Year 2000: who will do what and when will they do it? Towards actions.

(modified July 23, 1998) copywrite 1998

Douglass Carmichael doug@dougcarmichael.com     and   http://dougcarmichael.com

The curve of intense conversations about the Computational failures for 2000 is rising rapidly. As implications are becoming vivid some people are starting -- slowly a first, so as not to appear foolish or alarming, to take actions -- some organizational, and some personal.

Its amazing how many people respond that they will go to work on January 1^st and fix the problem, imagining that the building is open, that the power works, that the offices are warm, and Starbucks is still selling coffee, and they will settle down to fixing the problems that emerged over Friday night/Saturday morning. Pushed to the next level, people imagine that they will just stay home for a few weeks, watch television, talk on the phone, play on the Internet, while the systems folks get it all back together in the depth of the winter of 2000. Or they imagine driving out to their friends farm to avoid the mess, without realizing they will have to get past all the other cars that clog the roads and have been abandoned for lack of fuel, and whose owners wait in the road for the next hapless innocent.

Further, people imagine that the world will return to the way it was, like the great North East power outage of a decade or so ago. The French writer, Camus, said in the mid '40s, "It is unbearable to imagine what we will go through."

The problem is not simple. Since at least the early 1800’s the culture had standardized on the two digit year.

‘Twas the eighteenth of April in ’75
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year…

So Longfellow. Or we have examples like the goldrush of ’49. Programmers merely continued under conditions of business created by their employers that for the time being 67,68,69...97,98,99 was a sequence easy for computational devices to handle. Turns out that when that sequence goes 97,98,99,00, as was bound to happen when the time being ran into time future, weird things will, in many cases, happen. Mixing the abstraction of numbers in a piece of computer program with real biological lived time turns out to be messy at the places where the symbols are not precise or complete. Calling it a "bug" hides the full range of social responsibility for mishandling core technologies. As intellectual capital, we failed to comprehend. Most people hope to get back to "zero", making y2k a non-event. But since that is impossible a deeper look at causes and reactions is essential if we are to get the leverage to create a better outcome.

And we seem mostly oblivious that this is the post Einstein, Picasso, Marx, Freud, Stravinsky, Eliot, Yeats world. To say nothing of Blake, Beethoven, Goya, or the surrealists..stuff of already a century or two ago. We have not assimilated our art to help us understand the awkwardness of blending technology and human desires, so necessary for understanding the meaning of y2k.

We are entering into the next major phase, after denial, of the buildup, where cross currents of proposed solutions and blame knock against each other like the waves stirred up by throwing a handful of pebbles into the same quiet pond. We will probably be entering what might be called "the time of confusion." And exhaustion. Some see in the emerging chaos the potential beauty of self organizing systems. But I sense they fail to assess either the huge number of failures in the implied blind evolution, not distinguishing between cancer and health, both self organizing, nor  that the hierarchical organizations they disdain are also self organizing systems, else they could not exist.

I personally became involved with the year 2000 issues in May of 1997. I met with the CIO of one of the northeastern states on another project. He told a few of us at drinks before a dinner that the y2k effort would take six years of the state’s IT budget, and would still not solve the problem in time. I didn't know what that could mean and had him explain it to me. I could feel the depth of his anxiety. In the next few months I met with several clients (fortune 100's) at a level where I could get meaningful analyses of their y2k approach and potential for success. The facts were not pretty. Recent attempts to solve the y2k problem had in recent months failed. One of these was the use of a software "package" to handle all the issues. In several major cases, that software was being rejected by divisions within some major companies, because it required centralization and integration. Another was a decision to move from mainframes to LAN based workstations, and then the realization it would take too much time and training to convert and still maintain operational continuity.

During this time, I was part of conversations in a futurist oriented consulting company’s Internet conversation space. There was a noticeable lack of response to what looked like an issue many of the participants would be expected to have intimate opinions about. That redoubled my need to find out what was in fact happening. I woke up early one morning in early November, 1997, angry at the emerging picture, and, to clarify my own thinking, wrote the first version of this chapter and put it on my website.

I was more struck by the psychology of the various reactions to y2k talk than by the technology failures. As you will recall, in the early days of awareness people in business, government and the press were mostly saying "Its just hype by the consultants", followed by "If it is a problem, with the amount of money to be made, they will fix it." The extreme conventionality of those opinions was enough to convince me there was a very powerful undercurrent of socialization going on, probably fueled by anxiety.

A small group of us gathered Dec 31^st, through Jan 1^st to look at a set of scenarios a friend, David Isenberg, had put together earlier in the year based on our on-line discussion. That meeting only deepened the sense I had that we were dealing with a major technical problem and a major psychological experiment in social consciousness. One political person present said, face red with rage, "If this becomes a big problem, it is all the fault of the press. Its just a question of perceptions, of perceptions!!"

I was living  life in parallel parts. One was my normal activities, lived in a twenty year time frame of assumed continuities, the second was in my explorations about what was really going to happen. I certainly could not integrate the two into a pragmatic series of life decisions.

