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It was a dream come true. A dream you didn’t even know you had. You walk through the doors of the gymnasium (or the event hall decorated like a gym) to the dulcet sounds of Britney Spears (when she was good), Blink-182 (when you still genuinely believed they were good), and The Blueprint-era Jay-Z. Everything is tinsel shiny. The bucket hats are extra fuzzy. You can probably smuggle a whole keg in the folds of your JNCOs, but luckily there’s no need.
In high school, you scoffed at Armageddon. You know better now, if only because it’s so much more ever-present than it was then. Unlike most nights, when you just simply swallow down your anxiety and get on with it, tonight it still feels avoidable.
And behind it all, warbling in the background, the panicked protestations of the culture industry. No! We’re the ones who are supposed to be shoving all this down your throats! You can’t find a different meaning in it all! That’s not allowed!
The world isn’t ending. It ended a long time ago. All of this is just prettied-up wreckage. But at least you’re among people who can admit it. And you’re all itching to dance.
I didn’t go to the DSA-LA Y2K Prom. My partner and I have a ten-week-old son, and much as we would have loved to slap a “teen pregnancy” sticker on his forehead before strapping him in a papoose over my favorite crushed velvet tuxedo, it simply wasn’t in the cards. So no, despite being a dues-paying member, and having many friends who went, I didn’t attend.
I wish I had for sure. If only because I would have loved to see what some were so afraid of. When the California Post got wind of the event, its writers had their keyboards at the ready. In the end, all they could muster was repeated use of the tired “socialists are selling tickets!” trope, then finding something to panic over in the fact that funds would be going to organizing efforts. Boring.
On Fox Business’ Varney & Co, melting wax statue Stuart Varney brought on Temu Charlie Kirk to speak about the “malignant force” of socialism that seems to be winning so many elections lately. The two spent most of their time trying to scare-monger about Hasan Piker and wondering why more mainstream Democrats aren’t denouncing the far-left spectre (plenty are of course, highlighting how hopping on the Red Scare bandwagon will do little to disarm the right). But they took about thirty seconds to performatively scratch their head about the DSA-LA prom:
I think they think it’s retro and cool. I think it’s cringe, all right? It’s going to be a masked celebration – if you could even call it that – of a bunch of people that are hypochondriacs [Note: footage of the event clearly shows a “masks optional” event] with purple and green hair and asking for points of personal privilege. I cannot imagine a worse place to be. But that does sort of capture the ethos of the younger wing of the DSA party, unfortunately. I’m sure it’ll be well attended [Note: it was].
Fast forward a few days later, after all the booze was drunk and the volunteers had swept up the streamers. On Fox’s The Big Weekend Show, anchor Johnny “Joey” Jones (fucking really?) publicly struggled with the concept of irony only to have it calmly explained to him by co-host Tomi Lahren, who “loves” Y2K culture and knows all Millennials identify with it.
Lahren, for her part, is oddly transfixed by dorks, and it’s a compulsion she finds both shameful and inextricable. How do we know this? Because she kept calling the attendees at the Y2K Prom “dorks” and “weirdos” with such vitriol it sounded like she was trying to convince herself.
We know what to make of this by now, because we know how projection works, and we know it’s a common feature on the modern right. Every accusation is an admission, a self-loathing gob of spit hocked at the mirror. Every snide remark, every calculated giggle, every frothy sneer these people lob at their opponents, tell us more about the knots they twist themselves into behind closed doors, how cruel-but-pathetically-milquetoast their desires are. The biggest difference between us and them? We have the good sense to freely admit that we’re perverts.
That Fox News talking heads can only resort to calling socialists losers and dorks comes from a curious inability to comment on even the most basic policy. Universal healthcare, unions, ending the forever wars, and making everyday life more fundamentally democratic; these are more popular and attractive than ever. This is not to be smug, or to say that the right is suddenly rendered defenseless. But on the rhetorical level, it’s fascinating that they think the only leverage they feel they have is to mock the aesthetic, and they can’t even do that without making themselves look culturally blinkered.
Why would an organization composed heavily of Millennials and Zoomers want to throw a Y2K Prom? It’s not difficult to understand, particularly in a cultural landscape so stuck in its own feedback loop. All one has to look at is the (not so) recent vaporwave phenomenon for an example.
It doesn’t take expertise in hauntology to get that there is something more than nostalgia in the reappropriation of past cultures. There is an attempt to reckon with the past, to disarm its catastrophes, to picture what could be if events took a different direction. And yes, it can be fun. Those of us old enough to have been in high school during the low-level cultural panic over the Y2K bug remember it as deliciously weird. Society was on the verge of collapse because computers missed some numbers. It was laughable, but also the font of any number of sitcom plotlines good and bad, stories and scenarios written in our heads.
Society didn’t collapse. New Year’s Eve turned to New Year’s Day, and the new millennium was ahead of us. Complete with all the slick, flat, wide-opens of a planet increasingly interconnected into the rubric of globalization. History was over. The future was ahead of us. Until it wasn’t. We all remember what came next. The 9/11 attacks, and the beginning of wars that would grind tens of thousands of us into the dirt. Then the 2007 financial collapse, neoliberalism’s roosting chickens, freezing the economic fortunes of young people in stasis.
The election of Trump, the shattered illusion that the center will hold, the rise of a far-right manically embracing the spectre of apocalypse, a global pandemic signifying ecological collapse. The 90s seem attractive by comparison, and as I’ve written elsewhere weren’t as bad as we make the decade out to be. Y2K seems to be the last time we were able to avoid the world’s end. When we could play with its signifiers and imagine different points of departure from a culture oversaturated with itself.
This isn’t difficult to grasp. If anyone at Fox does, they aren’t being honest about it. More than likely they just can’t. Strange considering how much of their own vision is based on a fervent return to a past where the queers stayed in the closet, where the black and brown knew their places, where women were seen not heard, and workers were expected to just go along with nuking the rest of the world. That era won’t return, at least not in all the grandeur they hope for. Worse disasters are waiting to fill in for it.
Header image is from Fox Business.