Some argue that there is spirit in matter, that technological disaster can be seen as matter's revenge for man's development of consciousness.

Sheldon S. Kohn, M.A.
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Some argue that there is spirit in matter, that technological disaster can be seen as matter's revenge for man's development of consciousness. There are dire predictions of disasters to follow if we do not perform all the myriad efforts and tasks necessary to make our computers "Year 2000 Compliant." In the worst-case scenario, most things we rely on and take for granted in our daily lives could simply cease to function in less than one second as January 1, 2000, arrives.

Stores would no longer accept credit cards. Mortgage calculations would show banks that they owe mortgagees millions of dollars in back interest. People talking long distance at that precise moment could be billed for calls that lasted 99 years. Traffic lights and elevators could simply stop working. In less than one second, all the things and activities that characterize twentieth-century life could simply stop working, creating for us such a clean slate as to be unimaginable. Time is re-asserting its predominance in our consciousness because many of the world's critical computer systems contain this technological Achilles' Heel.

In these last days of the second millennium, it is surprising to find information technology workers re-entering some sort of participation mystique with their machines in which Time has to be re-discovered. All who use technology, which includes practically everyone in one way or another, must acknowledge the approach of the millennium because of this so-called Millennium Bug.

The simplest explanation of the problem is that many computers, especially those often referred to as legacy systems, will become confused about the date no later than one second past midnight on January 1, 2000. At that point, many computers will no longer be able to make calculations based on the comparison of dates. Digital brains will move from December 31, 1999, to January 1, 1900. Computer systems were unintentionally, one is tempted to say unconsciously, designed forever to remain in our twentieth century, even as we leave it behind. Implications of the Millennium Bug spread hydra-like to embrace everything that relies on a computer chip to function.

In the 1960s and 1970s, computer memory was horrendously expensive. One way to converse digital memory, and hence to save aurum vulgi, was to reduce the number of digits used to refer to the year to 2. Thus, 1999 became 99, and 2000 became 00. Computer algorithms do not allow for interpretation, judgement, or evaluation of context: to a computer's bits and bytes, 00 is always less than 99. There already have been scattered reports of legacy computer systems refusing to authorize purchases with credit cards whose expiration date is 00 or 01 on the basis that these cards expired more than 90 years ago.

Going through the code that makes up a legacy system line-by-line to identify dates is tedious, dull work. It is also surprisingly low-tech, as much of it is done by hand. Far from being the orderly and logical arrangement of lines of code that many people might think of, the architecture of many legacy systems resembles nothing so much as a giant foil ball. It is true that these systems began orderly and logical enough, at least in theory and design. As time went on, new programmers came along to paste a little new code here, and a little new code there. What we have today is often an incomprehensible mess that mysteriously manages to work.

One irony of the Millennium Bug is that computers were supposed to be true freedom machines. Pundits of the digital age, at the same time that programmers were creating these legacy systems, promised to improve our lives to the point that our biggest problem would be how to spend our leisure time. There were visions of paperless offices and of technological workspaces that would be egalitarian in the extreme. The delusion continues as pundits now promise us that we will soon all be telecommuting, which means that some of us will never be able to leave our work. Other corporate voices sell an illusion of control by asking where we want to go today.

With the Year 2000 rapidly approaching, one need not be a technophobe or a Luddite to recognize that the shadows of such promises are ascendant. It is not often considered that something in technology ultimately eludes human control, though examples of this truth are easily found. The revenge of matter symbolized through our struggle with the Millennium Bug finds expression in the fluid nature of Time itself. We must recognize Time, or the old gods will take our new toys away.

However reluctantly, even those most passionately pursuing the hierosgamos of Perfection and Technology in the alembic called "Technology" must honor the coming millennium with a sacrifice of their labor and intellect. The effort required for a successful technological transition to the third millennium is concrete in a way that demands attention from even the most unimaginative software engineer.

The symbolic aspect of this coniunctio of spirit and matter could lead us to a greater consciousness of the joint Work of the seen and unseen. The Millennium Bug seems somewhat like alchemical prima materia, a surprise joining of the inner and outer in the massa confusa of computer programming. As the medieval alchemist gazed into the vessel and discovered the chymical wedding, where matter and spirit join, the digital brain provides us with a receptacle for projections of our inner state as we approach the new millennium. No more than the alchemist knew what he saw do we know what we see with our fixed gaze.

The computer is the last significant invention of the last part of the last century of the second millennium. It was created in our image, and we are already relegating it to the past. In a way, our computers do not want to leave the twentieth century, as perhaps we do not want to leave the twentieth century. It is possible for human beings to enter the third millennium unconsciously, failing to consider or making light of the implications and consequences of doing so, as if an epoch were no more than a number. In the struggle to complete the tasks necessary to ensure that computers keep working through and beyond January 1, 2000, we are replacing the best technology of the second millennium with the first technology of the third. This is the sign of our times: we have a technological legacy, but no heritage.

The true legacy of these products of our most conscious activity may well be that no one knows exactly what we created. The process of correcting legacy systems is a bit analogous to exploring the unknown, perhaps even the unconscious, and the perils and consequences are just as grave. Alchemists often reported finding the prima materia in despised places full of chaos.

Our collective cultural march towards the new millennium is temporarily halted as companies spend literally billions of dollars, and technologists spend millions of hours to solve a problem created by ignoring the reality of Time. However committed we are to completing this task at whatever cost, the computer begins to seem like a mere twentieth-century machine refusing to move into an epoch in which it will come to be seen as something as primitive as a Stone Age tool.

At first glance, the Millennium Bug seems to promise us an unmitigated disaster at worst or a major distraction at best. A closer look reveals that all our technological efforts right now might offer a dim glimpse of an approaching unus mundus when spirit and matter join in our consciousness, when our work is also the locus of our Opus.

© 1998 by Sheldon S. Kohn

{/viewonly}