Time Bomb Y2K Documentary Review

➡ The documentary “Time Bomb Y2K” by HBO, directed by Marley McDonald and Brian Becker, discusses the Y2K panic. It explains how people feared that computers, which only stored the last two digits of the year, would malfunction when the year 2000 arrived, potentially causing widespread chaos. However, despite the widespread fear and preparation, the new millennium arrived without any major incidents. The documentary also explores the rise of ‘prepper’ culture and the role of Peter De Jaeger, who raised awareness about the potential issue and later advocated for calm when the problem was fixed.
➡ The text discusses the fear and confusion surrounding the Y2K bug, a predicted computer glitch that was expected to cause widespread chaos as the year changed from 1999 to 2000. The author recalls how a man named Peter used this fear to build his reputation, initially spreading doomsday predictions before later claiming credit for averting disaster. The text also explores how the Y2K scare inadvertently revived prepper culture and attracted right-wing extremists, leading to a shift in Peter’s messaging. Finally, the author reflects on the rapid technological advancements of the time and the emerging threat of terrorism, suggesting that these developments were not just coincidental but influenced by the turn of the millennium.
➡ This text discusses a documentary about John and David Trman, who created a militia movement in Montana in the early 1990s as a response to the Ruby Ridge standoff. The documentary also explores the fear and conspiracy theories surrounding the Y2K bug, suggesting that the government might use such a crisis to gain more control. It also mentions a new potential computer bug in 2038. The text ends with a review of the documentary, with both reviewers giving it a “sink” rating, meaning they didn’t learn anything new or find it particularly enlightening.
➡ This text seems to be promoting the website Paranoid American, encouraging readers to buy merchandise like art, comics, and stickers. It also includes some personal reflections and thoughts, possibly from the author, about life, emotions, and dealing with negativity. The text ends with a repeated phrase, “you’re welcome,” suggesting the author feels they’re providing a service or benefit to the reader.

Hey, a bunch of people got worked up over something that didn’t happen in the end. There you go. That’s. That’s the whole summary of the documentary. Under the do. Yeah, under the docks. They collect the do. Under the docks. Under the docks, yeah, under the docks. Happy New Year. I need a little noise maker. Yeah. Welcome back to under the Docks. I’m Sean on Chris with Paranoid American, where we dissect films for you. We watch it so you don’t have to. Or sometimes we suggest that you do watch it. We’ll see. Depending. Yeah, it depends. Wait till the end.

Sink or Swim. This time we’re gonna start off the new year with a little more like normie magic. And. And really, they just came up because we wanted to do a January theme. So the very first one is going to be about the year Y2K. This is going to be a documentary that. That came out, and it’s all archival, by the way. And just, I guess, a little spoiler, I guess. I don’t like all archival documentaries. I found that out through watching this one. It was. It came out in 2023 by HBO, directed by Marley McDonald and Brian Becker, is called Time Bomb Y2K.

And it basically breaks down all of the. The hype about preppers and people that were freaking out the world was gonna end, and basically what actually happened. I lived through it. You lived through. I think we were probably both. I think I was a senior in high school when this went down, so I have a very vivid memory about all of the paranoia building up to it. And then sort of a sire. Spoiler alert. The world didn’t end at the millennium. Oh, man, don’t even have to watch it. Don’t worry. I agree with you. Because I was 16 years old, and watching this, it made me think of, like, well, actually, maybe this is kind of what turned me conspiratorial, right? Like, I was 16 and I wasn’t frightened of it, but I knew, remember, as it got closer, I was kind of like, I don’t know, man.

Like, you know what I mean? Like, I wasn’t sure because I wasn’t really as critical of a thinker, right? I was more just doing my life and having fun and then kind of a little bit in the undermine of, like, so the computer just shut off or like, the planes fought the sky, when what do I do? That’s a good point, too, because I think this is the first time that I became acquainted with, like, prepper culture and people that were like, yeah, yeah, you got all These cool, nice tech toys, but we’re still going to go and live off the grid.

And I couldn’t realize, why would you do that? And then I guess the premise of Y2K, that explains, well, if EMP goes off or if all the machines just stop working now, you’re going to have to know how to make your own shoes and, like, skin squirrels or something. All right, let’s plot the course. This whole movie, like I said, it’s all archival footage. So a lot of it are clips from news programs and interviews and things leading up to it in, like, maybe the. The seven years right before year 2000. And I guess for anyone that doesn’t remember or didn’t care, whatever, the.

