An ode to Y2K

Sorry if my posts have been looking a bit tumblr-ish lately, but sometimes there is much cooler stuff on the Internet than what’s going on here. Take this for example:

I remember this esthetic; it gave off a vibe of futurism right before and during the dawn of the new millennium. And what would you know, some wonderful soul out there created a imgur account, collecting a butt ton of images using this style. They marked it as an esthetic between 1996 and 2003, which to me with that timeframe seems about right when that look started to take hold and then began to fade away.

It was seen all over the place: magazines, billboards, TVs, movies, album art, music videos, EVERYWHERE! The silky shirts, the spiked hair with frosted tips, goggles on the forehead or hanging on the neck, the slightly out-of-focus photography with a hint of glow, and of course, the heavy dosage of blue, orange, or green.

Back then you didn’t really take notice of it because we were living in it, but in hindsight you can easily tell it was a really unique look. I think technology was a big factor for the inspiration because it was steamrolling into our homes at neck breaking speed. With the introduction of the World Wide Web, people bringing computers into the house, ecommerce, and cybercrimes, it was like we were quickly surrounded by tech and didn’t know what happened until it was too late. The changes were fast and that may explain why everything was out of focus and heavy on the colors.

In relation, Y2K freaked everyone out, believing technology was going to betray us when the clock struck midnight on January 1, 2000. Thankfully that didn’t happen.

But while in the 1990s, even though Y2K was a looming threat, most people (mainly young people) saw the potential of what the digital revolution could bring. We were on the verge of starting something new and it was incredibly cool to see it about to evolve into its next stage. We were going to be the leaders of this new revolution, leaving behind the status quo of trivial stuff like typewriters, tons of paperwork, and, for the most part, the postal system.

But then nothing really happened once we crossed into the new millennium. Sure tech was still marching forward, but the utopia we were dreaming of really didn’t pan out the way we expected it to. After the dot com bubble and seeing a new threat to the country, the innocent dream was killed and so the style.

Either that or the style just ran its course.

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