Through discussions with Stuart Umpleby and the Institute for Social and Organizational Learning at George Washington University, I got invited to give a talk at Fannie Mae to the Washington y2k community. I knew that, while my understanding was piecemeal and intellectual, this group of about 200 would give me a sense of their assessment of the problem, and this would be news to me, whatever it would be. What I felt from this group - there was an hour long reception before the talks which is brilliant way to get people talking - was resignation and fear in individual conversations - which were amazingly candid - and the paralysis in the larger group. I came away no longer living life on two parallel tracks, but convinced that the problem was real, and that even solving it would alter the nature of society, to say nothing of what would happen if we didn't solve it. I also was highly aware that we did not possess good facts, and that those who knew about the problems lived in a different world from those who did not.

The night after the talk I wrote the following.

I'd say the most common view was that they, as individual organizations, are in great difficulty and are not going to get the problems fixed, and in some cases had abandoned the effort. Amongst issues like the "dirty" code (based on years of rewrites and patches) and buildings run by chip "enhanced" equipment from vendors that are out of business, the length of the testing periods, the cost, the need for man years of time, while people are leaving the organizations (programmers are following markets) it looks like there is no way.

It was also striking that while people saw the damage and inability to function in their own organizations, they have a hard time summing together what they know into any image of what happens at the personal, societal or community level. I thought some about that, the role of fear, and dependency on their organization, and after some talk with friends we decided that the money motive is not sufficient to get smart about Y2k. If it were their life, they'd be smarter about it. The money is too tied to the game and the role.

The serious purpose of the evening, to think about contingency plans, showed that what organizations have meant by "contingency" ( like having backups) is totally inadequate to y2k. Here was a group that knew that their office buildings, for example, were unexamined and vulnerable, but did not take the leap to "contingency plans' that involved failures in the surrounding institutions and communities, like imagining a newspaper’s advertising revenue in Christmas of 1999 to be like 1997 and maybe 1998.

There were enough horror stories to shake me up a bit. But all adding to the general view that the fear down in the trenches is worse than the that felt by the managers at the top, though the number of organizations whose top leadership is involved is certainly increasing. Handling the social and psychological side of all this, even to having honest internal discussions, was beyond their felt sphere of competency for most. But recognized as very important. It also goes to the major problem of retention of programmers because there was also good evidence about the increasing rate with which programming people are leaving these organizations.

The evidence was clear that most of these serious people see interconnected failures as a fact, and scenario logic requires that we stay in the realm where we do not know for sure. So it is probably time to move away from the possibility of merely isolated failures into the possible scenarios that emerge when failures are interconnected across organizations and political units, such as countries.

These notes were written before it became clear to many of us that people do not know how to do testing, there is no simple protocol, and it requires parallel environments that usually do not exist. We also were not aware of the depth of the interconnection problem and that fixed systems, when cross connected, were hardly guaranteed to be problem free. Nor had we seen the problem of the "committed" CEO’s saying to their IT director, "Tom, your going to fix this thing, Right! I’m committed". That just leaves people more scared and confused, and less willing to talk, and the quality of internal conversation goes down, not up.

I then went to London for a week to poke around organizations there and attended a two day workshop sponsored by GBN London. While I was in London I happened to be at a large meeting of one of England’s premier technology integration companies, and that night in the hotel I stepped to the crowded bar to order a malt and found I was standing next to some of the top managers as they were having a talk and winding down from their day. They were discussing y2k and I waited for my drink and took in the conversation. "Thank god we’ll be retired and off playing golf by then!"

Since I became involved in June of 1997 down to the current writing (June 29, 1998), we see an increasing number of people joining the conversation. At the same time we see that the mix of opinions has changed very little, and hard fact is as difficult to come by as it was a year ago, with a very few exceptions. In a way, each day is more of the same, only more so. In some ways it's not very satisfying. Our way of understanding what will happen turns out to be like reading mystery stories; one piece at a time, inferential from stories told, or the ones you don't hear.

Before getting to the core of the paper, one more preliminary remark. The conversation about y2k is unsatisfactory, but that is a clue to soem key aspects of the problem. Most conversation is in the broad band of emotional opinion, where those in the conversation seem to be unmotivated to go below that level to more solid fact, or above that level to more solid theorizing about social structure, complexity theory, emergent phenomena, population dynamics, or historical comparisons.

Slide 1: broad band of y2k conversation doesn’t touch fact or theory

The simplest explanation is that y2k touches people where they have preformed stories, either about the marvels of free market and technical progress, or about community, national and personal disappointments about the current momentum of events. Y2k ratifies existing thinking or suspicions. People are drawn to those with similar stories to tell. At the same time, facts turn out to be scarce, because, despite that we are talking about technology, the facts are much messier than anticipated by most of us. Second, we are not taught comparative history, nor systems theory, and sociological and anthropological theory are for the most part weak or unknown to the normal news savvy public. Not much fact or theory, mostly elaborating opinion.

I've learned, through many seminars and workshops, that a look at the buildup from now to 2000, and a focus on post y2k scenarios, helps people get grounded and see continuity through 2000, rather than seeing it as hitting a wall or going off of a cliff. It helps them see why what they do now can make a difference for what kind of situation we can help create – or avoid – after 2000. Whatever the actual path y2k takes, everyone and all organizations will be very active trying to make the best of a messy situation. Some will be self-serving, some will be socially constructive. Little actions now can have a big impact later. Stressing continuity rather than a single spike event helps people imagine a personal, institutional and social path through the events crowded around the start of 2000.