The whole thing was about the way computers store digits. So it would store a date with two digits for the day, two digits for the month, and then they only stored two digits for the year. So the idea was that when these decisions were being made in 1967, they were like, we don’t have to store the. The 1 and the 9, we’ll just store the 6, 7. And every single time someone brought up, hey, aren’t we gonna run out of Runway here? Are we gonna end up rolling over? And it was like, well, that’s not going to happen for another.

Whatever, 20 years, 10 years, five years. Once it got into that, that seven to five year range, now all of a sudden people start caring about it. And the ultimate fear was that, yeah, planes were going to fall out of the sky, that all government systems that were being run by computers. There’s even a point in this documentary where they show a news program and they’re just zooming into an alarm clock and zooming into a coffee maker and zooming into a toaster. And it’s like, are these things going to fail because of y. Okay, so it definitely hit a fever pitch.

And everyone heard about this during the late 1990s. So if you were over the age of like, five, you probably got an earful of this for a few years. And a fun fact. And I was part of a break dancing crew called Y2K because, you know, it was a. That’s how popular it was. I wasn’t the greatest break dancer, but the other guys were pretty good. You know, I. I thought it was funny, too, because you. You said about how, you know, it was typical management 101, like, look, bud, I got 10 more years at this company.

I’m gonna retire. I don’t care about that problem. Yeah, how does that affect my quarterly earnings report? Oh, it doesn’t. That’s someone for three years down the line. Okay, we’ll leave it for them. Which. Which makes sense because the whole point of only storing two digits for the year instead of four was just because of the hard drive space that it took up. That again, in the 1960s was a much bigger deal than it maybe is in. In the 2000s, where you don’t really care about those extra two digits. So the whole thing was created by people trying to save money and time and cutting corners.

That’s kind of the. The whole premise of the Y2K. There’s some other really interesting observations in this movie, too. So I’m. I’m gonna get into just like the main bullet points that this documentary goes through, aside from what the. The whole premise was the two digits rolling over. People worried that computer systems are going to fall down. There was concerns specifically about the telecom industries. So no more phones and communication power. So you’re not getting electricity to your house or your municipality. And then utilities, like all other utilities going down. What if gas leaks? I. I specifically remember that when I was in the late 90s talking about, well, what if the plants that control natural gas shutdown.

Now there’s natural gas and explosions and like, it was truly an apocalyptic insinuation. And a lot of that, we find out, is due to this one guy named Peter De Jaeger. And he’s the one that claims that he got a job, I think, at IBM in the 1970s. And the first thing that he thought of was like, hey, isn’t this going to cause a problem? These two digits? And in 1989, he describes watching a television show. This is wild that all of this is based on like, a guy saw a TV show, he’s watching a TV show called Connections with James Burke.

And the very first episode was called Trigger Effect and was about in how 1985, the entire skyline, I believe, of New York completely shut down because one faulty switch went out. And he starts thinking like, oh, this. This is what could happen if that date rolls over. And he essentially turns this into a career he’s getting. He’s writing books, he’s going on to news programs. And he’s kind of trying to explain to normies out there that don’t know about computer code and don’t care about it, why they should care about this and why it’s this big issue.

And it kind of follows his story of raising awareness. People accusing him of being Chicken Little in a way, and then he kind of makes a switch to being an Advocate saying like, all right, we fixed the problem. You can stop freaking out now, everybody. And it’s, and it’s interesting what the catalysts were that made him change his tune a little bit. We’re gonna get a little conspiratorial on that. And then essentially everyone goes to work fixing computer codes and updating the millennium bug and all this 2000 rolls around, the world doesn’t explode. In fact, pretty much nothing happens at all.

The only thing that they bring up is that two different plants in Japan, like nuclear reactor plants, they reported some unknown issue, but it, it didn’t affect anything with their operations. So I mean, anything could happen. Like someone’s watch could have like messed up or something. And that was the report just so that it made the headlines. But that’s, that’s kind of the main paces, that of not just this movie, but of Y2K itself. And the, the. That’s what made me laugh so hard too. Because this whole movie, like about the three quarters of the movie you got Peter just like, hey man, you got to do this.

And people kind of claiming like, aren’t you kind of grifting, bro? Like, you know, you’re, you’re selling like clocks and like different like things on your website to prep and going to conferences and speaking to people like, this is, this is important because if it goes to 1900, we’re all dead. And I remember personally being 16 years old and, and seeing news, I was trying to find them, I couldn’t find them. But seeing like news clippings and, and our clips on the, on the evening news of like nuclear facilities could just start shooting off, you know, the nukes could just start shooting anywhere.

