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Ccru Datastream 9 - The Year 2000 Will Happen
A Y2K datastream that recasts the millennium bug as a struggle over calendars, prophecy, and chronopolitical control.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The datastream insists that Y2K is not merely a technical bug. It turns the two-digit computer calendar into an argument about who gets to define historical time and whether Gregorian order can survive a digital mutation of dates.
It works by parodying leaked memos, security language, and millennial panic while sliding into a far stranger thesis: software calendars and eschatological time are already entangled. Bureaucratic prose becomes the vehicle for a theory-fiction of temporal insurgency.
This is one of the clearest surviving Warwick-era examples of the CCRU treating infrastructure as metaphysics. It matters because it shows how calendrics, prophecy, and systems administration could be folded into one conceptual scene.
How to read this text
Skip the mailing-list header and begin where the memo starts. The strongest reading path is to follow the opposition between technical remediation and chronopolitical mutation.
Watch for how official language gets twisted into speculative doctrine. The text is easiest to understand when read as both satire of Y2K management and serious reflection on calendric power.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
What is at issue for both groups is what they insist upon calling a quote cyberspace calendar. This is composed of the 2digit dating system which, if left uncorrected, is likely to produce all the delightful disasters with which our antiY2K propaganda has familiarised us .
Definition · paragraph 1
As we had hoped, the socalled Millennium Bug problem is generally being treated as a merely technical matter, in no way involving issues of calendrics and temporality. Agents need hardly be reminded of the two principal Y2K + groupings and their affinities.
Definition · paragraph 1
Agents need hardly be reminded of the two principal Y2K + groupings and their affinities. But since the threat they pose is highly significant, it may be worth rehearsing their key commitments one more time. What is at issue for both groups is what they insist upon calling a quote cyberspace calendar.
Definition · paragraph 1
This is composed of the 2digit dating system which, if left uncorrected, is likely to produce all the delightful disasters with which our antiY2K propaganda has familiarised us . But the catastrophe both groups are interested in concerns time itself. They treat the occupation and dissemination of the computer calendar as a quote ch
Stakes · paragraph 2
us to try out some interesting political arrangements pretty much unimaginable given normal circumstances. It's difficult to imagine many other contingencies that would allow us to usher in the new millennium in conditions of martial law. We can't let apocalypse happen by accident.
Appears in sections
Warwick and Formation Primary section
How the CCRU emerged around Warwick, Sadie Plant, Nick Land, and an unstable collaborative scene.