Slide 2: Continuity through 2000 and beyond…

Slide 3: The conventional view of y2k

Where nothing happens till the phone is dead, or the traffic lights aren't working, and then all hell breaks loose for 48 hours. No way. At the simplest, midnight happens in other places first, and we might have news reports by mid morning on the 31st. But of course the problem is not just what happens on January 1^st 2000. What will people do in anticipation, as their understanding increases? And when will they start doing it? There are signs people are already on the move. North or south, buying stand-alone electric generators, holding gold or cash, thinking about food, water, health, guns. Will we get inflation or deflation? How scary, how long will it last? But above all, when will the reaction begin in perceptible doses, and how will the press react? Will they blame and amplify tensions or help the conversation and learning? These questions are increasingly on the minds of many people.

One interesting perspective is to think of the number of people who should have been involved to get y2k basically fixed, and those who actually have been and will be. (the smoothness of the next curve is "ideal", in fact media events and things like the satellite outage create upward step shifts in the curves of awareness and participation.)

Slide 4: who has been, and will be, involved?

Its important to see that there is a buildup towards 2000, and lots of continuous activity afterwards. A problem that did not get fixed in the previous two years will not be fixed in a week afterwards. The focus of this paper is on the nature of the buildup, the way it is affected by perceptions of what might happen at the technical systems level, perceptions of other peoples' perceptions, and then on what the post y2k world might look like, good bad and ugly.

Those in the best situation position to know, watching the silt build up, mostly in the core of powerful organizations, are highly motivated to keep quiet. First, to avoid being an internal scapegoat, and second, to avoid flagging to the outside world that their organization is one of those in trouble. The result is, we are not getting the feedback we need. Organization lawyers are now actively recommending this path, or even ordering it. A recent NY meeting of y2k lawyers stressed protecting the client. No one raised the issue that, with organizations taking this path, society does not get the information to make decisions. A major newspaper cannot get its local electric company to tell them frankly what is likely.

I have been in meetings where the challenge goes out - "who is compliant with robustness for 2000?", and no one responds. The lawyers have said, make no claims, give no details, certainly you break contracts if you say you can't make it. Technical people are being told by the boss, "Do what is necessary to fix it, I am committed." but that's hard on someone who feels that their analysis is that it can't be fixed, and they have no one to talk to. The "smart" ones are going to move quietly, to protect their personal and organizational strategies, we are kept from meaningful feedback.

Those who want to hush the problem ("Don't talk about it, people will panic", and "We don't know for sure." ) are having three effects. First, they are preventing a more rigorous investigation of the extent of the problem. Second, they are slowing down the awareness of the intensity of the problem as currently understood and the urgency of the need for solutions, given our current assessment of the risks. Third, they are making almost certain a higher degree of ultimate panic, in anger, under conditions of shock.

It's my judgement that the earlier we flesh out the possibilities, the quicker we mobilize efforts to solve the problem, and, at the same time design contingency plans and alternative solutions. As I will say in a few minutes, that picture is not likely to get much better. Finding ways to help people into the conversation is important. For those who are sure we have a problem a word of caution: stick with the fact that we do not know, that there will be surprises, that human initiatives can have amazing effects - good and bad. In our not knowing for sure, we can still lay out a complex vision of the range of possibilities consistent with our facts and suppositions. If we do this, people will listen. If we take a stand ahead of the facts we stir resistance. John Koskinen, Clinton’s able y2k federal coordinator, has been quoted as saying "We need to find the fine line between informing and panic."

The buildup towards 2000 is influenced by our guesses about what will happen. It's interesting to see how people seem to know, like a hunch at a horse race, which way it will go. The most salient fact is, we do not know and all that we do think we know could be washed out by other aspects of the problem, aspects we have not paid any attention to. For example, will the US stock market go up, or down? Business failures and bank closings, electrical utilities not working, suggest down, but to the extent that the US banks are seen as more compliant that European ones, cash will flow into US banks and the stock market, as place holders for wealth. the market could go to 20,000. Not only that but the market could come way down, not by lowering its dollar value at the current near 10,000, but through very rapid inflation so that the Dow remains at 10,000 while the rest of the world goes up. You've still got your dollar value, but the value is much less. Surprises. And don't beat yourself up for not getting it right. Its too non-linear. The secondary effects will be larger than the primary.

The main thrust of this article is to convince you that the financial game is not the only game in town, that community and society are also at risk, and the opportunities are not just business opportunities, but societal. The normal consciousness of today is indeed almost exclusively finance and business, and to the extent that breaks down, shifts to personal and familial survival. It's considered wisdom to say "Y2k is not a technical problem, it’s a business survival issue" ( again, the conventionality of this language, so frequently heard, is a symptom of a complex social process). Actually it is a technical issue, it is a business survival issue, and it is a community survival issue. Politics is asleep, communities have disappeared and replaced by cable TV, work stress, Internet nightly vacations, and safe sex that does not require actually looking for a relationship.

So let’s look at the "buildup.". Imagine the following speculative curve

 Slide 5: schematic buildup prior to 2000

I will not repeat the curves for all the disaggregated events, but note that there is a similar curve of intensity of activity in a number of domains, and its an open question how intense the activity will be, but we can easily assume (interesting to speculate on what could prevent this development) it will continue upwards much higher (than June 1998).

