William Drenttel, "Snapshots at the Edge of the Millennium." The AIGA Journal of Graphic Design, 12:2 (Spring 1994) 16-23.

A Plan for the Millennium. Ten years ago, a group of friends and I used to get together and conspire about starting a Millennium Fund. The idea was that twenty friends would save a certain dollar amount each year during the '90s so that we could take the vacation of our lifetimes over January 1, 2000. For some of us, the idea of this mythic date in the future was the attraction. For others, the allure was a week of food prepared by some world-class chef. One was obsessed with the power of calculating the future: y dollars/year x 20 people x 10 years x prime compounded. Despite all the talk, the Millennium Fund never happened, because we couldn't agree on the friends to be included, on the locale for this dream vacation, on the chef, or on the exit terms should someone want out. We couldn't harness petty anxieties into a package on which twenty friends could agree--our goal was too far in the future for people not to imagine contingencies. In the end, it made us anxious.

Depression in 2003. The idea of the millennium haunts me. It gets closer and my anxiety grows. It's now close enough that I have visions of it receding already--I imagine being really depressed in the year 2003. I'm reminded of Italo Calvino, the Italian writer who died suddenly in 1985 while writing a series of lectures collected in Six Memos for the Next Millennium. One passage especially captures this anxiety: "We live in an unending rainfall of images... These are images stripped of the inner inevitability that ought to mark every image as form and as meaning, as a claim on the attention and as a source of possible meanings. Much of the cloud of visual images fades at once, like the dreams that leave no trace in the memory, but what does not fade is a feeling of alienation and discomfort. But maybe this lack of substance is not to be found in images or in language alone, but in the world itself. The plague strikes also at the lives of people and the history of nations. It makes all histories formless, random, confused, with neither beginning nor end."

A Collector of Clippings. I'm a collector of millenniana: predictions, articles, book reviews, little clippings of our culture chugging forward. Recently, The New York Times ran a story titled "The Arts Hurtle (Limp?) Toward the Millennium." An icon of '60s idealism, The Whole Earth Catalog, announced in the same issue that it will publish a millennium edition. At work, we sent mechanicals to a firm called Marketing 2000. I open a magazine, and there's an ad for RL 2000, Ralph Lauren's line of pseudo-modernist furniture. Then a friend called for advice about a new client, Millennium New Media. The coming turn of this century is already a lens through which we see ourselves, and I fear the image is blurred. The millennium has become a meaningless modifier, a cheap metaphor for importance and easy access to the stature of history. I believe the millennium is about the long span of history, not this week's predictions. It is my hope that the millennium will be a time for contemplation--a pause in our lives.

An Aside. Designers will give the millennium its feel, its visible, tangible forms. You can imagine the network television logos already. We will design logos for more companies contextualized by adding "millennium" or "2000" to their names. We will promote things with the millennium as a theme. All this is expected, I suppose--just the natural course of commerce. It's also sad.

Some Definitions. A millennium is 1000 years. The millennium, in its popular usage, is the end of this 1000 year period. Thus, the millennium wavers between being an unimaginable expanse and an event compressed into one day. William Safire finds a precise definition in The World Almanac Guide to Good World Usage: "The first century began Jan.1 of the year 1 A.D. It follows that the twentieth century will not end until December 31, 2000, and that the twenty-first century will begin on Jan. 1, 2001. Not, repeat not, January 1, 2000, as the common assumption has it." Safire dismisses the accuracy of this definition as "bean-counting," noting that its adherents are going to miss the party.

Two Big Parties, 12/31/99. The British Airways Concorde is already booked for a special flight on New Year's Eve, 1999. You attend an end-of-the-millennium bash in London and at 12:01 A.M., now in the year 2000, you hop in a limo for Heathrow. At 1:00 A.M. the Concorde departs. It lands at J.F.K. three hours later: 4:00 A.M. But, with five hours time difference, it is really only 11:00 P.M. in the year 1999 in New York. Another limo rushes you to Manhattan for another millennium bash. Two sides of the Atlantic and two millennia in one evening is a party I want to miss.

Space & Cells. Like the progress of physics and astronomy in the past century, the contemplation of the expanse of the universe, or of its opposite, of cells and atoms, comes down to ideas that seek to capture this expanse, to know it, to hold on to it. Perhaps the real millennium is the space on either side of this line, of this particular day in time. If Einstein and physics are on this side (the 20th century), then undoubtedly biology and the DNA map of human life are on the other side (the 21st century). The test-tube child recently born to a 59-year-old woman is clearly a child of the next millennium.

