I’m Still Obsessed with My Y2K Era Inflatable Bubble Chair. In a Weird Way, It Explains Everything.

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This passage has been excerpted from Y2K, Colette Shade’s debut collection of essays about pop culture and politics between the years 1997 and 2008. It’s out on January 7, 2025. You can find it on Bookshop, Amazon, or Audible.

When I was 11, I begged my mom to buy me an inflatable silver chair from Target. The year was 1999, and I had just started middle school and puberty.

I saw it advertised on a piece of junk mail that hadn’t yet made it to the recycling bin, in among deals on tissues and backpacks and Halloween decorations.

I had never seen anything like it. A chair filled with air like a pool float? I just knew my life would improve if I owned it. It was so shiny and futuristic, with its rounded edges, like it belonged on a spaceship or something. It looked like it came from the new millennium, which would arrive in just a few months. Y2K was practically all anyone talked about, at school and on TV and in magazines. I had to prepare! If I got the silver inflatable chair now, I’d be ready before the clock turned to midnight and the future arrived.

“Are you sure this is the chair you want?” my mom asked when I rushed over to her with the mailer. “What about something more practical?”

“Mom, it’s really practical!” I insisted. “I’m gonna do all my homework in it!”

She paused, talked out her hesitations.

“I guess it’s only 20 bucks,” she reasoned.

“It’s a really good deal!” I said. “And I swear, if you buy it I won’t ask for anything else for a really, really, really long time.”

She agreed that we could probably go to Target that weekend on the way back from swim practice.

“Yes!” I exalted, jumping up and down. “Thank you thank you thank you!”

The chair came in a box that my dad—ever the engineer—cut open with his X-Acto knife. Inside was some folded gray plastic that looked nothing like furniture. He read the instructions while I fiddled with the hand pump. There wasn’t much to figure out, and pretty soon we were taking turns pushing the handle up and down. The chair was taking shape.

It was so lightweight that I carried it upstairs by myself. I put it in a corner of my room, where I had pale blue sheets with clouds on my bed and I slept under a gauze canopy that my mom (raised in a foreign service family in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Nigeria) recognized as mosquito netting when I had begged her to buy me that, too, at Bed Bath & Beyond.

“I guess it will come in handy if there’s a malaria outbreak in Northern Virginia,” she had said.

I loved that silver chair. When I first sat down it was cool to the touch, and my skin made little squeaking noises against it. When I wore shorts, the material stuck to my bare legs, and the seams left small red indentations. I sat in that chair while I talked on the phone with my best friend, Hannah, doodling with gel pens and balling up pieces of paper to toss in my purple Garbino trash can. I sat in that chair while I organized my Pokémon cards in a special binder. I sat in that chair while I played Smash Mouth’s Astro Lounge on my silver Discman again and again and again. This, I thought, was the future.

A few months earlier, we made a Y2K time capsule at school. Outside in the warmth of the early June sun, we sat on folding chairs while our principal gave her remarks. She said the new millennium would be full of innovation, of technologies we couldn’t even imagine yet. We would all work collaboratively and celebrate multiculturalism, just like we were doing at school every day.

Beside her was the capsule. The three-foot-tall metal cylinder was filled with contributions from students, including letters from Mrs. Hathaway’s fifth-grade class, the ones we all had to write looking a decade into the future. Where would we be in the year 2008?

2008 seemed so far away. I would be 20, an age that sounded impossibly old. I would, presumably, have boobs—another seeming impossibility. How strange it was that I would leave behind childhood at the exact moment when America (and the world it led) would seem to slip the bonds of history. Though uncertain about its specifics, I knew the new millennium would be good—for me, for America, and for the world. And so I typed the following in ClarisWorks on our family’s Power Macintosh:

In 2008 I will be in my third year of college at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. They will have discovered a cure for AIDS by then and be close to a cure for cancer. By then most people will be watching their movies over the internet. But the internet will be even better than it is now. Instead of just viewing them on a normal computer that is about 1’ 6” wide and 10” tall, we will view it on a big screen computer and it will have full sound and everything.

They will have fixed up the New York Avenue area in Washington, D.C. It will have a huge shopping mall that will be famous all around the country and people-mover conveyor belts, like San Francisco Airport, so that people can get off at any shop they want without walking. They will also have escalators like we have today, but the shopping mall will be about eight stories high. Smoking will have been banned in all public places including parking lots and sidewalks. They will have new drugs to help people stop smoking.

