ cat/ and everything else precious to me...?!!

Well, since everyone else that runs into this particular wall (Y2K) has exactly the same thoughts, we can rest assured that the hills are going to be filled with all those folks we're trying to get away from. The first wave will be the rich folks who will drive up the rural real estate prices. The next wave will be the stragglers like most of the rest of us who will make all those country farmers edgy and overwhelm the capacity of small towns and forests to support the incoming crush of humanity. The final wave will be the hungry marauders, arriving to gather up all the resources that drained out of the cities months before.

"Shit," we think. "That's not going to work very well."

Same for our mothers and cats and hopes for a golden retirement. They're all in the same soup with the rest of us. I mean, this is a pretty big wave. Lots is going to get washed away. (An interesting image, when combined with the soup metaphor, isn't it?)

Anyway, I'd like to take this opportunity to suggest that all this "How To Save Yourself and Your Loved Ones and Prosper At the End of the World" is just real old-fashioned thinking. It obviously won't get us very far. I'd like to suggest that it is time for something new. It is time to Think Big.

The new question -- the Big Question -- is "What Does It Mean To Be A Human Being Alive At This Enormous Moment In History?"

This isn't a time for figuring out how much you can stuff into your backpack before the thousand mile hike (you won't be able to carry it all, anyway). This is a time for figuring out how to change the rudder of civilization. This is a once-in-a-millenium opportunity: Everything is coming apart. What shape is it going to come together in? That is the question we'll be answering with our lives.

This is a time to imagine your great grandchildren looking back and saying: "Wow! My Granddaddy/ Grandmommy was alive then, and they were part of making that incredible stuff happen!!"

This is like the American Revolution -- but much, much more so. We have the fate of humanity in our hands, for real this time. What happens in the next few years will make all the difference in the world, I assure you. Don't twiddle it away trying to figure out how to hide until the storm's over. The storm may not be over for some time. And if it gets you, wouldn't you rather have died making a difference instead of crouched in a tiny corner of the background scenery??

Think about it.

Go ahead. Take a break and think about it.

(But of course, you're not going to do that. You're going to continue reading. I always do...)

One needs to think not only about survival, but survival of what.

So now let's talk about what's really worth living for.

A sustainable, just world made up of resilent, vibrant communities.

That's not what we have now, and it's not what we're going to have in the Year 2000, no matter what happens. But in the Year 2000 a lot of what keeps us from realizing that vision is probably going to come undone. We won't have to TAKE it apart. It will just stop working. At that point we'll have a chance to turn the rudder of our civilization -- or at least TRY to do so -- so that when the motors start up again, the ship is headed in a different direction -- towards a sustainable, just world made up of resilient, vibrant communities.

I'm choosing my metaphors carefully here. This isn't something we're going to build and then have. This is a turning of the rudder, a changing of direction. What can we do so that, the further into the future our civilization goes, the more it becomes a sustainable, just world made up of resilient, vibrant communties? That's what we have a chance to influence -- in a big, ugly, one-time-only, going-out-of-business-sale way.

*****

But first off, we need to face two Y2K realities:

a) Most people are going to be trying to survive. They're not going to be trying to change the world. The world will be changing fast enough around them, thank you, without any effort on their part.
b) Total collapse will favor negative directions rather than positive ones. If things get bad enough, we're all going to end up in gangland, with local warlords doling out the goods to their loyal followers, and everyone else is food. (cf. Douglass Carmichael's scenarios.)

These two realities suggest a pretty clear strategy:

We will use community survival preparations as the carrier wave for the change in direction that we want to see.

Here are some examples of how that might play out (see also Protecting Ithaca from Computer Chaos by Paul Glover):