My Father. My father has colon cancer. It has a high probability of being hereditary. In the last month, DNA researchers have discovered a test that can isolate the hereditary gene. Sometime soon my doctor will be able to say that I have it or I don't have it. If I have it, early testing makes this a generally treatable disease. I feel closer to the millennium when I imagine that science can find the potential in me of a disease that is in my father's body.

Map Making. In his book Mapping the Next Millennium, Stephen Hall tackles the science of mapping: weather, the brain, DNA structures, mathematical chaos, galaxies and, of course, the Big Bang. At the end of this millennium, the moral choices posed by new technologies "crowd the margins of almost any map we might admire, regardless of its information, regardless of its beauty." He reminds us, "It is impossible to look at a map of the world from the sixteenth century, the century that most resembles ours in the degree of exploration and intellectual ferment, without seeing it as a record of failed dreams. It is impossible to contemplate these modern maps, of atoms and chromosomes and galaxies, without sensing the same promise and without fearing the same past."

The Millennium Descending. A high-profile presence of the millennium has been the New York staging of Angels in America, Part I: Millennium Approaches. It's partly about AIDS, so critical response has been less than critical. Jack Kroll of Newsweek cannot restrain himself: "Angels in America is the broadest, deepest, most searching play of our time." Not to be outdone, Frank Rich of The New York Times calls Part 2: Perestroika "a true millennial work of art." A millennial work about the millennium? Now I've seen this play. It has scope. And it has angels descending. Milton Glaser even did the logo. But it's overdone, commercial Broadway theater. I want something else from the millennium. In theater, I'd settle for Beckett. (Clearly the play of the millennium, Beckett's Waiting for Godot was the play chosen by Susan Sontag to stage in Sarajevo.)

Selling the Future. A thoughtful observation by Mark Dolliver in Adweek: "Our mania for owning whatever's up to the minute is in for a shock when we cease to count in mere decades. Our avid consumerism will have to contend with the realization that even the youngest and healthiest of us will live to see only the first glimpse of the millennium we're entering. As the 2000s arrive and we see a fresh epoch before us, there's bound to be something humbling about the sense it'll give of the long, long sweep of human experience."

Laughing at the Future. This spring, Print will publish a parody titled "Hoping for the Millennium." It anticipates "pompous summations and apocalyptic fears beginning to accumulate like wildebeest at a watering hole." Leading designers have been asked to write Spy-like articles on silly topics such as: "A sendup of new recycled paper made from human excrement (i.e., 100% post-consumer waste)." Confronted with the millennium, we get parody in advance of criticism.

A Concrete Future. The millennium is barely less far into the future than the year 1984, with its Orwellian associations, is into the past. At this late date, the millennium represents a concrete future, not the abstract future of science fiction. Predictions that begin "In the year 2000..." do not evoke what they did just a few years ago. In May 1991, the World Health Organization predicted that the number of AIDS cases worldwide would increase from 450,000 to five million by the year 2000. I remember that this prediction was shocking. Today, I don?t assume the future will be so dreadful--the year 2000 is almost here, after all. I called WHO to check the current statistic: 2,500,000 cases in 1993, expected to rise to 12-18 million cases cumulatively by 2000. Instead of a tenfold increase, the reality is a thirty- to fortyfold increase. By 2000, the cumulative number of HIV-positive cases will be 30-40 million. The non-negotiable truth of these statistics is just cause for anxiety: tens of millions of people will die from this disease in the first century of the next millennium.

Hanging Your Hat on the Millennium. Too many people are only hanging their hats on the millennium, so to speak. Two random examples: A new book about the contemporary artist Jonathan Lasker is titled Telling the Tales of Painting, About Abstraction at the End of the Millennium. Here, the word "millennium" is used to lend scope and importance to a book about abstract painting in the last ten years. A piece in Esquire by Phil Patton about corporations turning to design schools for new product-design ideas is titled "Style for the Millennium." The article is really about the search for new design ideas (not style), but invoking the millennium gives it weight.

