In her debut book, Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything, Colette Shade explores how the Y2K era – which she defines as running from 1997-2008, shaped our future in ways we’re still trying to understand. As a millennial myself who started and finished college in the middle of the Great Recession, this book hit close to home. It helped me understand the hope I felt as a child and the despair I’ve felt since.
In 2025, I wanted to bring back long-form conversations to the Debutiful site, a reminder of a form of media that dominated long before podcasts took over our lives, and knew I wanted Colette Shade to be the first. This conversation, which was edited and condensed, explores why Shade wrote this book and reflects on Y2K’s optimism, disillusionment, and enduring impact on contemporary life.
Debutiful: I’ll start with a very broad question. Why the Y2K era?
Shade: In 2016, I discovered this letter at my parents’ house, written for a millennium time capsule in 1999, when I was in fifth grade. I had totally forgotten writing this letter that I was assigned to predict the year 2008.
I found this letter and it said in 2008, I would be a junior at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. And that we would be starting to figure out that we’re hurting the environment and finally doing something about it. It said that we would be watching all of our movies on the internet. It said that we would find a cure for both cancer and AIDS. It was really detailed about both technological innovations and sort of what current events would be like, and also what my own life and career would be like. And suffice it to say very little of that happened. I didn’t go to Stanford. We didn’t start to do something about the environment.
When I found I found this letter in 2018, almost 20 years after writing it and 10 years after the year it had been assigned to predict, my life was a horrible mess. I had just gone through a terrible breakup, I was floundering in my career and that wasn’t working out. I had gotten really burnt out working an abusive job in New York. I flamed out and tried to figure out what I was doing with my life. I was about to turn 30. I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a career and I felt like I couldn’t find a partner. It just felt like the world was a mess and I was in a state of despair. Reading this letter that I found, it flipped a switch for me. I include the letter in full in the opening of the book because I think it’s just such a useful primary source for how people thought.
Yes, you could say, gee, well, I was 10-11, so I was naive. However, when I started to actually do the research for the book I found that people were saying totally naive stuff. There was this one MIT economist who said during the dot-com bubble that we would never have another recession again and that the economy would expand forever.
Debutiful: What I find super fascinating about that time frame, late-90s, early-2000s is the hope that everyone had. I just remember the patriotism of the USA, and that all of the turbulence with September 11 and the Iraq War was just a stepping stone and we’re on our way to superstardom as a globe, you know?
Shade: One thing I want to say to sort of preface this, is that one thing that I tried to do in the book was tie in the personal with these bigger narratives around the big economic forces and historical forces and talk about how these things that seem really dry or far away. Now, at the time when I was a kid and when I was a teenager, I was not very political. I really wasn’t aware of the forces that were shaping my life but looking back you can see these markers.
We had a pretty big win in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. We ultimately had more power and a stronger economy. Not only that, but the fact that we had won seemed to show that everything that was happening in America at the time was right, because, well, we wouldn’t have won if our way of life wasn’t the best way possible. Yeah.
Debutiful: just remember growing up, I think everyone’s jaded now, which is fine but back then even when like, life got you down, there was always like a rainbow coming. always felt that – and d maybe that’s the privilege of how I grew up – but I always felt things would be okay.
Shade: I do think that that’s that’s part of it. One thing that I’ve tried to be very clear with people about is that I’m telling my story. I’m not saying that my story is representative of every single millennial because the millennial generation is incredibly diverse. It’s unprecedentedly diverse. We cohort that started being born during this huge inequality diversion. There was much more inequality within, say, the millennial cohort compared to the baby boomer cohort, because they were they were all born during a time that economists called the Great Compression, which is when there was less inequality.
I think it’s the least amount of inequality in US history, whereas we millennials have lived through what some economists say surpassed the Gilded Age. Millennials have very different experiences, but something can only be interesting if it’s specific. I can’t possibly write about every millennial. That would be boring and uninteresting.
