Retrofuture.com

Remember 1999? All of those millennial dreams about the bridge to…wherever? That McLuhan-esque fantasy of a peaceful interconnected global village?

It all seemed so imminent in 1999. The economy was booming. The Dow rose daily as the bubble grew bigger. Irrational exuberance was the order of the day.

Proclamations that would seem foolhardy and even dangerously naive were made with great regularity. A lot of hot air about the end of history. No convulsive worldwide conflagrations remained it was argued. Western liberal ideas had triumphed. The phrase pax Americana was uttered unironically in 1999.

Economists promised markets would expand forever so we engorged ourselves.  Slaking the thirst of consumers was the job of the select corporate elite. The coming out parties in 1999 were IPO-only. Electronica pulsed as overnight millionaries popped Dom Perignon.

The Y2K crisis loomed but what did it amount to? A piffle, nothing, nada. No cataclysmic electric grid wipeout. In the final analysis, it was a jobs program for geeks.

And speaking of geeks, they ruled in 1999. The gadget-crazy culture we now live in was well on its way to establishing itself. The revenge of the nerds was already nearly complete when Jeff Bezos, the guru of e-commerce, was named Time’s Person of the Year.

Everything was going zoom-zoom in 1999. Especially design. The new VW Bug was all swoopy, as was the futuristic architecture of Frank Gehry.

More than ever, we were wired up. You could buy dog food on the Internet.  How great was that? The call centers in India, the plastic factories in China–all were humming along to the tune of “Living the Vida Loca.”

It was a great, big beautiful tomorrow straight out of a Disney animatronic future. Think about the money to be made on real estate (a no brainer). SUVs were safe and sporty. And, hey, why not dig up the backroads of America and build some more malls?

Looking back, virtual had begun to replace reality, just as debt had replaced credit. The signs of change were already evident. A millenium-eve terrorist attack at LAX airport was just barely thwarted. And soon enough the party would be over. The bubble burst in “two thousand zero zero,” the year of the hanging chad, just as Prince had predicted.

With the benefit of history it’s obvious: we were overly optimistic. Still, the feeling was implausibly hopeful at 11:59 PM and 59 seconds on December 31, 1999. Before champagne corks popped and the fizz went flat, back when the future of duct tape and color-coded alerts was blissfully unknown, it was a good year to be alive.

Please share your memories of that annus mirabilis 1999 by leaving a comment.