• When people move out of the cities -- instead of doing an individual survivalist trip -- they could move into experimental ecovillages. The more such villages there are, the richer the possibilities will be when the Y2K dust settles. (Of course, those ecovillages need to be in collaborative, mutually supporting relationships with the communities around them, or they, too, will become almost as vulnerable as lone survivalists.)
• People staying put can be shown how their survival depends on how well they know and work with their neighbors. Suddenly we may find it much easier to get people out to community events, fairs, work projects, parties, etc. We can do open space conferences and study circles on gathering rainwater, generating solar power, doing conflict resolution, decision-making, organic gardening, and bike repair. Sustainable technology marketeers and salespeople should have a field day preparing folks for off-the-grid living. (Take note, you socially-conscious investors!)
• There is LOTS to do together to help prepare a community for Y2K. Public officials need to be educated, pressured and inspired. Local businesses need to be awakened to the problem and helped towards Y2K-readiness. Agencies in charge of water, sewage, security, and other necessary services need to be pushed into wise, effective action. Emergency services need to be expanded to support much larger populations than they have envisioned in the past. Schools, churches, businesses, nonprofits and other organizations need to be engaged in a community-wide effort. Everyone has something to contribute, and everyone will be a beneficiary. (History shows that, even when communities have prepared in inappropriate ways for what eventually happens, the very act of preparing together has created a collective resilience that enables them to cope successfully with the unexpected crisis.)
• Since mass participation is a necessity in this effort -- and since American populations are ill prepared to either collaborate or to blindly follow orders -- this is a fantastic opportunity to experiment with new forms of collective decision-making, collective reflection and learning, and self-organized activity. There are hundreds of approaches to this (see my co-intelligence website for the tip of the iceberg), and all the practitioners of these leading-edge approaches can set aside their proprietary interests and dive into the fray getting the public addicted to the co-creation of their communal future.
• Local, ecological, and cooperative economic forms can be promoted because the economic infrastructure may no longer exist for the kind of massive export-import commerce and waste removal we're used to. Without that mega-economic infrastructure, we're left with neighbors working together to create what they need out of local resources -- or else stealing from each other. Community livelihood may not come from anywhere else -- for weeks or months -- or even years.
• Racial and economic justice can be advanced through the realization that unfairness and hatred can blow apart communities just when they most need mutual aid to survive, when the business-as-usual systems of support and control are removed. If the cops can't come, where will social order come from? It's you and me and our ability to hear each other and act together as peers for our mutual benefit, for real.
• Existing county and bioregional networking will need to be expanded because no community can plot its course alone through times of breakdown. Any individual, group or community that is unduly advantaged will become a target; and possessiveness about resources will undermine everyone's ability to make this work. Creative sharing and making do, by everyone, at all levels of social organization, is the only thing that will sustain social cohesion in the likely hard times ahead.
• Companies trying to prepare for the new era can invest in eco-efficiency and local operations which make them less vulnerable to infrastructure breakdowns. While planning for Year 2000 contingencies, wise companies will look beyond 2000 to 2010 and 2020, and use the demands of Y2K to become more resilient in many ways to better face all the challenges the new century. They'll find they need to collaborate much more with their suppliers, customers and even competitors, in order to make it through. In addition, community activists may find companies more responsive to community concerns, even such radical ideas as local currency and barter systems, when their survival is on the line. Programs like the Natural Step and industrial ecology could make good use of the demands of this new era.
• National governments have a chance to empower communities -- or at least to "download" federal functions, like they've been trying to do for years. (We may not like this trend, but you have to admit, it could serve democratic decentralization, if we play our cards right.) Communities should pressure national governments to early-on identify and ensure a safety net of the minimal vital infrastructure needed to supply basic food, water, heat, security, etc., to community-based populations. The Y2K-readiness of these safety-net infrastructures must take precedence over all other Y2K-readiness projects. Politicians and governments need to get this message soon. (This is to prevent the worst possible collapses.) Communities also need to speak out against undue use of police and military force as a strategy for keeping social order in high-stress times; if state power gets out of hand, we may slide into fascism, which will make it all that much harder to turn the rudder. (Some people suggest that the collapse of the infrastructure would make fascistic centralization impossible, but we shouldn't underestimate the creativity of fascists.) Of course, minimizing the need for state power requires a high level of responsibility by communities, themselves, to keep order. (Civilian-based defense is a resource for this.)
• Similar community-based preparations should be encouraged internationally from both the governmental and grassroots levels. With the potential for the spread of toxic and nuclear substances (released by Y2K-caused accidents), diseases (caused by Y2K-damaged public hygiene infrastructure), migrating populations and social unrest (caused by Y2K-stimulated deprivation), we have no choice but to work for resilient, just communities in as many places as possible. We're definitely into an era of one-worldism, like it or not. We might as well make it a desirable one world.
• At a deeply personal level, the demands of Y2K will stretch many of us to -- and beyond -- our limits. Even now, there are dramatic opportunities for personal, psychological and spiritual growth -- and for mutual support and service. We are facing a threat of death and loss unprecedented in the lives of most Americans and millions of others. Let us pray we emerge from Y2K wiser and more mature than when we went into it.
• Artists, performers, story-tellers, movie makers, documentarians, journalists and all the other media web-weavers (both mass and local) can help us cope, adapt and mature through the challenges of this era. They can provide models, ideals, insights, life-narratives and emotional perspective to deepen our experience. When they do, they will be creating a culture of sustainability, fairness, cooperation and meaning right before our eyes. I expect it will be difficult to get that new-culture genie back into the bottle, once it's out. A new culture is a new culture.

How far can we get in any of these realms? That depends to a great extent on how quickly we wake up to the unbelievable opportunity we have. Right now it is falling out of the sky into our laps. The universe is saying to us: "You want a revolution? You want transformation? You want a new world? Well, I've done your dirty work for you. It's time for you to get off your duffs and get the show on the road! YOU have to make whatever good is going to come of this. I gotta tell you: It was hard coming up with this idea, and it took a lot of effort to keep it under wraps until it was ripe. I'm not sure I can pull off another chance like this for you. So grab it while it's hot!"

Which brings us right back home to us and what we do with our lives.

The choice goes like this:

a) We can step out of our own personal business-as-usual so we can respond really creatively to this situation. OR
(b) We can wait until the situation is worse and we have less time, fewer resources, and more chaos and barely enough time and energy to keep our heads above water.

That's the carrot, and that's the stick.

My personal conclusion -- just for me, mind you (you'll have to figure out what's right for you) -- is that it is time to pour all the life energy I can muster into this one, starting yesterday. I've spent my whole life trying to change the world for the better, usually with little result. And from where I sit, it seems to me that the carrots and sticks don't get much bigger than this. Massive change is on the launching pad, and the countdown has begun. I see no better investment of me, anywhere. I realize there are no guarantees, but I'm determined to do the best I can.

How about you?