To Russia and Japan and, and to China. We could start like a, a nuclear annihilation. Because once it hit 1900, the computers wouldn’t understand. The way I got it as a kid because it brought back so many memories for me is that I, that the computers couldn’t understand. It was going to go to the year 2000, so it was going to revert back to 1900 and all hell was going to break loose. Like the computers were going to shut down, nukes were going to get shot everywhere, planes fall from the sky. And then to find out it’s this guy Peter that was like pretty much fear mongering through this whole thing to build his reputation as an author, in my opinion, and to become this character.

And at the end where he’s talking about all these governance. Oh well, we pushed everybody to do the right thing since I Sounded the horn, pat on my back, nothing happened. So he was able to do a victory lap of like, yeah, I know I worked you guys all up, but we fixed it because I figured out like, hey, if I keep telling all these programmers to do this, this and that, they’ll get it. And then I fix it all. Now the computers understand it’s year 2000. He, he ended up becoming the figurehead for this whole Y2K thing.

And I just got attack in here that you’ll notice he changes his tune the most dramatically after he realizes that it, it reinvigorated this whole prepper culture and then it brought out the militia folk and then it brought out like these right winger. He actually says that, that these right wing extremists latch on to his initial, you know, like, doomsdaying. And that he didn’t like, he actually was like anti right wing. I guess it kind of comes out in all this. So it seems that he gets a little bit closer to the government, which is Bill Clinton at this time, and kind of cozy’s back up into government.

And now he goes back on that exact same circuit. It’s like a podcaster that comes out with some new idea or documentary, a book or something. They kind of do the, the route the same way an actor is coming out with a movie. They do all the talk show route. They, that’s what this guy, he just made that his career for about 10 years. Talking first about the world’s going to end and then saying like, all right, let’s not get too crazy. All you doomsday preppers and right wing militiamen like, stay at home, it’s actually going to be fine.

And I, and I’m curious. Go ahead. Quote, unquote. He said the far right and I just blew my mind. Because that is a term now that like we hear. So I’m not saying it’s never been heard on TV before, but it seemed like to me watching him say that it was a catalyst for this whole new, what we call the far right. There’s like compilations of this stuff that you can find on YouTube of news reporters. Far right. And I never really heard that until he said it. And he kind of said it like a little hesitantly, not exactly how they say it now, but I was like, I wonder if that was the birthplace of it.

Well, it, it definitely came from this tech sector, like an elitist west coast tech sector that were trying to reach one audience and reached a different audience that, that they were not intending to talk to. And I’m Curious, man. What. What were you doing on New Year’s 1999? Do you remember what happened? Like, were you like, oh, thank God the world didn’t blow up? Well, yeah, I thought that because. So. So we wanted to go to the Rose Parade. My mom was like, oh. Because we were in California at the time, and she’s like, oh, we want to go there.

And we were like, yeah, yeah, let’s go to the Rose Parade. Let’s go to the Rose Parade. And then I don’t know what happened. I’m like, you know, we. Maybe we should stay in. Maybe stay in, man. Like, you know, because I started getting a little freaked out as it got closer because I’m 16. I’m like, about Y2K. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, well, what is gonna happen? I was like, probably better just to be at home, right? Like, I could probably be like, okay, at home. And then it happened, and then we woke up and we’re like, dang, we should have went to the Rose Parade.

I was just at a house party, and I just remember it being like any other crazy New Year’s night. So I had a blast with it. There was a small concern, but I think after I was like, you know, I’m like, 17 at this point. After I’m like, six beers in, I don’t really care about Y2K anymore. See, that’s how I should have done it. If I would have been at a party, I wouldn’t even have known. I’d be like, oh, it already passed. Yeah, it’s exactly how that night was. Yeah. All right, let’s just get right into Hidden Treasures and Overboard moments.

In this one, I’ll. I’ll kick it off a little bit. I’ll say. I’ll guess I’ll start with the Overboard, which there’s not a lot, because, like I mentioned, this is an archival only sort of documentary. So there’s no new claims, no new information that you’re really learning unless you didn’t live through this or experience it yourself. But there are kind of a few different highlights that I was not expecting in all this. The main one I’ll just get right to. My absolute favorite thing is they’re just interviewing some random lady on the street, I believe, and they’re getting everyone’s opinions about Y2K and all this.

And she makes this comment that everyone is. Is so focused on the advancements in technology, and computer chips are getting 10 times faster and 10 times smaller every 10 years, and. And the Internet comes out, and it’s she mentions that it’s not just a coincidence that Y2K and the Internet and all those things are exploding right at the millennium, and that it’s the millennium itself that is causing the technological advancements and that everyone else is so focused on like, oh, humans are doing such a great job. Let’s pat ourselves on the back. Science is advancing and I don’t know, it’s.