Political: Clinton gives state of the union Addresses in January of 99 and January 2000. But there is the congressional elections (and many state and local) in November of 98. Forbes is already running on a y2k agenda, and Gingrich has made strong statements. Gore’s fate might hang on how he handles y2k. (Note how you probably accepted 98 and 99 as legitimate.). The first primary is in January of 2000. I believe that sometime probably late 1998 here will be a move by the G8 and a number of multinational corporations to try to "manage" the y2k response. So far so good, but when it gets tied to emergency measures, and threatens non-included corporations, and might be tied to freezing markets and price/wage controls, drafting of programmers, flat tax that is seen by some as unfair, the whole political mix could turn into a giant gridlock, which in turn will stir more political activity. We have just seen a number of state legislatures already vote to protect themselves, and at the same time, the failure in California of a bill to protect corporations. There will be further "amnesty" legislation around legal damages, but they will raise such deep constitutional issues that we can expect no action. I have been thinking through seriously the possibility that people and businesses will push for the nationalizing the electrical utilities, because that may be the only way to get accurate information on progress towards compliance. The range is great, and we can expect surprises.

Economic: Movement of the stock market. Most people expect a break downwards. The economy is not in such good shape anyway, independent of y2k. There are areas of worldwide over-production, cars being one, and the Asian crisis still has a long ways to reach before the effects are known. But the market might stay up, either because of Asian and European money entering, or because of rapid inflation where a steady market means an actual decline in real value. We might also see increased market turbulence with no emerging trend. There is likely to be a feeding frenzy around assets of failing or perceived-to-be failing companies. Some will actually announce that they have not and will not make the investment. The values of perceived-to-be-compliant companies, often aided by nearly mythic statements like "the big companies are way ahead", implying that all little or mid sized ones are not, will affect share prices unfairly.

Will business itself decline? Not completely, for sure, some business will do very well till 2000. One prediction is that we can, independent of specific y2k effects, expect an increase in market because of hoarding and replacement, of about 2%, with a corresponding post y2k time limited crash of perhaps 5% based on inventory reduction. The interesting part is what happens post y2k? More in a few minutes.

Media: A rapid rising curve of media attention will keep rising, though it may peak in about early 1999. While it rises scapegoats will be necessary to keep the focus off of markets and managerial decisions. But the press will need to deal with the question, how did we get into this mess? Blaming programmers and IT managers is likely to be one major route. World wide, criticism of the US may grow intense. What will be the counter reaction? We will watch the sequence of cover stories, there will be a major movie release in fall on 1998, programs like Meet the Press, and Sixty Minutes will explore tbe issues confrontationally.

Societal: Churches, universities, non-profits, National League of Cities, trade associations, can each be expected to come into the conversation vigorously. We are beginning to see special panels or presentations at already scheduled national meetings. This will increase the demands to "do something". What we will notice is that there will be many voices, but very few that even attempt to speak for society as a whole (or even community in the holistic sense). We have lost much of our social capital around these concepts.

Security: Security efforts will tend to highlight the degree to which we are a stratified society. Threat to property will get confused with shifting values because of market reevaluations. But as the situation begins to look worse, the debate around the deployment of the national Guard, reserves and regular military will get intense. The joker is, many of those people may have other things to do and not show up, and the communications infrastructure of those groups is threatened. But units will be hard to focus against those they identify with.We can expect an effort to mobilize to guard major corporate and governmental assets, and middle class communities. We can also expect geographically coherent communities, mostly towns, to mobilize local walkie-talkie based security in the event of difficulties from outside.

Community: We can expect intense analysis of town/city vulnerability to outages or shortfalls of power, water, heat, food, health and transportation. This could lead to rethinking local dependence and a rethinking of how communities might be somewhat more self reliant, with local production. During the pre 2000 year period we can expect many community meetings, sorting out power and politics, finance and people. This will absorb a tremendous amount of time and effort, and could possibly be deeply fruitful for rediscovering community.

Personal: Once most of us get past the "I’ll go south" (or the family will) by realizing that everyone else will have the same thought, we start turning to others for advice and solutions. Jefferson’s "Pursuit of Happiness" referred to "happenings", and the range of roles an adult got to play in society; the more roles the "happier". In recent years roles have collapsed into work and family. The individual impoverishment for most of us has been noticeable, regretted, and paralyzing. New levels of community activity will lead to individuals doing their personal thinking, and looking for ways to participate. The implications are profound, and are already to be seen.

Its clear that all these buildups towards 2000 are influenced by imagined outcomes at 2000.

There seem to be two main directions for the path through 2000. That we spend the money and get it fixed, or that we spend the money and don’t. I’ve argued later here that in both cases our investment strategy should have the same underlying structure, just more intense as we see that we may get major systems failures.

First is the Long Boom scenario, stated boldly by Peter Schwartz in Wired magazine. The basic idea: this free market economy can grow at 6% for 25 years. While the Asian crisis came only a few weeks after the scenario was published, its underlying logic, with some fixes, is still not totally implausible. Its momentum, already under way for the last ten years, implies, for y2k, that we have a large problem that is solved with lots of cash. This means worldwide maybe one trillion spent between now, and say September 1999. This alone, as we already see being developed, is requiring a major effort and enabling legislation. It is requiring a worldwide mobilization of people like a community effort to pile cement bags to hold back the flood, but with the technical and managerial complexity of a dozen (actually, many more) Manhattan Projects. There are emerging more and more serious, hectic, hysterical and face saving efforts. We can expect all these to increase, with still unpredictable results, including that it works. Don't underestimate human ingenuity.

