The Guide #219:: Don’t panic! Revisiting the millennium’s wildest cultural predictions
I love revisiting articles from around the turn of the millennium, a fascinatingly febrile period when everyone – but journalists especially – briefly lost the run of themselves,It seems strange now to think that the ticking over of a clock from 23:59 to 00:00 would prompt such big feelings, of excitement, terror, of end-of-days abandon, but it really did (I can remember feeling them myself as a teenager, especially the end-of-days-abandon bit,)Of course, some of that feeling came from the ticking over of the clock itself: the fears over the Y2K bug might seem quite silly today, but its potential ramifications – planes falling out of the sky, power grids failing, entire life savings being deleted in a stroke – would have sent anyone a bit loopy,There’s a very good podcast, Surviving Y2K, about some of the people who responded particularly drastically to the bug’s threat, including a bloke who planned to sit out the apocalypse by farming and eating hamsters,It does seem funny – and fitting – in the UK, column inches about this existential threat were equalled, perhaps even outmatched, by those about a big tarpaulin in Greenwich.
Honestly, it’s staggering how animated so many people were by the Millennium Dome: I get that it was a colossal New Labour white elephant, but did it really merit such breathless, teeth-gnashing coverage? (Click a few pages into the Guardian’s millennium tag for a sense of the collective mania at the time,) Especially when you consider that its eventual fate, rather than being razed to the ground or shot into space, was to be turned into a successful, if soulless, entertainment venue,Alongside worrying about the Dome, and the small matter of the world ending, the millennium offered a rare opportunity for grand reflection – on the thousand years of history just gone – and wild prognostication on every possible topic: politics, religion, sport, technology and, of course, culture,Looking back at past predictions and pointing out how wrong they were is a pretty cheap sport, like shooting Mystic Megs in a barrel,But given that, earlier this year, we looked at how music, film and TV had changed over the past 25 years, it seems instructive to see what people thought those next 25 years and beyond would look like.
And what’s fascinating is how close, but also how far away, predictions of the future of those forms were.Take film.Around the turn of the millennium, the major disrupting force in cinema was the arrival of digital projectors, which it was confidently predicted, would end the century-old use of celluloid.There were countless articles fretting about the ramifications of this shift, both aesthetically and in a business sense and, in a way, those articles were right to be concerned: by the mid 2010s, 90% of movies were shot digitally rather than on film.They did, though, rather miss the wood for the trees: the streaming revolution and struggles faced by cinemas would make the digital/film face-off look a minuscule issue by comparison.
And, anyway, plenty of directors have made it their mission to keep the film flame alive – see Brady Corbet dragging his hefty 70mm canisters into Venice to premiere The Brutalist (pictured above).At the turn of the millennium, the TV industry was worried about a gamechanging innovation too: personal video recorders (PVRs) like TiVo, which they feared would completely destroy the ad market by allowing audiences to record shows and whiz through commercials.They were a big enough deal for author Michael Lewis, of Moneyball and The Big Short fame, to devote several thousand words to the subject in the New York Times.Of course those recorders were merely a stop on the journey towards total on-demand TV offered by Netflix et al, but some smart people were already aware of the direction of travel, like one director of a PVR company who was quoted in a Guardian feature on the trend.“Television schedules will shift from a time-based paradigm to one based purely on content,” he predicted.
“People will operate channels according to their own interests,It will have a dramatic effect on those general channels which are ad funded,Maybe this is the end for scheduling,”More than any other cultural medium, the music industry was already vaguely aware of the changes it was facing – this despite the fact that 2000 would become the most successful ever year for CD sales,In the autumn of 1999, the Observer asked a panel of musicians, label staff and DJs for their predictions, and there were some impressively accurate calls on where music was heading – Parlophone A&R Keith Wozencroft noted the possibility of making an album from your bedroom, and a decade before Boiler Room, Paul Oakenfold said that he was already doing live shows online.
Pete Waterman’s crystal ball must have been fogging over when he predicted that people would start buying their music “not via the Internet, as most people think, but digital TV – the digital shopping services will blossom in the next five years”,But he was on the money in his claim that “music markets worldwide will converge”, citing the success of Ricky Martin as evidence for a global appetite for Latin pop, an appetite that, as proved by the likes of Bad Bunny, is just as strong today,Of course a whopping great cultural innovation on the horizon that was completely missed by all the prognosticators was podcasts: the term would be coined only a few years later (in the pages of the Guardian, I’m contractually obliged to remind you),And there’s no mention in any of the turn-of-the-millennium predictions of what will possibly be the biggest change of all for culture this century and beyond: artificial intelligence,That’s a wave that is still breaking, and no doubt plenty of the predictions being made about its impact on film, TV and music will be wrong (I’m less than convinced by the idea that we’ll use AI to star in our own movies alongside Marilyn Monroe, for example).