It’s a wild concept to think, like, what if we’re only playing a passive role in this? And the. The advancements in the Internet and Apple and all these things coming out. It’s really the millennium itself that’s doing this. It’s like entering the age of a. In like a. A hippie kind of way, right? But it’s the age of Aquarius that’s actually causing the innovation. Is that stupid to think. I don’t think so. I think it. It made sense to me too, because you’re passing and how far technology jumped, right? Like, I know we had CDs, I know we had like, pagers and cell phones.

But from 99, just watching that and seeing all the old footage, I’m like, we jumped like leaps and bounds and what, 20 years? 20. It was 26 years ago from 1999. And we. And we are way farther from that than if you were to compare 1980 to 1999, right? Like the, The. The technology was still similar. Like, you could see, like, you go from a CD to. It doesn’t exist anymore. It’s all digital. You know what I mean? You go from a flip phone or a little brick Nokia to actually being able to use a touchscreen and be more innovative.

And we’ll touch on this later on the. The other series. But I think accidentally sometimes, like, maybe we did that, right? We have our own little moment of a Age of Aquarius with this. Three documentaries. Because we just picked them randomly to kind of like fit into the theme of January. And they all kind of coincide with this technology boom and this boom of propaganda. Because one of the other things I was really forgot about this was the push of terrorism. So as we got like, you know, hey, the tech boom and all this, we started getting this like, oh, yeah, be careful too.

There also might be a terrorist attack. There’s this guy named Osama bin Laden. Don’t know if you heard of him, but he’s a. A guy you want to look out for. And I was like, oh, my God, I totally forgot about this. You know, it slipped my mind that this push of terrorism because I think, like, the preppers and the. The actual infrastructure shutting down was kind of more scary. And I was like, oh, this was the foreshadowing of. Of Osama. Th. That’s actually my other biggest highlight from this one is out of left field. Or maybe not.

Maybe. Maybe. At the time, I just didn’t realize how big of an influence this was. But this documentary goes into this guy, John Trman, and his brother David Trman, and In the early 1990s, they create this militia of Montana movement as a direct result of the Ruby Ridge standoff. So these are like some OG Ruby Ridge, Waco, okc, sort of, you know, fanatics and maybe the kind that are watching this show and they become kind of like the main role in this. And. And personally, after watching this archival footage, I think that this is what makes the Dragon.

What’s his name, the Jagger. I think that this is what makes the Jagger change his tune a little bit, is that he sees that he himself is personally adding a little bit of weight to this movement. And ultimately they were just concerned about the government overreach. And they started coming out and saying, yeah, this the Jaeger guy, he’s right, man. And here’s what’s going to happen is that the government is going to use a nationwide blackout or some huge tragedy as the result of Y2K, and they’re going to use that to just get more control. They’re just going to take more control over people.

And they were totally right. They were just off by maybe nine months in a year. Right. Like they. They were 100. Right. That something was going to happen. And it was wild. That cut in through here. And it didn’t even make a big point of it. It was just a tiny little clip, but it was a news clip of saying, in addition to, you know, this Y2K bug, people are thinking that. That some radical name, Osama bin Laden, might try and take advantage and cause a terror attack. And I was like, damn, man, they were. This documentary was a little more prophetic and it’s.

It’s less about Y2K and it’s more about the government finding ways to manipulate tragedies for their benefit. But I guess I’ll. I’ll take my tinfoil hat off for just a second, but that’s where my mind was going as I was watching this same thing. Mine went the same exact place. It actually made me look up this article from the New York Post, and they were talking about this whole, like the Y2. And this is recent. Let’s let me tell you when this was. This was released in 2023. So like around the time the film. So they observed it.

But guess what? There’s not only that, there’s a new bug to worry about, the 2038 bug. That’s when the older computers using 32 bit processors will fail to cope with the date and time change at 03:14 07 UTC time on March 19th. This is Peter Jaeger again jumping on this and he’s claiming he again is making a prophecy. So it made me feel like. Is. Is Y2K a test run? You know, was it a little test run for like some of these other things we’ve saw? Just like we talked about the OKC stuff because one of the, the overboard moments, because I, I will say too, because it was almost like a montage, right? It felt like I was watching a huge montage of Y2K.

