We are the Class of 2000

We were told we were special. Librarians, teachers, school administrators who organize time capsule burials in the front lawns of elementary schools, our parents, MTV and Nickelodeon, children’s book publishers—pretty much anyone with a meaningful connection to children born between November 1981 and October 1982—declared that we would define the lens through which future generations would analyze the past. Significant because our high school graduation would be the first in the new millennium, our class was the vanguard of the greatest generation since the Greatest Generation. We were the Class of 2000.

Yet, responsibilities in the distant future meant nothing to first graders. I was more interested in why my classmate kept getting his head stuck in his desk. These were simpler times: phys ed consisted of a gym teacher in a neon tracksuit blasting “Jump” by Van Halen while students ran circles around a basketball court. The long-term ramifications of my decisions were unimaginable. I couldn’t even fathom the consequences of tossing myself from the top of a car tire pyramid onto a thin layer of garden pebbles on the playground floor (it hurt). Still, the weighty symbolism of the year 2000 etched into my mind. I learned what lay ahead through a steady diet of 80s movies on basic cable: a steadfast cyborg sent to the present on an assassination assignment to prevent the future (The Terminator), the potential for time travel to lead to inappropriate relations with your hot mom (Back to the Future), and the opportunistic cloning of hot women (Weird Science). In retrospect, such burning wants of the future were clearly desires forged in a past Boomers wouldn’t let go, so our generation were to see this media as cautionary tales, wisdom to avoid the pitfalls of technology as we propelled into a new world.

No longer a swarm of snot-nosed kids tempting serious injury on dangerous playground equipment, the Class of 2000 was a vessel for America’s desires. At each academic milestone, we were reminded that children are the future, that we are the last great hope of the old millennium, the first great hope of the new one, the liminal group that encompassed the gap between the Class of 1999 (Generation X) and the Class of 2001 (Millennials). The times they were a-becoming quite different. The Simpsons ruled prime time. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles opened our eyes to art history. MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice brought Rap to suburban talent shows. Basking in the LED glow of the car audio room at Nobody Beats the Wiz, we dreamed of Chrysler wood-paneled minivans with TVs in the back seats. CD players replaced dual cassette decks and discmen rendered Walkmen relics. We went full analog to digital, from information imprinted on easily tangled ribbons of tape to information etched by lasers onto durable, reflective round discs. Life was good. We were the Class of 2000.

Nothing shouted the future like computers. Constrained by black screens and fluorescent green text-based interfaces, the machines of the 80s were ancient, sufficing only for learning computer basics in lab class; writing papers that needed to be saved on a floppy disc, or printed, for posterity; and playing Oregon Trail, an educational game that enlightened modern children to the dangers of dysentery. Color computers arrived on the scene and changed everything. Windows and Mac OS made the digital environment wanderable, accessible, and enticing—desktop operating systems became graphical worlds with icons and images. Meanwhile, the internet arrived quietly. Before websites, there was nothing online except stock updates, banking, or educational games. I would sign in with my great uncle’s unwieldy Prodigy username—BKHX67A—be confused by the gnarly sounds, be impressed by the fact I was connected to a contraption that funneled information through a phone line, and sign out. Although the internet looked like MS-DOS, I had an inkling of the possibilities. Information from anywhere in the world was accessible at home, in an instant, and available to store for posterity—again, on a plastic disc, but smaller. A revolution was brewing. The World Wide Web formed a space ripe for conquest. Distances collapsed. The world of ideas diminished through access to information. If I craved information, I no longer needed to master the Dewey decimal system and sift through hundreds of index cards in the library card catalog: I typed into Metacrawler and things appeared, things the library would never hold in its vaults. Porn in plastic bags hidden in the woods was now obsolete. The transition from analog to digital was almost complete. The Dot-com bubble kept expanding, and we were prepared for the burst. We were the Class of 2000.

Surprisingly, what had changed our lives for the better presented an unexpected, looming apocalypse: the Y2K bug. The Class of 2000 had been saviors. Now, the year 2000 was a harbinger of societal failures resulting from vanity and arrogance—why had we moved so fast? Our punishment was almost biblical. Once internal digital clocks hit 00—something impossible with analog—computers wouldn’t know whether the date was 2000 or 1900. Markets would crash. Airports would lose contact with planes. Hard drives would burst into flames. Few had planned for Y2K, and those who had were ignored because the year 2000 was an abstraction, so far off. As 2000 inched nearer, Y2K panic simmered. We held our collective breath preparing for the New Year’s Ball to drop. The Class of 2000 was no longer the future; it symbolized misfortune, a reset—the nil year, emptiness, a gap. Ultimately, the mirrored ball dropped without incident. 2000 ended up being just a number. The symbol of 2000 emptied and refilled instantaneously. Instead of representing the future—or nothing—the Class of 2000 represented something even worse: the past. And there was nothing we could do about it, even if we are the Class of 2000.

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