The Journal of Commerce
August 20, 1999
Page 9
 

Praise the Lord and pass the windup radio

By JOHN HALL, Washington bureau chief of Media General News Service

[NOTE: this article also appeared in the 19 August issues of several newspapers, to include The Newport Daily News, The Tampa Tribune, and The Richmond Times Dispatch]

On the way to the Y2K conference, I heard a radio report that some Canadians had invented windup AM radios to serve remote parts of Africa. They've ended up making a mint selling them to people here and elsewhere in the industrial world who think we're headed for apocalypse Jan. 1.

Sorry, but everybody is simply too busy and getting too rich to have a millennial catastrophe right now. If you're determined to have one, some folks figure they might as well make some money selling you windup radios. Ah, enterprise.

It is hard to get a read on this situation.

Over at the Naval War College, they'll curl your hair with worst-case scenarios--millennial meltdowns, millennial ""mania'' of stockpiling and hoarding, panic in the financial markets, rolling brownouts, mass transit disruptions, investor panic, food-supply failures.

The colorful Nostradamus of the Navy, Dr. Thomas Barnett, even has written of the potential for ""Littleton-like shooting tragedies, and/or Waco-like standoffs between authorities and heavily armed religious cults.''

But if that represents the state of mind among the brass--and Barnett carefully disclaims any connection between his report and the official Defense Department position, whatever it may be on a given day--it couldn't be more removed from the cooler-than-thou attitude from Surf City.

The president of the Internet Society, Donald Heath, and the chairman of the president's Council on Year 2000 Conversion, John Koskinen, called a news conference this week to reassure everyone that the Internet will make a successful transition to the year 2000.  While they said it was impossible to guarantee that some of the networks that make up the Internet won't experience temporary problems rolling over to the new date, the Internet is so redundant that it will just keep on giving you mail while you forage for berries.

The one problem the cataclysmic and the cool can agree on is that at about 12:01 a.m. in the New Year, there are going to be a whale of a lot of failure-to-connect warnings on computer screens as every teen-ager in the world competes to be the first to send e-mail in 2000. But few are expected to die from a busy signal.

Beyond that, there doesn't seem to be any technical problem with Y2K that armies of consultants and technicians aren't already surveying and poking to death.  Besides the Internet, all kinds of work has been done on defense systems, the power grid, airline safety and most of the other electronically based systems that could break down for one reason or another.

Less is known about the mass psychology of this event and the run-up to it.  It is here that Barnett and his colleagues at the Naval War College are trying to make a contribution.  The concept is that if there really is going to be big trouble around the time of the millennial change, the Navy needs to be on top of it.

The Barnett draft report suggests that it isn't just the technology, but how people perceive this event that will drive what happens. Some of the public perception is totally irrational, but that doesn't make it any less realistic.

The Barnett draft suggests we're going to get some clues as early as Labor Day as to what kind of trouble could be stirred.  Will people and even firms begin stockpiling in anticipation of trouble at the end of the year?  Will there be more loose talk from businesses and governments--like Virgin Airlines' statement that it intended to give employees New Year's Day off--that convince people something must be wrong?

Right now, Barnett says the majority working on his project think investors won't panic for several reasons--principally, that the 1997-98 global financial crisis was a dry run for Y2K and the markets have been vaccinated.  Also, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan is still around and will print money if necessary.

The Barnett report says "The public desire for mass celebration should be accommodated to the greatest extent possible.''

So have a good time. And if the electricity goes off and there's a battery shortage, we can all keep in touch from the forest by our windup Canadian radios.