Millennium Memes

Nothing makes you feel like a digital fossil quite like remembering the Y2K panic. That Best Buy sticker warning you to turn off your computer before midnight on 12/31/99 is a relic from when we genuinely thought computers might implode because programmers saved two digits on dates to conserve precious kilobytes. Kids today will never understand the existential dread of wondering if planes would fall from the sky because computers couldn't handle "00" as a year. Meanwhile, those of us who stockpiled canned goods and printed our bank statements are looking at Gen Z's TikTok Y2K aesthetic like battle-scarred veterans. We didn't survive the dial-up modem sounds just to become vintage meme material.