If we add the time spent in things like reading this article, conversations over lunch, anxious meetings among top managers, then the real cost of merely fixing the problems will be three times the one trillion. It is taking up the social channels as well as paid work time. Think of the cost of canceling celebration projects for 2000, planned and still planning, with exuberance in mind.

But it is not all just lost cost: it's also stimulating a shifting economy that has value of its own. It certainly contributes to productivity and GNP, at the same time it takes money away from where it would have been spent. A true estimate requires putting the two patterns of spending into a comparative analysis.

But most importantly y2k may be a trigger to rethinking the proper use of technology for the quality of life and community, and simultaneously releasing tremendous world wide economic activity to actually get there. What y2k does to the original Long Boom scenario is add the community and quality of life correction that was absent in that "more for us and let them eat trickle down" approach in the exuberant "Silicon valley for the world" model.

The second scenario, if the fixing doesn't work, is a major collapse of key infrastructure: financials, telecom, transportation, utilities, food, water, health. During World War II all the major infrastructure in every European country remained intact. Even with the collapse of the Soviet Union the major infrastructure of food, water, power, and transportation continued. We can also expect threats to cash, the paper value of wealth, and markets. The psychological and social consequences require some major acts of imagination to begin to get the picture of the consequences. Goya's sketches of the civil war in Spain ...

The year 2000 problem also resonates with weak markets, over-production, increasing disparities of have/have-nots, and the increasing dependency on technology everywhere. This has the makings of a very dangerous situation, leading to increasing chaos and anxiety. There are potentially three emerging responses from the social side. And it is the social side that shows a weakness in our social imagination. We seem to be able to talk about the threat to financial institutions and businesses, but we seem to lack a sympathetic imagination when it comes to people, communities, children, sick, poor or suburban; all threatened to the core of their being. Our over-reliance on the technology has made us blind to people.

Of the three potential directions, two are quite negative: under the threat that rapid deprivation of scarce reserves, as people are scared, angry, and hungry and cold, lead us to either centralized techno-fascism, or local Mafia-like tough guy control.

Is normal government out of the picture? Can large government cohere? Can the multinationals organize an alternative? Unclear, but since they are generally part of one side of the equation: ownership of large assets, their attempted solutions may lead to increased rather than decreased tensions. Those with power will attempt to preserve that power and let those without fail. But the basic distribution of goods - the simple things, like water and food and energy (heat and light and cars) are likely to fall out of their control. The breakup of the Soviet Union is a good model to learn from, where, with a break in the official system, the black market emerged as the new legitimate form of market and governance.

A third more positive possibility is that we get a new form of governance through an improvised Internet that supports a democratic and more community based society, making good use of distributed light technologies, such as the Internet at the core, with cellular phones, solar energy, and new forms of locally producing biotechnology for food and fuel. This will require lots of effort and clarity of purpose. A solution that helps distribute goods and maintains an ethical social platform that is democratic and compassionate, is going to be hard to achieve. So you can see why I think it is so important to focus on a coherent community- based response that offers something to people, not just to business systems.

One of the most helpful images and supporting analyses to help people see the context of what might happen, are the four scenarios derived from looking at the two major unknowns: will failures be significantly interdependent and would society hold together?

The resulting four scenarios are.

Slide 6: the y2k scenarios

Each of the four can be characterized in a sentence. The Official Future is what our organizations and leadership are mostly saying: a few failures, no social impact or reaction, keep to your oars. Smoke in the Theater is the media-induced panic to a few important but not interlinked failures. The reaction causes more and more problems to emerge as people abandon their positions.

The Millennial Collapse is terrible, and in a just-in-time no storage world where half the world’s population of six billion are in cities, over-crowded, dependent on transportation and communications and the good will of those in the supporting infrastructure, a real catastrophe is possible. And perhaps we can let ourselves be motivated by an awareness of the dark side. We could not rule out that  social collapse would turn us into a Rwanda, a Bosnia, in a world-wide spasm of social reaction in grasping for power and control. In such a world a loss of half the population is not out of the question. It's sufficient motive to mobilize us towards the prevailing of the Human Spirit and the Spirit of Community.(and many of us suggest that we need to be working in that direction anyway).

From a goals and values point of view we want to look mostly at the bottom right, where human spirit and community prevail. . So social survival it is. Now we start to get smart. (Interesting that threat to life does motivate us more than threat to wealth, although maybe those with wealth will defend it at least as vigorously as those without defend life.I have watched business groups alk in a dull way about "threat to business survival", but when they see that some life is at risk, there is a deeper awakening.)

Based on current realities, I think we can exclude the isolated failures scenarios except as teaching aids to help bring people into the conversation who are new to it. Of course, if the wind shifts, we may need to bring them back, but as of now, I think we deal with the bottom half. Where we accept interconnected failures as given, and look at the remaining scenarios.

Taking a broader view leads to rethinking investment. Some of what is being spent now towards fixing the problems ought to be targeted towards having in place what we will need on January 1^st to be able to repair what didn’t work. The next slide shows stripping off some of what is currently budgeted for fixing and putting it towards having the right resources and people in place on Jan 1, as difficulties emerge in those first hours or days. The community human spirit scenario remains as the only viable one from teh point of view of strategy.

