I love revisiting articles from around the turn of the millennium, a fascinatingly febrile period when everyone – but journalists especially – briefly lost the run of themselves. It seems strange now to think that the ticking over of a clock from 23:59 to 00:00 would prompt such big feelings, of excitement, terror, of end-of-days abandon, but it really did (I can remember feeling them myself as a teenager, especially the end-of-days-abandon bit.)
Of course, some of that feeling came from the ticking over of the clock itself: the fears over the Y2K bug might seem quite silly today, but its potential ramifications – planes falling out of the sky, power grids failing, entire life savings being deleted in a stroke – would have sent anyone a bit loopy. There’s a very good podcast, Surviving Y2K, about some of the people who responded particularly drastically to the bug’s threat, including a bloke who planned to sit out the apocalypse by farming and eating hamsters.
It does seem funny – and fitting – in the UK, column inches about this existential threat were equalled, perhaps even outmatched, by those about a big tarpaulin in Greenwich. Honestly, it’s staggering how animated so many people were by the Millennium Dome: I get that it was a colossal New Labour white elephant, but did it really merit such breathless, teeth-gnashing coverage? (Click a few pages into the Guardian’s millennium tag for a sense of the collective mania at the time.) Especially when you consider that its eventual fate, rather than being razed to the ground or shot into space, was to be turned into a successful, if soulless, entertainment venue.
Alongside worrying about the Dome, and the small matter of the world ending, the millennium offered a rare opportunity for grand reflection – on the thousand years of history just gone – and wild prognostication on every possible topic: politics, religion, sport, technology and, of course, culture. Looking back at past predictions and pointing out how wrong they were is a pretty cheap sport, like shooting Mystic Megs in a barrel. But given that, earlier this year, we looked at how music, film and TV had changed over the past 25 years, it seems instructive to see what people thought those next 25 years and beyond would look like. And what’s fascinating is how close, but also how far away, predictions of the future of those forms were.
Take film. Around the turn of the millennium, the major disrupting force in cinema was the arrival of digital projectors, which it was confidently predicted, would end the century-old use of celluloid. There were countless articles fretting about the ramifications of this shift, both aesthetically and in a business sense and, in a way, those articles were right to be concerned: by the mid 2010s, 90% of movies were shot digitally rather than on film. They did, though, rather miss the wood for the trees: the streaming revolution and struggles faced by cinemas would make the digital/film face-off look a minuscule issue by comparison. And, anyway, plenty of directors have made it their mission to keep the film flame alive – see Brady Corbet dragging his hefty 70mm canisters into Venice to premiere The Brutalist (pictured above).
At the turn of the millennium, the TV industry was worried about a gamechanging innovation too: personal video recorders (PVRs) like TiVo, which they feared would completely destroy the ad market by allowing audiences to record shows and whiz through commercials. They were a big enough deal for author Michael Lewis, of Moneyball and The Big Short fame, to devote several thousand words to the subject in the New York Times. Of course those recorders were merely a stop on the journey towards total on-demand TV offered by Netflix et al, but some smart people were already aware of the direction of travel, like one director of a PVR company who was quoted in a Guardian feature on the trend. “Television schedules will shift from a time-based paradigm to one based purely on content,” he predicted. “People will operate channels according to their own interests. It will have a dramatic effect on those general channels which are ad funded. Maybe this is the end for scheduling.”
More than any other cultural medium, the music industry was already vaguely aware of the changes it was facing – this despite the fact that 2000 would become the most successful ever year for CD sales. In the autumn of 1999, the Observer asked a panel of musicians, label staff and DJs for their predictions, and there were some impressively accurate calls on where music was heading – Parlophone A&R Keith Wozencroft noted the possibility of making an album from your bedroom, and a decade before Boiler Room, Paul Oakenfold said that he was already doing live shows online. Pete Waterman’s crystal ball must have been fogging over when he predicted that people would start buying their music “not via the Internet, as most people think, but digital TV – the digital shopping services will blossom in the next five years”. But he was on the money in his claim that “music markets worldwide will converge”, citing the success of Ricky Martin as evidence for a global appetite for Latin pop, an appetite that, as proved by the likes of Bad Bunny, is just as strong today.
Of course a whopping great cultural innovation on the horizon that was completely missed by all the prognosticators was podcasts: the term would be coined only a few years later (in the pages of the Guardian, I’m contractually obliged to remind you). And there’s no mention in any of the turn-of-the-millennium predictions of what will possibly be the biggest change of all for culture this century and beyond: artificial intelligence. That’s a wave that is still breaking, and no doubt plenty of the predictions being made about its impact on film, TV and music will be wrong (I’m less than convinced by the idea that we’ll use AI to star in our own movies alongside Marilyn Monroe, for example). And of course, in 25 years there will be people writing about how way off the predictions made today turned out to be – well, if we’re not in a post-apocalyptic wasteland eating hamster meat by then.
after newsletter promotion
If you want to read the complete version of this newsletter please subscribe to receive The Guide in your inbox every Friday