The environment will have become a lot worse than it is today, but we will start to realize that we are destroying our environment so people will be getting in the process of banning power boats and stuff.

The popular artists will be using computer electronic music and you will rarely hear their real voices because it will be changed by the computer.

Bye!!!!!!:):):);):););):)

I imagined a future fifth grader reading this in the cool bluish light of the new millennium, in a version of our elementary school where all the furniture had turned silver and white.

In 2018, I found a copy of it in a box at my parents’ house. I was about to turn 30, and my life was a mess. After a promising start, my writing career had stalled. I had recently gone through a bad breakup, and my ex was engaged to someone else. Donald Trump was the president, and nearly every month set a new climate record. As I read, the memories came flooding back: the time capsule, the ceremony, the jubilant turn-of-the-millennium anticipation. It occurred to me that I hadn’t felt hope in years.

In July 1997, the cover of Wired magazine read: “The long boom: we’re facing 25 years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment for the whole world. You got a problem with that?” The cover was bright yellow. A cartoon smiley-face globe held a flower in its lips: a callback to the 1960s, when the internet was born in California in a liaison between the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the counterculture.

The headline summed up the mood of the moment. In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended. American-led capitalism versus Soviet-led communism had been the defining conflict of the 20th century, and finally, capitalism had won. Capitalism’s victory seemed to prove that it was the superior system, that its birthright was to take over the globe completely. Sure, there were some questions, but around the world everyone collectively exhaled, relieved to no longer live under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama announced that we were at “the end of history” in a bestselling 1992 book of the same name.

In 1992, 12 countries in Europe signed the Maastricht Treaty and started the European Union. In this peaceful and collaborative new era, the trenches and the concentration camps and the Iron Curtain could all be forgotten. That same year back in America, Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton was elected on a “Third Way” platform of deregulation and privatization that borrowed heavily from Republicans. Why not? After all, history was over. In 1995 and 1997, his French and British counterparts Jacques Chirac and Tony Blair would bring the same type of post-politics to their countries. Poor nations, meanwhile, were transformed by free trade agreements, which brought manufacturing jobs outsourced from wealthy countries—a process which was broadly referred to as globalization. All these changes were part of the same single process: capitalism had, for the first time in its short history, taken over every part of the world and every aspect of life. It merged fully with politics, and it shaped how people saw themselves. In this, it was a psychological victory as much as an economic and political one. Nearly everyone—from public figures to regular people—operated under the assumption that we lived in the best of all possible worlds, that there could be no alternative.

Whatever you want to call it—the End of History, the New Economy, globalization, the neoliberal turn, the Washington consensus, the triumph of the capitalist world system, the end of politics—this process defined the 1990s. But what I will call the Y2K Era started around 1997 and lasted until 2008. The Y2K Era was defined by two things: the End of History and the rise of the internet. Like the End of History, the rise of the internet revolutionized politics, social relations, and our own individual self-perception. And both the End of History and the rise of the internet were fundamentally forward-looking. Together, they made the era feel ecstatic, frenetic, and wildly hopeful.

The Y2K Era was bounded by two economic bubbles. It opened, in 1997, with the dot-com bubble and it closed, in 2008, with the housing bubble. Both relied on stories about frontiers and endless growth, old stories that go back to foundational American thinkers like Thomas Jefferson. These stories looked only to the future, blinding us to warnings from the past.

The dot-com bubble lasted from 1995 through 2000 (though it really took off around 1997). It fused the techno-optimism of the early internet with record-breaking stock prices. The internet, people thought, would not only connect the entire planet and let us buy kitty litter at home in our pajamas; it would launch stock values into the stratosphere, literally higher than they had ever been since good numbers became available in 1871.

All this wealth, it was assumed, would make everybody rich, even though labor protections had been dismantled and inequality had increased throughout the ’80s and ’90s. In the new millennium, we wouldn’t need pensions or unions or labor laws. We could just invest our mutual funds in the stock market, which would, of course, go up forever. Alternately, we could found or invest in a dot-com startup. The IPOs of Netscape, Amazon, eBay, Google, and PayPal minted a large portion of our current billionaire class, and they were covered by the media in a way that suggested anyone could take this route and get rich overnight.