 Slide 7: Invest some now for 2000 breakdown resources

Another effect of y2k, both in the buildup phase and in the selection process going through 2000, will be the enhanced attractiveness of some technologies and the lowering of attractiveness of others. Y2k will nudge us towards lighter, swifter, more distributed technologies, such as cellular, fuel cells, and biotech for local crop production: things that are available now but need more investment and or more market robustness. Y2k may have that effect. The result is that we come out of y2k different than we go in, despite the usual language of fix it and "recovery" period, both of which imply returning to the baseline of continuity with the past trends, even to the point that it would look like y2k never happened. After the current spending of the money, even if it all gets fixed, we will not be the same.

The shifting mix of technologies, and bearing in mind the how our choices can support the human spirit community-based scenario, we get an investment strategy starting now that has momentum towards community out beyond 2000. (We need to be aware that some percentage of the population will support centralizing technologies as the answer to the problem – about which more in a bit).

Slide 8: y2k selects for technologies

We should think of that as an investment strategy, going from now towards the future.

I have been involved with another project looking at health for 2020. That got me thinking about all the issues we face in 2020. Take three.

1. By 2020 we need to triage energy systems as alternatives come on line and oil , either because of price, or more likely, because it's un-attractive in comparison to alternatives, is no longer the main source of energy.

2. By 2020 world wages will have evened out quite a bit, and production at a distance ceases to be so profitable. Then local production emerges quickly as the preferred solution. This means that each geographical area becomes the preferred place to produce. That means community, can be organized for work, education, and (hopefully smarter) consumption, in a much tighter cycle than we have had for a good part of this century, maybe even including much of the 19th. Citizen comes back into the identity of normal people who have a reason to participate because the town is becoming a coherent entity.

3. Bio/nano technology release us from the need to import raw materials for manufacturing and agriculture. Local communities, even small sized ones, can be producers of food and manufactured micro tools that serve much of the material needs of the community.

So, why not let these major issues for the years 2010-2020 affect investment strategy now, so that we get a coherent line from 1998, through 2000, and out to 2020? The emerging picture is

 Slide 9: 2020 issues lead the investment "pull"

If we add to the pull through investment picture some other interesting potentials

1. Paul Ray argues that 45 million Americans, whom he calls the Cultural Creatives (the other two groups being the Traditionals and the Moderns) are ready for more quality of life: relationships, leisure, environment, and they would chose less work to get it if they could. These people seem ready to grasp the emerging y2k investment strategy without needing to "develop" new attitudes: they are ready. They just need to see the logic.

2. Governance. it's fairly clear that some federal and state and local agencies and functions will be hard hit. Congress, and other legislative bodies in the states, are likely to take the opportunity, in the triage language of today, to cease to fund many of those functions. We then have the possibility of a revitalized, publicly accountable by geographical location, cost-effective investment, for a new governance to support the y2k environment.

Putting these all together we get

Slide 10: Majority politics for a y2k strategy

We now have replaced a bump and cash drain with a coherent strategy that links current actions through 2000 towards a future that can integrate not only technology choice, new governance, community focus and those who desire a better coherence to the human side of cultural choices, but also environmental reason, manufacturing for zero emissions, saner transportation policy for ground and air, into a single, coherent, fairly loose coalition of interests, interests that are not deeply antagonistic to each other.

To take the analysis a bit deeper, let’s look at the expected events between now and 2000.

it's my judgement (could well be wrong) that there will be an attempt to control the process by some combination of governments and multinational corporations. That effort will probably fail, given that it requires the most complex infrastructures of communication, and because it's likely to stir a vigorous, even violent, reaction. That would then lead to a shift towards communities.

Slide 11: expected events

I also believe (doesn’t mean I am right) that central planning, FEMA, military, rationing, price fixing, will not work. They are too dependent on the very tech that is most likely to fail. That means that both the techno-fascism and the government continues to its job scenarios may no longer be plausible (there will be major political fights about this). I am not sure if the centralized attempt fails in 1999 or at the pass through point. I am inclined to think that the struggle will begin earlier, rather than later.

That moves the scenarios to the two critical uncertainties: Democratic or Mafia local community control, and social chaos or social cohesion. That leads to the following

Slide 12: community scenarios

1. JAZZ scenario – improvising together: social cohesion democratic:

2. MAFIA scenario :social cohesion with strong man organization

3. STARVING CITIES scenario: social chaos with democratic form:

4. PIRATES scenario: social chaos with roving strong man

 

JAZZ requires that we see community based co-creation as yielding a much more interesting, viable, attractive solution, with much higher satisfaction of needs. To get there we need models of Open Space planning that are documented and widely distributed. It’s the creative, life-cycle, modernist approach, blending together village romanticism with distributed judicious use of hi-tech communications, biotechnology, solar energy, and other community based infrastructures.

MAFIA is based on historical analysis and tendencies in our social character: basically it says that those already strong will try to co-opt the local situation for personal gain in exchange for delivering goods and protection. It’s a kind of neo-feudalism, an extension of gated communities, and likely to lead to lots of fighting.

STARVATION is based on the lack of social cohesion, not even enough, with fast moving hungry people, to even get minimalist police organization. We have a vulnerable system utterly dependent on JIT food deliveries at a distance. It’s a story of a failure of hierarchy without an emerging order to the resulting open community. Nothing coheres, and the most basic needs do not get met.

