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Not necessarily a common enemy, but a common cause.
I've never seen people come together and work harder than when we were trying to end the Y2K problem. I guess you could call the bug "the enemy", but it was a little more abstract than that.
Were you in an industry affected or are you just reminiscing on being in society
Because being in society for y2k was utterly meaningless. We did nothing. We did not come together, we did not work hard. A small handful of dweebs noticed the issue and fixed it.
The USA, with its burgeoning 24 hour news cycle and coming off such hits as oj, princess di, and columbine, recognized they could blow that shit up. So then America wasted 40 billion dollars and a shitload of fear mongering when basically every other country spent almost nothing for essentially the same outcome. Because the outcome was contingent on patches to windows and the Linux kernel, which were obviously going to happen long before 1/1/2000 and regardless of the government because it was a glaring bug that was found
I do ultimately agree with your sentiment though. A common enemy is not necessary and we absolutely can be unified around a cause. The space race obviously had Russia as a villain. The new deal is something that on paper could unify but in practice saw conservative opposition and liberal criticism that it didn’t go far enough. I still think it’s possible though, even if an example is a challenge to think up
I was a front line worker during Y2K with 60 software updates across 600 systems from Texas to Guam.
I had to run a color coded Excel sheet to keep it all straight, it was CRAZY.
In my case, because it was the automotive industry, it also all had to be done early because of the '00 model year cars. Like I say, I've never seen people work harder.
Even then, there were still problems outside our control:
https://www.capecodtimes.com/story/news/1999/10/13/y2k-brings-back-horseless-carriages/51026660007/
So you were administering systems or something similar? Then sure, I am sure for you and your team it brought you together (and maybe some tension at times). Glad it went well. But society as a whole? Eh
That’s the challenge though. On a micro level it’s easy. I work in mental health and I have similar stories from my days working in hospitals (I do outpatient work now) where our unit staff have banded together for challenges. Covid was like that at the beginning. Then it fell apart because everything became politicized thanks to our dogshit leadership at the time
But finding something that can (for the most part) unite all of society? Even limiting it to just the US that’s a talllllll order. Especially if you also don’t want it to fall apart after a month like the Covid thing
The only system that has sustained common cause in human societies long-term is religion. It's outlasted nationalism and political ideologies, noble families and dynasties, and even the collapse of civilizations.
Which is terrifying, when you consider how much violence has been done in the name of religion throughout human history. Why do none of our more productive ideas and organizing principles have such longevity?
I was administering a small part of a system, probably 1/3rd of the entire server environment. There was another team doing the financial software and another team doing the hardware side.
But, yeah, society as a whole I think did notice. There was an up-tick in "prepperdom" or whatever you want to call it, especially when this story broke:
I had a lot of non-technical people asking me what it was all about and I explained it like this:
Let's say, on 1/1, the government has decided to issue everbody new quarters and all your old quarters are going to go away.
1:1 - you won't lose any money, but the new quarters they're handing out won't work in ANY vending machine. Everything with a coin slot needs to be updated.
Now, if you have the proper tools, and knowledge, updating one machine is not a big deal.
But now you have to update every machine on your block, in your neighborhood, in your city, in your county, in your state, in the entire country, in the whole world...
Suddenly the scale is far, far bigger.
To this day, I'm stunned we pulled it off without more problems. There was the "horseless carriage" bit noted above, there was another problem with a taxi system in, I wanna say Thailand?
Singapore! I wasn't that far off!
I quit after y2k. I worked nights for months and after it was over, my baby threw up on me one morning, I was 10 minutes late because I had to change, and my boss literally screamed at me.
And now people are saying climate change is like the Y2K bug and "it will fix itself" 🙄
Those people don't even KNOW about the 2038 bug... ;)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
Fortunately(?) it's unlikely I'll live to see that one.