With all this wealth everywhere, it seemed like there would be no more wars, no more conflict between labor and capital, no more racism, and no more sexism. Deindustrialization? Who cares! Since capitalism and the internet made everything so great for everybody, there was no longer a need for politics.

This mood shaped popular culture. In 1997—the same year Wired published its “long boom” issue—Puff Daddy and Mase released the video for their song “Mo Money Mo Problems.” The video, directed by Hype Williams, embodies the hopeful, futuristic aesthetic of the moment. Stylist June Ambrose dressed the rappers in half a dozen looks consisting of baggy, monochrome streetwear: shiny red leather jeans and matching jackets, head-to-toe silver, high-visibility yellow and clear vinyl paired with matching goggles. They rap and dance and gesture into a fish-eye lens. They float in zero gravity on sets of white and chrome designed by artist Ron Norsworthy. Presumably in outer space, Puff Daddy and Mase have transcended history. The video is intercut with scenes back on Earth, with Puff Daddy transcending history in another way, by winning a golf tournament as a Black man, just like Tiger Woods really did at the Masters that year.

Back then you couldn’t turn on MTV without seeing videos like that. Rappers and pop stars and R&B singers all seemed to be living in the future and having a great time. They wore futuristic clothes, used real or fictional technology, existed inside video games, and rode around on spaceships. In “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly),”the fish-eye lens goes in close on Missy Elliott, who wears a shiny black bodysuit resembling an inflated garbage bag and a glittery helmet with red sunglasses attached. She looks like a dignitary from an alien civilization. Timbaland’s beats, too, sound like they came from outer space, or perhaps from a very sophisticated computer not yet available to the public. The year before, Timbaland and Missy produced Aaliyah’s album One in a Million. She sings over a collection of digital bleeps and bloops. In her videos she looks like a teen cyberpunk: silver sunglasses, baggy pants, crop tops showcasing incredible abs. “Your love is one in a million,” she sings. “It goes on and on and on.”

Jennifer Lopez’s 1999 video for “If You Had My Love” takes place, seemingly, online. We see people logging onto the internet and typing “Jennifer Lopez” into a search bar, and then we are transported through the screen, in between 0s and 1s of binary code, to a minimal, silvery-blue room filled with surveillance cameras. The singer walks in wearing a flowing white ensemble and shimmery eyeshadow, waves at the viewer, and begins to perform. That same year, TLC released an internet- and email-themed album called FanMail. In the album art, T-Boz, Chilli, and Left Eye are silver-tinged cyberbabes. They appear pixelated, as if conjured online. The album opens with a stilted digital voice that producer Dallas Austin created using Macintosh text to speech.

“Welcome,” the voice says. “This is a journey into life, love, and the future of music.”

The futuristic, intergalactic, and digital aesthetic permeated the entire music industry, from Whitney Houston, Cher, and Madonna to Destiny’s Child, NSYNC, and the Backstreet Boys. Cher popularized autotune in her rave-inspired dance track “Believe,” from 1998. The 1999 Backstreet Boys album Millennium featured the band members in matching white outfits against a pale blue digital backdrop. In a 2000 issue of American Girl Magazine, the album is listed as a good item to include in a millennium time capsule, alongside butterfly hair clips, a WNBA basketball, a bottle of glitter nail polish, and an i-Zone instant camera.

It wasn’t just music. Between 1997 and 2001, more and more products and spaces were white or clear, neon or silver, bathed in white or blue light. Everything was blobby and fluid, in motion like droplets of water. There wasn’t a sharp edge in sight. In the words of industrial designer Karim Rashid, whose self-described “blobjects” shaped so much of the era’s look, “If freedom were a form, it would be a never-ending undulating boundless shape that is in perpetual motion.” Rashid’s ubiquitous, award-winning Garbino trash can debuted in 1996, all curves and lightweight translucent plastic. Another common household object was Rashid’s Oh Chair, from 1999, made again of molded plastic, in white or hot pink or maybe lime green, with oval cutouts in the back and under the arms.

Round plastic iMacs were available in your choice of candy colors, ready to connect to the World Wide Web. First came Bondi Blue in 1998, then Strawberry, Blueberry, Lime, Tangerine, and Grape. The look of the iMac—rounded edges, translucent plastic, an array of colors—was taken up by every conceivable consumer good: PlayStation controllers, floppy discs, Game Boys, boom boxes, Tamagotchis, televisions, cameras, and memory cards.