PIRATES is based on the image of roving gangs, mostly young, taking and leaving. It’s the barbarians among us scenario. Some cohesion, but not enough to get stable communities,

There are of course some constants across all four scenarios. Property and asset values are shifting. Since the value of an asset is dependent on its relation to other assets (no asset without such connections has any value), the free fall of some assets (businesses decide to not make the expensive changes and simply sell off) will put the valuation of all assets in play. We can expect a feeding frenzy of market activity as companies are dumped, "bargains" snapped up, new alliances made and created on a daily basis. We can expect fortunes to be made and lost in rapid waves. I suspect that normal rules of trading will be circumvented, because the need to act will be so urgent, and then time so short (The Ernst and Young merger was finally abandoned because of regulatory issues, but the time needed to be able to make that decision will collapse from months to hours - or just bypassed).

All this likely will be part of the buildup in the coming months. We will not wait till 2000 for these to happen.

There also will be a sorting out of surviving and discarded technologies. The intensity of this market making activity cannot be over estimated. We live in a time when most of the world has been forced to adopt the "economic humanity" model and people will play this game throughout the y2k period (1997-2005), despite however much successful community activity emerges. The balance between free market and an emerging alternative culture is part of what makes this all so interesting. We need to remember that the 20^th Century saw two major attempts o deal with this problem: fascism and socialism. Both failed, but the problem is still with us: how to integrate technology, wealth, power, and status in an ever more crowded world.

There will be extraordinary personal pain and fear on the part of everyone, without exception, regardless of which scenario plays out. Asset preservation will appear first before community or personal survival is taken seriously. Hopefully we can get past that as people recognize the power of an integrated approach reaching from now towards a future that makes both technical and human sense. The coming shift of production towards local communities makes such a possibility a little more likely.

Given this picture of unfolding difficulties; what do we do? There are several reasonable courses of action. We must proceed – and people will (the evidence for this is much clearer than when this was written) - on multiple paths simultaneously. I propose that we work in parallel along the following lines

First, to try and fix the current systems, and their interdependencies. Try to hold together and repair as much as we can. This might save 70 percent of the overall system.

Second, and simultaneously, to build starting now what we can call the B-system, an interconnection of systems that are guaranteed totally clean. This might include 25 percent of existing fully repaired systems, tested and interconnected by December 1999. This would give us a lower limit to failure. Though social factors can modify this picture. Harlan Smith of Computer Professionals for Social responsibility calls this "austere infrastructure."

Third, the development of contingency plans, including the preparation of new legislation so that there can be a debate on what would be tolerable and what would be intolerable and under what conditions. There will be waves of attempted and failed legislation, failing because it stirs too much resistance, or is unconstitutional. The second and third waves of legislation will be more, not less, radical.

Fourth, like the air raid practices of World War II, we need to practice soon, cold turkey, for a week, one at time, without banks, electricity, water or food. The population needs to practice, to get tough.

Fifth, do all we can to create participatory local community response as a protection against survivalist reactions and strong arm local control. The need to get communities into open space meetings (large circle, open agenda to create breakout groups of their choice, self selection) towards self managing emergent structures. In order to meet basic needs (food, heat, water, sanitation, - then health, and meaningful activity). We need to make sure that we are in the self organizing mode and do not allow "committees of concern" to become local un-elected soviets. We see that both capital in its late 20^th century form and socialism were too bureaucratic, based on elites that become blind and stupid about the consequences of large system dominance.

Six, use the media to create images of survivalist self starvation vs. vital community cooperation and self organizing design to rework local production and distribution. I can image TV spots that show the situation and the response of the mean spirited bad guys and the community spirited good guys, with the clear implication that playing together gives a much greater sense of success than playing isolated survivalist.

Seven, use advertising agencies to create interesting, even fun, informative awareness of the problem. Being creative about it will shift the perception from boring and scary to scary and interesting.

Eight, stress actions now, given probable major failures, that can help create a very attractive post y2k community, businesses and governance. Show people the need for cooperation instead of isolated gun and bunker solutions. Help the creation of new market mechanisms at the local level. There will be rapid innovation, some good, some monopolistic and exploitative. Recognize that, while all this is "terrible", there are also opportunities to radically rethink technology, the place of money, the opportunities for community, art, relationships. It's important to look for ways of bringing forward every positive image of a new community. We might get a more individual and community focused future. No longer so much abstract market and consumption, but the graceful use of technology and education to meet human needs and leave people in the foreground, not marginalized as the current technology/market/career mix has demanded of us.

Nine, do all we can to get people employed will be as critical as food and heat. Little kits to let people knit, peel potatoes, plant seeds, whatever, will be important, and needs to be done on a massive scale. There is some hope in this, and fascinating to work towards. Meaningful contribution is the key, ASAP. A person who works on flood control told me that "we arrive with cans of paint and brushes, and organize the teenagers to paint the mailboxes as soon as the water recedes." The message is obvious. Hunger plus nothing helpful to do supports survivalist undermining of the social fabric.

Ten, it will be important to maintain the loop between human effort and meeting needs. This means that we need local mechanisms of exchange, which might mean local printed money, the value of which is locally determined (this based on the likelihood of rapid inflation in federal dollars as federal check writing quickly outstrips revenue).

Eleven, talk to friends and relatives, get them aware, get them talking, thinking. This in itself sets a community tone.

Some proposed specifics.

1.Get four towns to undertake open space planning of ways to get basic needs met. We need to film these and make the videos widely available.