A Thousand Faces. The millennium is taking on a thousand faces. The images include toppling monuments, things biblical, New Year's Eve parties, environmental disasters, maybe the next Sarajevo. It has its own vocabulary: it slouches, hurtles and wobbles; it's about culmination and revitalization. It is an idea, a notion, a barrier, a countdown, a launching pad, an end and a beginning. The idea of the year 2000 is evocative in its elusiveness.

Fin de Siècle. At a recent dinner party, someone suggested that the indulgent '80s were our fin de siècle. This view assumes that our end of the century is like 1900 in Vienna or Paris. I think we are, in our fin de siècle, experiencing something closer to the paralysis in 1800 when Europe was filled with anxiety at the standoff of the Napoleonic Wars. We have the superficial stability of the end of the Cold War, but anxiety about almost everything. One knows that wars are coming, that the environment is at a crisis point, and that order is an illusion. Thus, Angela Carter's widely quoted epitaph: "The fin is coming early this siècle."

Dread and Dire Prophecy. In The New York Times Magazine, James Atlas defines this dread: "The year 2000 fast approaches, and millennial doom is in the air. Global warming, nuclear proliferation, chaos in Eastern Europe. Even the notion of post is over. Post-modernism, post-history, post-culture (to borrow George Steiner's term)--we're beyond that now." He asks, "What follows post?" and cites Harvard professor Samuel Huntington's name for the latest eschatological craze: "endism."'

The End of History. Francis Fukuyama was our first 1990s proponent of endism. He posits a post-Hegelian, post-Marxist view of the world wherein history comes to rest in the success of political liberalism over the challenges of communism. In Fortune, he exhorts us all to participate in bringing about this end: "The spread of liberal democracy does not happen automatically or in a linear fashion...It is American and European business, acting in its own long-term self-interest, that will have to provide the East with the wherewithal to rejoin us at the end of history."

More Endism. In Wired, the multimedia bible of the future, Brenda Laurel comments: "Immersive technology represents, on the one hand, both the grail at the end of the history of cinema and on the other hand, the beacon that draws creative energies toward the culmination of computing...In the world of immersion, authorship is no longer the transmission of experience, but rather the construction of utterly personal experiences." I'm intrigued by the idea of new forms of authorship, but I don't believe these new forms will supplant traditional narrative approaches--or result in the end of the history of cinema.

A Bandwagon of Endings. Discipline by discipline, everything seems to be ending. First history, then, cinema. Arthur Danto predicts the end of art. Bill McKibben predicts the end of nature. Time magazine even ponders the end of Freud: "The collapse of Marxism, the other grand unified theory that shaped and rattled the 20th century, is unleashing monsters. What inner horrors or fresh dreams might arise should the complex Freudian monument topple as well?" Why is no one defining what comes next? History, it should seem, is not like physics: there are no voids.

Should We Plant Crops in the Year 1999? Many modern historians have found models for understanding the flow of history in generational thinking. In these models, something special happens at the end of decades and centuries, and, of course, at the end of the millennium. Henri Focillon's study of the year 1000 is a case in point. In the year 999, farmers in Europe did not even plant crops, so sure were they that the end of the world was upon them. He refers to "a diffuse feeling of the evening of the world" in the period before the year 1000.

Some Doubts about Endism. I wonder if all this endism isn't just plain wrong. The past fifty years in Europe have seen incredible progress, even fundamental restructurings of political and economic life--and still Europe is not civilized enough to stop Bosnia from being the site of 200,000 deaths. Despite tremendous change, European culture has again fallen prey to the same nationalism that led to the two world wars. History is not ending, it is just taking new forms in repeating itself.

The Millennium is Upon Us. To this writer, the environment, science and technology are three distinct areas in which the millennium is truly upon us, where the sweep of history is about to enter another era:

1. The Environment. The environment is clearly at a crisis point. The natural world is disappearing so quickly that scientists are already past the point of thinking of preserving it--they are now thinking in terms of managing what's left. In effect, we already live in a zoo: we are looking in at and feeding what's left of nature. Here, taking the long view, a certain amount of doom seems appropriate, but speaking of the end of nature doesn't get us very far.