They just kind of threw things together and like I’m like, I did like some of it, but you could. I never realized how much you can dictate and manipulate with just news clips because they put it into a light of like, hey, the blue team’s good. The Al Gore, the guy that invented the Internet is gonna save everything, you know, and like this just was the birthplace of like climate change and, and things of that nature. So to see Peter back at it, pushing some false narratives like 2038. I didn’t know if we’re gonna call it 2038 K or I’m not sure, but we’ll have to get a catchier name and maybe it’ll work.

He should go for the 237, man. 2037. Because now you got that Kubrick connection. And actually maybe we’re gonna start that. We, we need to be like, yo, Jaeger is, is like you’re off. He’s one year off. Just like they were in, in Osama bin Laden’s attack. Right, but. And the other, I wouldn’t consider this overboard, but I was disappointed and I understand again, since it was archival footage, but there was this one lady that they interviewed when they’re talking about all the different doomsday preppers and she’s like, yeah, well I sold off like all of our assets.

I cashed in my kids, you know, like college fund. We cash in our 401ks. We sold off all, everything and we spent it all on being these homesteaders. And it’s kind of showing you like, okay, yeah, the money went to a lot of work that they had done to become self sufficient, but they were made out of Like Mylar plastic and like little vinyl sheds and stuff. Like something that probably is not still around now in 2025. And I so badly just wanted. At the end of this movie, they’re like, hey, we checked back in on Margaret, whatever her name was, just to see what, you know, what she thought of her decisions, because she was this.

She basically said that, yeah, well, if the world doesn’t end, then we’re going to be in a real tough spot because we sold everything to buy chickens and plants and stuff. And I guess unless you’re willing to just turn into a farmer overnight, you know, then there’s really not. And it kind of shows her. She’s like, yeah, here’s my new chickens. And she’s wearing brand new overalls that still have the creases in them. Like, she should probably just order them off Amazon or something. Pre Amazon, pre day Amazon, Pre Amazon. Yeah. She got them in the regular analog, the series, the Sears catalog.

But also to go off your point, I think she’s. So they sold their business. I think they sold their whole business off. And if it goes into where she’s growing plants and let’s just say the plants do not look great. They’re all drooping over. She’s like, she’s like, good. She’s learning as she’s going, yeah. All right, I’ll let you lead us off on the sink or swim. Where. Where we at on time bomb Y2K? I’m gonna give it a sink. I. I think I could suggest people to watch it. It’s not a hard watch. You can sit there and go through it.

It’s a good watch if you want to kind of remember some of the nostalgia and if you don’t know what happened during that time and the fear mongering, that aspect it’s good of. But the story they told to me was narrated in a way that like. Oh, like the people that are fear mongering. Like, they talked about the fear mongering and then it made it seem like it was all the militias and all the right wingers, but really everything was okay because Bill Clinton took care. Government did the right things. They put the right czars into place and everything’s fine and dandy.

The government saved the day. I didn’t like that aspect of it. Now, as far as to go back in time and see some of these treasures we’ve seen, I love it, but it’s a sink for me. Yeah, I guess I’m. I’m learning with this series in particular sinks and Swims aren’t necessarily the exact same thing as like I recommend you see it or I don’t recommend you see it. For me, I’m also a sink. And that’s cause my evolving criteria here is it that I learned anything at all that I didn’t already know. And not really even the stuff with Peter Dieger.

I feel like I, I remember seeing him on TV because he was the guy that was going around, he was the Chicken Little on all the news. And it was wild, like nostalgic to see some of these articles about, you know, is your computer protected? Little symbols that say Y2K approved. I was like, damn. I remember seeing those things go through the school system, going through my job. I worked at like a Kinkos, so we had all these copiers and, and computers all over the place. And I remember having to go through and like putting stickers and all this stuff.

So it was wild to live through it. Ultimately, man, since nothing happened, since the world just kept turning on, you know, on the January 1st, 2000 at midnight, there’s really nothing to report like the documentary. A big spoiler is just like, hey, a bunch of people got worked up over something that didn’t happen. The end. There you go. That’s. That’s whole summary of the documentary. And if I can summarize it that easily without being like, oh, but by the way, there’s this other cool nuance, then yeah, I guess that makes it a sync for me. What do we got next? General Magic.

This one you actually picked out hit. I’m just gonna say I think everybody’s gonna like this one. This one’s also gonna connect us into the world of technology and jump forward and really where we got all this modern technology from, like smartphones and different things of that nature. One particular company that’s not talked about a lot that I did not even know about until I watched this film. And we’re gonna get deep into some more conspiracy speculation. So check out that one. Head up to paranoidamerican.com kill themockingbirds.com this is another episode of under the Docks. Peace.

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