We would use one-day workshops beginning with a presentation of the scenarios, admitting that we do not know which way it will go. Have small groups of eight prepare their view of how the community might respond, put it on a flip chart and report out to the whole group. End the morning with a short presentation of the Rocky Mountain Institute town analysis method: draw a circle around the town, look at what comes across the line that is crucial, and needs to be rethought for y2k possibilities.

In the afternoon have an open space (everyone in a circle to start), "wow, look at what we did this morning. Let's build an agenda of the issues and opportunities that confront us. Take some part of how we might respond and you’d be willing to lead a breakout group around. You don’t have to have the answer, just the issue. When we start come here in the center, write it on a piece of paper, announce it to the group, and go put it on that wall. When we get up all the ideas, we’ll go to the wall and sign up, and then off to the breakout group you signed for. Make sure you get some potential next steps. Come back at 4 and we’ll have short report outs."

2.Make sure the Internet coheres

I said at the beginning of the paper that we need to deepen our analysis if we can hope to get hold of the underlying causes of y2k. To anticipate my next writing, there are several social aspects I will be developing further. They are

1. complexity and collapse

2. inflation

3. denial and psychology; humans matter

Complexity and collapse: We are spending an increasingly large part of the GNP on digitalization. Some of this is productive, and some is like a tax on the system: mere maintenance. Archeology and history indicate that societies collapse when their infrastructure costs increase more rapidly then their productivity. In economistic language, the marginal utility of complexity decreases with increased effort. it's possible for an organization to buy complexity, but very hard to buy simplification.

This is happening at the same time that a rising population puts increasingly heavy demands on our infrastructures. Too many decorations on a Christmas tree and finally it breaks. These two taken together indicate a deep threat to the infrastructure.

Inflation; research shows centuries long rises in prices. As prices go up, wages tend to stay constant. The result, along with rising interest rates and rents, means a slow shift of wealth upwards: till the society breaks. This happened in the west (with Asian correlates) in 1400, 1600, and 1800 (roughly), with major reshuffling of power and loss of population. We have been on a steep rise since about 1870. Evidence suggests that this movement is deeply causative of social breakdown. We need to pay deep attention.

Denial and psychology: at the core our belief in progress is religious, and we live in one of the most ritualized societies in history. "it's just technical and can be fixed" extends to the body, with plastic surgery, the psyche with drugs (Prozac, Ritalin, Viagra). We are letting ourselves be transformed into machinery. The result is, we have not noticed that digitalization, the map, is replacing nature, the territory. This set of gods is felt as our last hope: all the other gods died. I believe people know that population, biotech, pollution, food content, and daily complexity are out of control. With no alternative, knowing that the ferry is sinkable is unbearable. Another part of denial is the culture of contempt towards workers, and with them, technologists and programmers. "Our people are working on it" is not said with affection. Programmers are very distrustful of management (less so in recent years) and often made code obscure. The managers know they are disliked, but haven’t cared. Manufacturing environments are often hostile, and the resulting implications for y2k compliance are not good, but to discuss these issues is to open a can of worms.

I and many others look at y2k as part of the flawed integration of technology with society and with the real human beings whose lives are biologically grounded, and lived in real time in society. People are dependent on technical systems that have grown like the water systems of ancient Mesopotamia where the extended infrastructure to support agriculture used all the surplus to feed the workers to keep the system from silting up, till the cost overwhelmed the system and it collapsed. Owner greed pushed the extensions of the water systems further than made sense.

Working on these in numerous collaborations, more fully developing the new and especially post y2k scenarios, getting better data, and writing a paper on "Social theory, technology, ethos: complexity and collapse; what we can expect from y2k: investment, governance and community", are my current focus. These efforts can be found at

http://www.tmn.com/~doug

We have lots to debate, quickly. Because people are starting to get strategic. it's not what we will do on January 1st 2000, some months from now, but what we will do somewhere between now and the early months of 1999. And markets, many new forms, will emerge within hours of any full or partial collapse. There will be a move, starting long before the final hour, to reevaluate all assets: buildings, land, whatever. New organizations will spring up to try to manage and leverage those reevaluated assets. Fortunes will be made and lost in days, in repeated waves of such days. Normal SEC style regulations will be routinely bypassed

We have learned a good deal about how to make large scale community conversations useful. Talking about scenarios is one of those ways. The serious possibility of failures impels us to discuss contingencies But contingencies for what? We really don’t yet know. We see a tendency to gridlock in our organizations as people see that budget needs may require crossing boundaries to get the needed cash. Planning stirs up issues around turf and budget. Talking about Scenarios, that is, some plausible images of the future beyond what we know for sure, get people engaged with much less anxiety. Having looked at scenarios in cross organizational groups, we can then talk more fully about what we should do.

We are in the middle of a very complex social process. My advice is, read history; the French Revolution, the Thirty Year's War, the collapse of complex societies, the emergence of feudalism, the rise of industrialization, the making of the oil industry, the Meiji restoration, the Luddites, myths of creation and destruction. It hardly matters; every historical episode provides a map of some aspect of the current situation. it's a feast for those who are willing to think, and lots of antique knowledge turns out to be very useful.

Notes

Started and stimulated by Don Michael, whose Planning to Learn, Learning to plan, is seminal on the difficulties of planning.

The scenario quadrant was first proposed by David Isenberg (www.isen.com) and amplified in a workshop Dec 31-Jan 1 1997/1998. The Who will do what paper was written by Carmichael in November, 1997.