Party like it’s 1999 - Part(y) 1
A glimpse at a 1015 day window when all was relatively well (or was it?)
5 minute read
There was a time when these monolithic words foreshadowed some kind of space-age apocalyptic future: ‘Two thousand zero zero, party over, whoops, out of time… Tonight I’m going to party like it’s 1999.’ These days 1999 conjures up images of a warmer, fuzzier time. Let’s flash back for a moment to this pre-Y2K year - when the greatest fear citizens of the global West might have had was that just after midnight on December 31st, 1999 global computer systems would fail to correctly format and recognize dates after 2000 - believing 2000 to be the same as 1900 - causing havoc and financial damage.
I remember New Year’s Eve 1999-2000 and the vibe was pure elation - at least in Amsterdam. The anticipation in the air was intoxicating. Even after midnight - we were drunk with a sense of frolic and unity. My friends and I video’d ourselves doing sketch comedy - including a faux impromptu shrink + psych patient narrative (which, in today’s fragile world, would be frowned upon with Puritan glares).
I was entering such a positive, buzzy resonance field that my 24-hour-party-person self decided not to tempt fate. So I bowed out of the after-party activities. I may have had a drink that night — not much more— and wasn’t about to keep the party going and buy a ticket to ride the white line highway (to quote another throwback tune).
That may have been the last ‘good year’ of the internet era. I’m not alone in thinking that. I hear it all the time from friends and colleagues. I’ve seen videos on youtube posted by GenZs lamenting the present day and noting how everything in the early 2000s had a magical sheen to it (they couldn’t have known - but in this case they were right). Certainly technology and humans had found the ‘sweet spot’ of digital convenience and exquisite human messiness, creativity and freedom.
We may have carried our mobile phones around but texts were limited to, again, language befitting (a) Prince: ‘R U here?’ and ‘C U soon’. Simple times. I note that the language of ‘Y2K’ fits in with that lexicon too!
Of course it wasn’t all laborious texts, parties and good, good, good vibrations. There was a looming sense of what was to come: an apocalyptic malaise which produced some pretty awesome art/music/film. Recall videos like Aphex Twin’s Windowlicker (which caused many an electronic music fan to have a drug-less bad trip) and The Prodigy’s MTV-banned Smack my Bitch Up? Then there was the dark Nordic cinematic movement of Dogme 95 featuring Lars Von Trier (Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark) and Thomas Vinterberg (The Celebration - though that was released a tad earlier in ‘98).
The fact that humans found a way to contend with their demons by creating edgy art speaks to the power of the micro-period between 1999 and 2001. Yes, 2001 was surely the end of that dreamspell - 9/11 didn’t just impact Americans in a big way; it changed the (largely Western) world. Peripatetic party people have never been the same since - pining for the days of carefree air travel and flying ‘courier’ with Now Voyager at rock-bottom prices. These days, when I travel I feel like I’ve entered some dystopian sci-fi movie - the throwback indignity of shoe removal remains (thanks feckless ‘shoe bomber’), add to it: face scans (thanks Patriot Act).
The night before 9/11, I was cleaning out my cupboards and stocking them with new Yogi Teas I had just bought (I was obsessed with the brand). I recall whistling as I worked and feeling extremely happy and tuned in, for no reason whatsoever. It hadn’t been a great year. I had gone through a bad breakup which careened me into an existential Saturn Return crisis. My socializing ended and on most nights I could be found crumpling myself around an attic window staring at the moon (even on a moonless night, LOL!)
But on that rare evening I felt connected to something higher. Fast forward a few hours, and the next morning I awoke from a nightmare that I was in the cockpit of a plane standing next to a Middle Eastern-looking pilot. He was sweating profusely and I remember wondering, in the dream, ‘can he actually land this plane?’
Then the world changed for the global West.. Surveillance and security became de rigueur in the name of protecting citizens. And after the live collective trauma of planes hitting buildings, we could hardly have been blamed for rolling over and letting the state do whatever it needed to do, by all means necessary - to keep us safe.
On the digital front, Apple’s iphone, Friendster (R.I.P. the O.G.), Myspace and Facebook were re-configuring people’s minds. The populace was primed to be excited by tech - I know I was! I had been an early adopter of internet services and loved the convenience and all those unique websites and that evil-free Google search. Those early days were still fairly creative. Myspace pages reflected a sense of early ‘Wild West’ internet individuality as they launched into your music of choice when you landed on them (Facebook’s tech-uniformity changed all that).
And the rest is history. Have we been happier in the 2001-2025 era? It’s all relative. For some it’s a utopia of endless digital content and AI promises for others a dystopia of endless digital content and AI promises.
In the latter camp, a plurality of British teens between 16 and 21 (47%) recently said they’d prefer to be young in a world without the internet. There is great skepticism about tech overreach amongst that age cohort. They say ‘it’ skips a generation - so after the Millennials accepted all things tech in the name of ‘progress’ (*for the laptop class) and scaling up their startups so they can smugly calling themselves ‘founders,’ another generation that can think for itself and value societal well-being over personal enrichment will fight to make its voice heard.
What will they do? What will we all do? I’m already doing it. What, you ask? Partying like it’s 1999 of course (minus the drugs). You can never go back but you can certainly extract and distill the best of an era — marrying it with parts of the present day to hit that sweet spot.
Next up, in Part Deux, how partying like it’s 1999 could work.
