I remember the period well. The tail end of the 1990s always felt on the cusp of something. After eighteen years of Tory rule, New Labour had finally swept to power in a landslide. Blair’s grinning face, his Britpop handshake with Noel Gallagher, the gleam of Cool Britannia. It all felt like history had been paused, rebranded, and relaunched. The postwar consensus was long buried, Thatcherism unchallenged for a generation. But now, maybe, the future had arrived.
The internet still came in the form of a beige tower unit in your parents’ spare room. Connecting meant sitting through the whirrs and beeps of the 56k modem, hoping no one picked up the phone and kicked you off. You logged into Yahoo chat under a handle with too many x’s and numbers, typed in lower-case slang, and signed off with brb mum needs the phone. Broadband didn’t exist. Text messages were ten pence each. You passed round CD-Rs labelled in biro, graduated from Discman to Minidisc, and watched Top of the Pops religiously on Thursday nights. Event television was exactly that: Big Brother, Queer as Folk, Cold Feet, Band of Brothers. And if it wasn’t event TV, it was the DVD boxset, the original binge-watch, spread across five, six, sometimes ten discs. Series one of The Sopranos, 24, Six Feet Under, The West Wing—entire weekends vanished in the glow of cathode ray. Y2K briefings at work warned of embedded chips in aircraft and power stations. We laughed, mostly, but some of us kept cash under the mattress, just in case.
Colette Shade’s Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything is written from across the Atlantic, but it’s about that same long turn of the millennium. When neoliberal capitalism had entered its messianic phase, the Cold War was supposedly over, and the future looked like a translucent iMac. Shade calls this the “Y2K Era”—roughly 1997 to 2008—a time bracketed by the dot-com bubble and the crash, when politics became vibes and the market dressed itself in chrome.
The book is a cultural memoir, but also a study in ideology. Shade narrates her childhood through the things she coveted: an inflatable silver chair from Target, Pokémon cards, Astro Lounge on repeat. “This,” she writes, “was the future.” But her recollections are never innocent. She understands what was being sold: capitalism’s soft power, dressed in body glitter and bubble fonts, promising the end of struggle, the death of politics, and the arrival of a frictionless utopia.
We had our own version. In Britain, it was the Millennium Dome, the ‘New Economy’, the fetish for start-ups, rebranded creative industries, and the Blairite Third Way. The optimism was saturated with marketing: Labour claimed it was forward-looking, young, inclusive. But it governed like the City of London in human form. Dissent was rebranded as bad PR. Globalisation wasn’t to be questioned, just managed.
One of Shade’s sharpest insights is the way pop culture helped launder this new order. In a chapter on shopping malls and anti-sweatshop protests, she recalls believing a Gap hoodie connected her to a benevolent ‘global village’. In reality, that village was held together by bonded labour and collapsed unions. Her uncle, a former hippie turned early investor, made millions in the dot-com boom. She thought everyone would. “The grown-ups were right,” she writes. “The new millennium really would change everything.”
That fantasy unravels fast. Aaliyah dies in a plane crash. Days later, the Twin Towers fall. “The future had died, too.” MTV scrubs its playlists, pop becomes patriotic, irony is declared over. Limp Bizkit’s video, filmed on the roof of the WTC, vanishes from the airwaves. Cosmopolitanism is replaced by chauvinism. In Britain, Blair becomes Bush’s emissary in Europe, championing ASBOs, detention without trial, and ID cards. Dissent is policed; the Iraq War is pushed through Parliament with lies. The optimism of the late ’90s curdles into surveillance, control, and shock therapy.
The book’s final third brings us to the crash. By 2008, Shade is broke, directionless, living with her parents. The Stanford dreams she’d written into her Year 6 time capsule are gone. “The future looks hard instead of soft, sharp instead of round, solid instead of translucent.” The promises of stock options, girl power and soft-edged tech end in foreclosure and precarious work. The party’s over. No one cleaned up.
Shade’s writing is strongest here: not in the lists of cultural artefacts, too often a BuzzFeed rhythm creeps in. But in the expression of disappointment. She captures the ache of downward mobility, the loss of future tense. “Try as I might to shape my life in a particular way,” she writes, “it has never been mine to shape.” It’s a line that hits harder than any nostalgia for butterfly clips or TRL reruns.
And yet the politics remains diffuse. Capitalism appears more as atmosphere than system, something you swim in rather than fight against. Class is mostly absent. Resistance is vague. The book ends with Shade scrolling old Y2K fashion spreads, buying glitter lip gloss on eBay, and looping Smash Mouth tracks on Spotify. “It makes me want to reach for a tube of body glitter,” she writes, “because the future hadn’t happened yet.”
The culture didn’t lie to us, exactly. It just sold us a version of the future it had no intention of building. Y2K is a eulogy for that future, and for the people who were meant to live in it. In that sense, it’s a vital document of generational betrayal. But its final gesture. Backwards, not forwards. Feels telling. The future broke, and we went back to where it shimmered.
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