15 Jan 2025
This is history: Colette Shade on Y2K
My favourite book about the internet is by the Canadian author Douglas Coupland. In his 2014 book, Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent, Coupland asks, “Where did the sense of invention go—the sense of futurity—the sense that by working in tech, you were somehow building a better tomorrow, a smarter tomorrow, a more democratic tomorrow?"
Colette Shade begins her book, Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything (Essays on the Future That Never Was), in a period in which it was generally felt that by working in tech, you were somehow building a better tomorrow, a smarter tomorrow, and a more democratic tomorrow. (Plus ça change!)
In Y2K, Colette asks, “What was the Y2K Era and why are we still living in its shadow?”
Y2K’s essays—on subjects as varied as blobby furniture and see-through consumer electronics; VOGUE magazine and disordered eating; and McMansions, Hummers and Starbucks—explore this question.
We talk:
3:33 : "I want to write a book. What should I write about?" - Colette
4:04: Why 1998 was the best year of Colette's life
5:18: On being a kid in the '90s (Pokémon, riding your bike, watching TV)
6:00: The Dot-com Bubble in the 1990s
6:35: Netscape mentioned
6:55: "There was no understanding that [the internet] was a place where you could make a lot of money." - Colette
8:00: Colette's uncle got rich when his company was bought by Nokia
10:29: This meant that Colette went to college debt-free, without student loans
10:58: It's hard to write nonfiction about current events because you have to stop when it's time to publish, and current events keep happening. But Y2K feels timely, nonetheless.
13:27: The 90s/2000s purity culture is now repackaged as trad culture/retvrn culture
14:40: Colette wrote about taking a sex-positive sex ed class that contrasts from the typical way Americans learn sex ed; and, as Colette argues, played into the culture war now happening online and in real life
17:38: Colette says that the culture war is a proxy war
19:38: "The Christian right has a great enemy. It's gays! It's all those slutty women!" - Colette
20:25: This contrasts with her parents' worldview as secular liberals
22:12 "The people who want to ban books... that feels accessible to them, whereas gaining control of their economic conditions does not." - Colette
22:48: "Your body. My choice."
24:44: Donald Trump wants to make Canada the 51st state (wtf??)
25:41: 25% tariff
26:35 McMansions and Hummers as symbols of the post-9/11, pre-2008 bubble
27:40 "Americans don't always have the stomach" to think critically about their history - Colette
28:23: Colette on Greg Grandin's Pulitzer Prize-winning book The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (2019)
29:35: Colette paraphrases Grandin's argument on the cause of the American Revolution, which gave Americans "a mandate for endless expansion" (sound familiar?)
33:15: Colette compares American expansion to the PlayStation game Katamari Damacy
35:04: America First
36:12: Cyberspace as a frontier
36:34: Early internet users saw themselves as Cyber Cowboys and settlers in "a place where they could be free," says Colette
37:55: Property ownership and the American Dream
39:00: The 2008 subprime mortgage crisis marked "a real break in American history," says Colette
40:45: The information superhighway
40:55: Olivia Rodrigo asks first dates whether they like Elon Musk
41:21: "The years start coming and they don't stop coming." - Smash Mouth
42:17: What advice would Colette give her teenage self?
Buy Y2K: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/y2k-colette-shade
Colette's website: http://www.coletteshade.com/
My website: https://www.annasoper.ca/
Music:
The Sound of dial-up Internet by wtermini on Pixabay
Spirit Blossom by RomanBelov on Pixabay
Fighter [No Vocals] - punk rock by 22941069 on Pixabay
......
Teen People is recorded in Kingston/Katarokwi, the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee and the Huron-Wendat.