Even clothes began to look this way. There were silver wraparound Oakleys and silver puffer jackets and translucent raincoats and translucent handbags and white ripstop bondage pants and white nylon vests with hoods. Japanese, Chinese, and Hindi characters were incorporated into graphic tees and mesh tops, as if to signify that globalization was here, and it was beautiful. Hair was spiked and separated and chunky, almost pixelated, or worn in space buns, shot through with bleach or colored dye. Eyeshadow was silver and ice blue and white. Body glitter shimmered like the underside of a CD. Even cars were part of the vibe. The Volkswagen New Beetle came out in 1998, available in Silver Arrow, Techno Blue, and—most iconically—Cyber Green, a shimmering peridot. Though its design pointed to the future, it called to mind the ’60s, of course, and California.

Contra popular belief, a subsection of the hippies had won, and they gave us what appeared to be a capitalist techno-utopia. The future promised to us by the internet and the stock market and the fall of the Soviet Union and the turn of the millennium was one of seamlessness, of open borders and endless choice and perpetual motion. At the turn of the millennium, the future had no limits. Technology was fun. Technology was friendly. Technology was transparent. Its soft edges wouldn’t hurt you.

On August 25, 2001, Aaliyah died in a plane crash near the Bahamas, where she had just wrapped up filming the video for her single “Rock the Boat.” She was only 22. Her music had sounded like the future, and with her violent death, it seemed like a part of the future had died, too.

Her death seemed to foreshadow another plane-related tragedy that would happen just weeks later. On 9/11, hijacked jets sliced through the clear blue 21st-century sky, filling it with black smoke. It was a violent rebuke of everything that the blobject aesthetic and its accompanying ideologies stood for—the internet, globalization, free market capitalism. The possibility of a 21st-century utopia was over, and it had barely even begun.

Instead, American culture and public policy took an alarmingly atavistic turn. Flag buying became socially mandatory, radio stations banned songs that were not sufficiently patriotic, and the government openly celebrated its illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq, alongside torture and widespread domestic surveillance. A popular country song celebrated Americans collectively “put[ting] a boot in [the] ass” of, presumably, Osama bin Laden/terrorists in general, but also possibly just Muslims and/or Arabs in general.

The president told Americans to buy trips to Disney World. Other people told Americans to buy Viagra and Frappuccinos and Hummer H2s that got 12 miles per gallon, to buy issues of Us Weekly that said how fat or skinny Lindsay Lohan or the Olsen twins were getting, to buy McMansions, to buy Fiji Water. Jay-Z told us he was a hustler, baby, and Lil Scrappy said he had money in the bank and J-Kwon told us everybody in the club was getting tipsy. In New Orleans, a hurricane trapped families on roofs. In Los Angeles, Britney shaved her head when she could no longer stand the contradictions of trying to be a virgin and a sexy woman at the same time. This second half of the Y2K Era—2001 to 2008—was a kind of chauvinistic reverse of the optimism from 1997 to 2001. It was in 2008—that fateful year I had attempted to predict for my school time capsule in fifth grade—when the Y2K Era truly came to a close. A decade of speculative investment in the American housing market resulted in the meltdown of the entire global economy. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped by 777.68 points—at the time, its biggest single-day point loss in history. U.S. unemployment would reach 10 percent, and about 3.8 million American households would lose their homes in foreclosure. Around the world, pension funds lost 23 percent of their value. The Great Recession and its aftermath permanently altered the political economy and culture, in America and around the world. It ended the End of History.

In a post-2008 world, the future looks very different. It mocks instead of beckons. It looks hard instead of soft, sharp instead of round, solid instead of translucent. Between growing economic inequality, political breakdown, and escalating climate change, the future appears to get worse with each passing year. And the crises, particularly around the current and future habitability of Earth, appear not just bad but terminal. Temperatures rise over time, causing more breakdowns, in turn causing more breakdowns. This is, interestingly, very similar to how capital operates. The more debt you have, the more it generates compound interest over time, putting you deeper into debt. The more wealth you have, the more compound interest it generates, making you wealthier.