And of course, in 25 years there will be people writing about how way off the predictions made today turned out to be – well, if we’re not in a post-apocalyptic wasteland eating hamster meat by then,Sign up to The GuideGet our weekly pop culture email, free in your inbox every Fridayafter newsletter promotionIf you want to read the complete version of this newsletter please subscribe to receive The Guide in your inbox every Friday
Soon-to-be-axed 7am Manchester-London train will still run – but without passengers
The good news for rail travel between Manchester and London is that a morning train will continue to link England’s biggest cities in under two hours. The bad news: passengers will no longer be able to get onboard.The rail regulator has axed one of Britain’s fastest and most lucrative intercity services, the 7am Avanti West Coast from Manchester Piccadilly to London Euston, as part of a timetable shake-up that will take effect in mid-December.What will heap on frustration for passengers, as well as the operator, is that the exact same train service will continue to run between the stations from 7am each weekday: crewed, fast and empty.The train and staff still need to travel from Manchester as they are rostered to operate subsequent services out of Euston on the new December timetable, under rail’s complex planning
Jetstar cancels 90 domestic flights across Australia after global Airbus A320 recall
Jetstar has grounded some of its Airbus fleet in Australia and cancelled domestic and international flights after the aerospace manufacturer ordered software changes to thousands of its A320 planes following a mid-air incident.Ninety Jetstar flights were affected on Saturday with disruption expected to continue until Sunday, the airline’s head of flying operations, Tyrone Simes, told reporters at Melbourne airport.Airbus said on Friday it was ordering an immediate software change on a “significant number” of its bestselling A320 family of aircraft, a narrow-body plane which is also used by Virgin Australia and Qantas.Simes said on Saturday Airbus had issued Jetstar with a maintenance directive to reverse a software upgrade that had been installed on some planes and resulted in a malfunction.He said 34 of Jetstar’s 85 Airbus fleet were affected, but engineers could complete the software update on the ground in Australia, which would take about two to three hours for each plane
More than 1,000 Amazon workers warn rapid AI rollout threatens jobs and climate
More than 1,000 Amazon employees have signed an open letter expressing “serious concerns” about AI development, saying that the company’s “all-costs justified, warp speed” approach to the powerful technology will cause damage to “democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth.”The letter, published on Wednesday, was signed by the Amazon workers anonymously, and comes a month after Amazon announced mass layoff plans as it increases adoption of AI in its operations.Among the signatories are staffers in a range of positions, including engineers, product managers and warehouse associates.Reflecting broader AI concerns across the industry, the letter was also supported by more than 2,400 workers from companies including Meta, Google, Apple and Microsoft.The letter contains a range of demands for Amazon, concerning its impact on the workplace and the environment
After a teddy bear talked about kink, AI watchdogs are warning parents against smart toys
As the holiday season looms into view with Black Friday, one category on people’s gift lists is causing increasing concern: products with artificial intelligence.The development has raised new concerns about the dangers smart toys could pose to children, as consumer advocacy groups say AI could harm kids’ safety and development. The trend has prompted calls for increased testing of such products and governmental oversight.“If we look into how these toys are marketed and how they perform and the fact that there is little to no research that shows that they are beneficial for children – and no regulation of AI toys – it raises a really big red flag,” said Rachel Franz, director of Young Children Thrive Offline, an initiative from Fairplay, which works to protect children from big tech.Last week, those fears were given brutal justification when an AI-equipped teddy bear started discussing sexually explicit topics
North Melbourne v Brisbane: 2025 AFLW grand final – live
The AFLW grand final is a sell-out for the third straight year – and the second consecutive season under lights at Ikon Park – with more than 12,500 fans set to watch North Melbourne and Brisbane lock horns yet again.Let’s hope the AFL can find a solution over the next 12 months for a suitable venue that would allow even more fans to be part of what should be a celebration of women’s football as much as the season decider between the competing clubs.The best things come in threes.Hello and welcome to live coverage of the 2025 AFLW grand final between North Melbourne and Brisbane as the pair of powerhouse sides meet in the decider for a third straight season. The premiership ledger over that time stands at one-all, which gives each team an opportunity to claim to be the ‘best of three’ and the standout of the stretch
Looking for Lando: My crash course at the track where F1 star Norris learned to drive
Monaco, Las Vegas, Singapore. The list of pitstops on Lando Norris’ road to the top of Formula One is like a luxury travel agent’s catalogue.So when I was asked to trace the young man’s journey ahead of a weekend in which he could become the first British champion driver since Lewis Hamilton, my hopes were high.As the taxi pulled up outside the Clay Pigeon Raceway in Dorchester, however, my excitement was taken down a few gears.It may seem an inauspicious place to blood the talent of those who will become some of the most glamorous, fiery competitors in sport, but here, in the shadow of an industrial estate not far from Yeovil, is where a growing number of Formula One stars are made
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