A LOOK BACK AT 2001: HOPE OR ILLUSION? JOE WRIGHT

A LOOK BACK AT 2001 HOPE OR ILLUSION?

BY JOE WRIGHT (18–)

When I asked my Mum what she remembers about 2001, she said ‘Optimism’. So I shall start there.

At the start of 2001, there were several good reasons to be hopeful. The news at the beginning of the year told us that scientific innovations showed we were learning more about ourselves than ever before. In February of 2001 the first draft of the complete human genome was published, and in July the first AbioCor self-contained artificial heart was implanted. These two landmarks are often overlooked but they signify a huge leap in how science could be used to affect people’s lives: we now had the tools to create the organ of life itself, shattering the age-old assumption that death was unbeatable.

Anyone you ask will tell you that they know exactly where they were, and what they were doing, on the 11th of September 2001.

One year and nine months after the turn of the millennium filled the world with hope, Mum was teaching in school all day, isolated from the news. However she knew from hushed whispers of colleagues that something terrible had happened. That evening she drove up to London where she met my father and grandfather for dinner, and my parents announced their engagement. She remembers that journey as the radio drilled out the incomprehensible story, and sobbing all the way to the restaurant, where the happy news of a new life beginning was drowned by the hundreds who had had theirs cut short.

After 11 September 2001, there were another four major disasters involving planes in the subsequent months of that year.

Is there any explanation for how, in just a few months, disasters on airplanes (accidental or engineered) could snatch so many lives from the world? Sometimes the human mind has to find a reason for things that seem too terrible to explain, and so, for want of a better cliché, maybe the year 2001 was when the soaring hopes of the new millennium plummeted tragically back to earth.

Aside from the tragedies that shattered the general feeling at the latter end of the year, 2001 was littered with smaller incidences that seemed to feed the growing sense that post-millennium optimism was a sham.

The Millennium Dome was the perfect focal point for such sentiment. Although Tony Blair’s New Labour comfortably won the 2001 general election, the sunny optimism which powered them to the 1997 landslide was starting to wane, and the public saw the Dome as an embodiment of how empty such wild hopes were. By 2001, Blair’s great monument appeared a purposeless homage to the age of ‘Cool Britannia’ which was already showing cracks.

New York, 9/11: the attacks on the World Trade Center

Left: Conservative party Campaign poster for the 1997 General Election Below: The Millennium Dome, 2001

The New Labour government was brilliantly satirised by Armando Iannucci’s TV series The Thick Of It, the nineties’ and noughties’ answer to how Yes Minister ridiculed the governments of the 80s. Peter Capaldi’s swearing Scotsman was the centre of the show, a lampoon of the infamous ‘master of spin’ Alastair Campbell, who was, in the public imagination, the shadowy puppet-master at the centre of Downing Street, a perfect bogeyman for fears that Blair’s bright blue eyes and perpetual smile masked something darker. 2001 also saw the release of the film adaptation Bridget Jones’ Diary. Some people (often men) dismiss the book’s importance outright, but although the books were a playful satire at face value, Bridget Jones’ character became an important cultural icon, as her books reflected with perfect relatability the experience of being a working woman in the 90s and early 2000s. One year before 9/11, a financial crash burst the silicon valley tech bubble. One company that survived was forced by wealthy shareholders to mould their early idealistic vision of digital capitalism into a profit-making machine.

That small company was called Google, and they soon came up with a new way of using their revolutionary search engine. Google began collecting data on what users where searching, giving a complete and accurate picture of any person’s behavioural patterns. This information could be sold for vast amounts of money. Suddenly companies could see inside their customers’ heads. Richer entities could outbuy all their competitors for space online.

But in early 2001, lawmakers realised that Google’s system was an infringement of individual rights, and so laws were prepared which would stop search engines harvesting data.

But then 9/11 happened. Afterwards, the Bush administration passed the Patriot Act, which allowed the data of every individual to be scrutinised on security grounds. The phrase ‘we couldn’t join the dots’ was on the lips of every government official, and Google had the green light.

It was only a matter of time before data harvesting started to enter politics. Politicians could now control the information received by their voters, and mould their pithy messages to whatever the public wants to hear. Fifteen years on, and Google’s data revolution had propelled Trump to the Presidency.

In 2001, those in power used manufactured optimism to cover their faults, but tragedy showed that the passage of time cannot fix the world alone. The struggle for peace and equality is long, and does not obey the ticking of a clock.

If many people who were hooked on those books came back to them now, they would be shocked to see some of the accepted, everyday norms in Bridget’s life. The author, Helen Fielding, felt much the same way when revisiting her work in the age of #MeToo. The casual sexism, aggressive flirtation and discrimination depicted in the books, which feels deeply uncomfortable in this day and age, was deemed normal ‘office banter’ for the time.

Furthering the cause of feminism in 2001 had even less coverage than it has today. In politics, New Labour had committed to positive action policies but progress seemed to fizzle out. There were no really major laws as a consequence, or serious policy shift. It seemed that politicians and the media simply weren’t committed enough.

In the arts there was a similar story. The Hollywood titans were fixated on their blockbuster franchises such as Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings, and very little media with women in the leading roles, on and off camera, were given exposure and recognition by industry juggernauts who didn’t think a ‘women’s film’ could rake in the viewers.

For a fuller article from Joe Wright, please visit www.rgs.newcastle.sch.uk/rgsfamily/ona-magazine.