2. Science. Modern science seems beyond our grasp--even for most educated people. Thinking of science as one generic field is hardly equal in intellectual rigor to the reality of its specialization, and understanding even one small part of its many arenas is daunting. Frankly, most of us just don't know anything, despite being surrounded by information. We spout recycling truisms without understanding the chemistry (bleaching and chlorine processes) of papermaking or the economics (not the art of moneymaking, but the science of economics) of restructuring the national distribution system of wood, pulp, and trash. We face decisions about cancer and infertility and depression, but we get our biology lessons from pop magazine columns. We have to learn more to know enough to participate in these changes.

3. Technology. For 500 years, the printed word has been the world's primary means of communication. This is no longer true: we are already beyond books, and quickly moving beyond computers and television. Yet, the real evolution in communications will involve more complicated changes than doing home shopping or reading newspapers on the computer. This hope for the information superhighway is unflinchingly championed by Al Gore: "The printing press made possible the modern nation-state and representative democracy by giving citizens of a large geographic area enough civic knowledge to participate in decision making. If the printing press did that, then how much richer in spirit can our country be if our people are empowered with the knowledge that these high-capacity computer networks can distribute?" I think this view is naive: that information becomes knowledge is not a given on this side of the millennium.

The Designer's Role. If the three categories above are, in fact, areas of millennial change, it is worth noting in this journal that all involve education and commerce colliding to create new markets for communication. Most designers embrace the technology that will produce this communication; this is the easy part. However, few of us are prepared, in terms of knowledge, to grapple with the complex issues that will form the content of this communication. The risk is that we lose our culture--that sphere where we share things and remember things--in the process of creating commerce. If the information superhighway is just about selling things, then life will not be better on the other side of the millennium; it will just be full of more things. This thought is echoed by Karrie Jacobs and Tibor Kalman in an essay in The Edge of the Millennium: "So, in the apocalyptic spirit of the millennium, we are calling for the end of design... What we are calling for is the end of a design profession that has, as its sole purpose, the propagation of style devoid of content, form devoid of function, and commerce devoid of culture."

Civilized Discourse on the Internet. Two recent articles in The New Republic and The New Yorker (by Robert Wright on the Internet and John Seabrook on E-mail, respectively) describe the surprisingly civilized discourse on these new networks. Some people are writing letters again and reading their mail. It may not yet be the end of contemplation or culture. As John Seabrook notes, "...today one hears about shopping, banking and renting movies on the information highway. These are all possible ways of making money, of course, but the point of the information highway, it seems to me, is that it offers a new way of talking to other people."

Birthday Parties. In the midst of this anxiety, an unlikely number of cultural institutions are having birthday parties; it is a cultural countdown to the new millennium. Both the Wildlife Conservation Society (the renamed New York Zoological Society and Bronx Zoo) and the New York Public Library will be 100 years old in 1995. The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum will be 100 years old in 1997. Most striking, for designers, is the Library of Congress turning 200 in the year 2000. These birthdays suggest that something was in the air--an energy, a hopefulness--at the end of other centuries. The Library of Congress anniversary, at the end of our own century, is an occasion worthy of the millennium, especially with the printed word under fire from all sides. In its history, the Library has come to symbolize a Jeffersonian legacy of democracy founded on knowledge. I believe the fate of the printed word will be played out here, in the discrepancy between information and knowledge.

New Year's 1994. I came across another millennium clipping, this one an advertisement for the Hotel Millenium in New York City: "Celebrate the New Year with 5-mile views, 12 long-stemmed roses, 1 lavish upper floor room. $189. Stay above the maddening crowds..." So I spent New Year's Eve there. The roses were missing. I took a pause and didn't think about the millennium.

Fin de Siècle
by Rachel Hadas

Impossible to read a paragraph
These days and not to stumble over some
Reference to imminent millennium:

Sensation less of drowning than of draining.
Not one of us who wash around the sluice
But feels the suction. In a recent letter

F. writes of having "finally turned the corner
Into the postmodern," and I picture
A brisk back being turned upon a life

Left stranded on that corner ever after.
Future was once horizon; now it's angle
(Cavafy's angle to the universe,

Said Forster). People also speak of cusps:
Peaks, monstrous teeth or moons or mountain ranges.
Near you I sense no draining,

No corner turned, climacteric, finale,
No grandiose gesturings toward 2000.
It's January; and a few green leaves

Shadow your light eyes like the hope of summer,
A picnic at the swimming hole, a walk
Among wildflowers at the quarry's edge.


From Unending Dialogue by Rachel Hadas. Faber and Faber, 1992.

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