Colette Shade says the 2000s were full of optimism. 25 years later, she feels let down

Day 612:48How the Y2K era shaped our current political environment and broke people's faith in the future

When Colette Shade imagined the future, she was full of optimism. It was 1999, and even though she was only in Grade 5, she pictured an upcoming century that was peaceful and prosperous.

But then came disaster, followed by disaster. There were the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, then military retaliation from the United States. There was the 2008 financial crisis. Shade says that beautiful utopia she imagined began to fade away.

Shade dives into what happened, and how that affected the future, in her new book Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything (Essays on the Future That Never Was). She spoke with Day 6 host Brent Bambury about the book. Here's part of that conversation.

In 1999, when you were in Grade 5, you wrote a letter about how you imagined the year 2008. What does that letter tell you today? 

Well, that letter really shows how much hope that I felt, but also how much hope that people in general felt for the millennium at the time. 

There's this idea that the internet and the stock market and the fall of the Soviet Union would all sort of meld together to give us this amazing millennium that was peaceful and prosperous for all. 

And that's not what happened.

No, no, it's not what happened. 

Smash Mouth gives the first chapter of your book its name. Tell us why you decided to name the chapter what you did. 

I name the first essay "Only Shooting Stars Break the Mold." You know, I grew up in an upper-middle-class family, and I was taught, like a lot of upper-middle and middle-class kids that, well, you can be anything you want to be and the world is limitless. And certainly you're going to have, at the very least, a basic level of financial security. 

And that just completely turned out not to be true in large part because of the recession of 2008.  

WATCH | Colette Shade on the new millennium's 'hyper optimism':

The rise and fall of Y2K's 'hyper optimism'

8 days ago

Duration 1:01

Colette Shad, author of Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything, argues that events early in the millennium — from 9/11 to the 2008 financial crisis — broke our faith in the future.

You went back and looked at the era of '97 to '08 through a more critical lens, and from a socioeconomic perspective. Can you describe that period in those terms for us and what it meant for the ambitions and the dreams of a young person like yourself?

So what was happening in the late 90s, like '97, '98, '99, 2000, 2001, until 9/11, is that you had this kind of go, go, hyper optimism. We're going to have almost like open borders and free exchange of information and people and money due to the internet and global capitalism. 

And we're kind of going to have this peaceful capitalist techno utopia and it's going to be great for everybody. But then when 9/11 happens, it really spoils that idea. And in America, there is this really reactionary turn almost overnight.

You say in the book, to tell the story of the Y2K era is in some way or another to tell the story of the millennium during the decade that followed. Tell that story for us a little bit.  

This was kind of an era where Americans no longer saw themselves as political subjects because there's this idea that, "Well, we kind of solved all the big problems. It's the end of history. Cold War is over. There's no need to, like, be in a union because we can all invest in the stock market." 

And so to the extent that you're political, it's like maybe voting, maybe. And what happened in 2008 was the recession and housing crisis undermined the American way of life. So no longer could people just count on home ownership and stable employment as a birthright. 

To be clear, there were plenty of people during the Y2K era and, in fact, an increasing number of people for whom this was not the case. But it could kind of be hidden conveniently under these two bubbles, first the dotcom bubble, then the housing bubble. 

But then what happened in the recession was that it completely changed the political economy. And you had people who are graduating into this economy where there was, at one point in 2009, an average of 10 per cent national unemployment [in the U.S.] and locally much higher in many places. 

You had millions of families who lost their homes. You had people lose their savings, businesses, all of these things.... And that's how you got Occupy Wall Street and then the much more successful Bernie [Sanders] movement. 

But unfortunately, that's also how you got things like Trump. That's also how you got QAnon and these other big conspiracy theories, which, to be clear, are not on the left, but they're all kind of symptoms of this crisis of political economy and political subjectivity.

It feels like the world is so much different between now and the turn of the millennium than it was between the turn of the millennium and the 1970s. It feels far more fragmented…. Do you think nostalgia is different for a millennial than it is for a boomer or a Gen-X?

I absolutely do.... But there is a historically contingent and historically specific experience of millennial nostalgia, which is basically that people in my cohort — I was born in 1988 — were raised to believe that they were inheriting this uniquely peaceful and prosperous world.

And then … it was a bait and switch. Then as soon as we're entering adulthood, there's this generational financial crisis. Many of us have never recovered financially. 

And then not only that, but you have escalating climate change, you have escalating political violence and wars and all of these awful things. And there really is this sense now that when I compare primary sources media from the late 90s and early 2000s with primary sources now, there's a real difference in tone. 

There's a sense that there is no future or that at best the future's kind of shaky and scary. Whereas then it was taken as a given by, you know, leading economists and by leading op-ed writers that things would just get better and better.