Debutiful: And many millennials graduate right during the recession.
Shade: Yes, yes. I think what’s so important about it is that recessions happen. Right. And even very bad ones. That particular recession created these conditions where it undermined everything that everyone believed in for decades. A lot of the people who suffered the most were people who were older and they got forced out of their jobs and they couldn’t get back into the workforce. They’re older and they lost their homes or they became homeless. The recession ended up undermining all of these stories that we e were told.
To get back to the Soviet Union, after it collapsed, and after the dot-com bubble started to take off in the late 90s, all Americans were told this story about how history worked.
I talk about Francis Fukuyama’s 1991 essay and eventual book The End of History and The Last Man, where he says that liberal democracy and a certain form of unfettered capitalism are the last evolution of human society. They go hand-in-hand and are the pinnacle. Well, it wasn’t fine for people who were unemployed and getting locked up in jail and countless others in America. It created this real existential crisis, this searching.
A lot of millennials sort of got put on this path to search for what the answer to these existential questions might possibly be. Some of the paths are better than others, right? Unfortunately, a lot of those paths led to Trump and QAnon.
I miss when it was generally agreed upon that there was hope for the future.
Colette shade
Debutiful: All of your questions and thoughts about this time culminate when you find this letter and the years after thinking about it. You also are writing freelance throughout this time and working in media. I know you wrote this piece for Gawker called “”Baltimore is a Shithole”: Undisturbed Peace at the Maryland Hunt Cup” in 2015.
Shade: I wrote a piece for Gawker that I think people found very provocative, and it was basically like a new journalism piece where I knew of something that national media didn’t during a moment when there were riots in Baltimore because of a really horrible police killing of a young man.
Baltimore is in the national spotlight and my parents live near Baltimore. I knew that there was this, kind of aristocracy horse race that was happening concurrently. I went to this horse race and used it as a framing device to talk about the 400-year history of racial politics in Baltimore, how Maryland was a slave state, and how a mob of angry planters and thugs tried to kill Abraham Lincoln when he traveled through Baltimore in 1861.
I asked attendees at the horse race event what they thought of the protests and a lot of them were just like said they didn’t get it or understand why everyone’s so upset. That community that I was sort of adjacent to that I moved to when I was in high school and I always thought it was sus a sort of outsider’s perspective of it because I wasn’t fully enmeshed in it. I didn’t grow up in it, and it allowed me to have a different perspective.
Debutiful: Did that viral essay lead to any offers?
Shade: I talked to a couple of agents about some other ideas, and it never really went anywhere. Then in 2020, I talked to an agent. Again, this is all very muddled. Like, it’s not a clear process, like it’s a miracle that this even happened.
Debutiful: Is that when you find the letter and start thinking about this book?
Shade: No. Here’s the thing: I quit writing for a few years, like around like 2017, or 2018. I was just focusing on other stuff and trying to cobble together some kind of a career for myself. All the while, I’m just obsessing over the Y2K era. I’m watching every single movie from the years 1997 through 2008 and every TV show. All of these internet archivist accounts get created; like old makeup ads from 1999, music video stills from 2004, or just all of these old or old paparazzi shots. I’m just falling into this self-made world of nostalgia. I was suddenly only listening to music from 1997 to 2008, and I didn’t plan it this way, but it just became this obsession while I was going about my life.
I was working toward a career as a psychotherapist and I had this idea for a book that was a book of essays that was about mental health, with the working title of This Sucks. I signed with my agent, Eric Kane, who I still have to this day. We went into some meetings. Publishers were kind of into it but kept asking me to redo the proposal. After a few months, I was just like, I don’t even know if I want to do this anymore.
It was the middle of Covid, I had a 9-to-5 job, and Eric asked me what I wanted to write about. I think I originally said it as a joke, I was like, what if I could write about the year 1998? Because that was the happiest year of my life. He thought maybe there was something to that. And we started talking and it was really him who helped me put together this idea of a book of essays that’s about the late 90s and the early 2000s. That’s a decade’s book like the classic one is David Halberstam’sThe Fifties. And then a more recent example is Chuck Klosterman’s book, The Nineties.
Debutiful: This book is a blend of personal narrative and cultural criticism. Tell readers about how Y2K was shaped.
Shade: A big question that came up when writing the book was the question, “What is the Y2K era?” Because most decades books are The Nineties: 1990 to 1999 and The Fifeties: 1950 to 1959. What I discovered and found interesting about the Y2K era or Y2K or Y2K nostalgia, was that it wasn’t being talked about as the ’90s or as the 2000s. Years like 1998 and 2004 were being seen as one and the same. That made it a bit of a challenge because the organizing principle of the book is that it talks about this era, but where does the era begin and where does it end?
I pulled from this concept from academic historians that’s called periodization. That concept asks when does an era begin and end? It’s like it’s not like everyone wakes up one day and says they’re in the Victorian era. You can kind of dispute all eras are fictions to a certain extent, and they’re kind of just convenient. Shorthands we use to talk about something without getting too into the weeds. What I ended up deciding to do was bound the Y2K era bounded by the dot-com bubble, which began in 1995, and the the 2008 recession.
I say in the book is that the Y2K era is 1997 through 2008. The way that I came up with this was in my research. I found that because the book is not just hard history, it’s mostly cultural criticism and memoir and I felt that this Y2K spirit, this idea of this boundless future really starts appearing in media and trickling down into aspects of our lives like fashion around 1997.
I have this copy of Wired Magazine from July 1997 that claims that the next 25 years are going to be full of peace and prosperity for the entire world. There are all these other touchstones like the music video for “Mo Money Mo Problems,” which is shot by Hype Williams, where they’re flying around in zero gravity. They’re wearing these silver leather pants and jackets to show how they’re in the future.
Debutiful: After all this research and writing the book, do you still think about Y2K?
Shade: All the time. I wish I had a time machine. I know that that’s folly because all people who are middle-aged look back and it was so much better when they were a kid. Their judgment is being clouded by nostalgia, which is true, but also I miss when Google was not a monopoly and was just a cool new search engine invented by researchers at Stanford. I miss when it was generally agreed upon that there was hope for the future. Now it feels like everyone agrees that the future is very bad, that we’re going to have a dystopia instead of a utopia. I don’t even want a utopia. I just want people to stop saying, “I guess we all have to live in a dystopia.” I don’t like that.
Debutiful: I do think that we’re of the age where we will start saying it was better when we were younger, but I really do believe that I think the internet, as someone chronically online, the internet ruined everything.
Shade: The internet did ruin everything. One of the essays is about my love of tabloids and celebrity media when I was in high school and college. Back then, it felt like these are the people who are always in the public eye, and now we’re all in the public eye. I kind of hate it. I hate the fact that I have to constantly be making content and showing myself. I have to be doing cool stuff. I can’t just be in sweatpants and eating crackers.
Debutiful: We’re always on. We’re always performing now. My least favorite part of the internet is now everyone is trying to be a celebrity in one shape or form.
Shade: I liked the internet when it was that it was an appointment activity. Especially dial-up only. If you want to go on the internet, you have to go to your house, the library, your work office.
Debutiful: And now you have to be available effectively from wake up to shut-eye. But, on a more positive note,I’d love to end with book recommendations or media recommendations from the 2000s. What are your cornerstones from the Y2K era?
Shade: A big one is You’ve Got Mail. Also, Bring It On. The politics are shockingly progressive because there’s a lot of really shockingly racist stuff in media in the late 90s and early 2000s.
I would say Fan Mail by TLC is a favorite. It was inspired by the actual fan mail they received and it’s a concept album about email and the internet Then Astro Lounge by Smash Mouth, which I talk about at length.
In terms of fashion trends, and I haven’t been brave enough to wear these recently, but I love butterfly hair clips.