I’m sad about the state of the world, but I’m also disappointed with my own life trajectory. When I wrote that time capsule letter in 1999, it really seemed like I could have gone to Stanford. When I pictured “growing up,” I imagined I’d become a surgeon, a movie director, a research scientist, a classical trumpet player, a CEO. I imagined I’d be married, with children of my own. At 10, I never imagined graduating into a recession, struggling to pay rent, or moving back in with my parents. I never imagined that it would be so difficult to piece together a career or feel financially secure enough to have kids.

“Men make their own history,” wrote Karl Marx in 1852. “But they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”

I came across this quote around the same time I found the time capsule letter. It’s about the return of a dictatorship in 19th-century France, but it feels relevant to just about any problem in the 21st century. It could also, I realized, apply to my own story. Try as I might to shape my life in a particular way, it has never been mine to shape. Much of adulthood has felt to me like an accumulation of disappointment and despair. It’s historical, it’s personal, and I’m not quite sure where the one ends and the other begins. And it hurts because, as Smash Mouth says, “The years start coming and they don’t stop coming.”

Amid all this, I’ve found myself drawn back to the Y2K past. I shop for lettuce hem micromesh tops on Depop and silver platform shoes on Poshmark. I paint my nails peridot. I peruse scanned fashion editorials from turn-of-the-millennium issues of Vogue and Teen People. Smash Mouth’s Astro Lounge has become my most-listened-to album on Spotify. I stream You’ve Got Mail and Sex and the City and Men in Black and 10 Things I Hate About You and The Sopranos. I play every video I loved on MTV all in a row on YouTube: TLC and the Goo Goo Dolls, Crazy Town and NSYNC, Limp Bizkit and Fiona Apple and Lil’ Kim and Sugar Ray and Ludacris and Christina Aguilera and Destiny’s Child and Sum 41 and Mýa. Here, I feel safe, like the future is still full of promise, like my whole life is still ahead of me.

I first began to seek out these old pleasures as a kind of critical project, to see what they might reveal about how the present came to be. But along the way I became a connoisseur. I began to love this stuff in a way completely divorced from the intellectual, critical, and historical judgments I impose as an adult. I do historicize TRL and You’ve Got Mail and the blobject aesthetic, but this is kept separate from my true and genuine love for this stuff: the love of a preteen girl.

I’m not alone. Turn-of-the-millennium nostalgia has been a trend going on several years now. “Y2K” is a top search term on social media and clothing resale sites. Self-funded internet archivists like the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute and Instagram accounts like @shes_underrated, @y2kdaily, and @discontinuedmakeup painstakingly catalog images of editorials, advertisements, consumer products, and video content from the era. Celebrity memoirs from Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Pamela Anderson, and Jessica Simpson have topped bestseller lists. Ludacris did a State Farm ad. Gen Z kids who never lived through the Y2K Era post TikToks of themselves in body glitter and butterfly hair clips and low-rise flares. When I see this stuff, I see a marketing construct, as nostalgia runs on a 20-to-30-year cycle (the amount of time it takes for the people who lived through it the first time around to become the adults who create culture). But I also see a yearning for a more stable world: by those who grew up in it, and by those younger generations who have only known entropy.

Though I indulge in nostalgia, I am skeptical. Don’t we all idealize our childhoods, whether we were kids in the ’90s or the ’50s or the Justinian Period of the Byzantine Empire? The past will always seem better because it always recedes from our grasp. For adults like me who are entering middle age, so much of our yearning comes from our sense of foreclosed possibilities, from our aging bodies, from our accumulated bitterness about careers and relationships and money and death. When we say things were better in our youth, what we often mean is that our parents were still healthy and our hearts hadn’t been broken and our backs didn’t hurt. We mean that the future hadn’t happened yet, that it could still be (in our minds, at least) whatever we wanted it to be.

While there is a timelessness to this yearning, it is also true that many things really have gotten measurably worse since my childhood: economic inequality, political instability, and, most of all, climate change. The costs of housing, health care, and education have gone up even when adjusted for inflation. There is a general sense of futurelessness pervading both politics and culture. It makes me want to reach for a tube of body glitter.

A few months after I persuaded my mom to buy it, a hole developed in my inflatable chair. It didn’t pop dramatically. Rather, air slowly leaked out of a seam until I began to notice that it was no longer taut and shiny but wan and flaccid. I tried to fix it with duct tape but another hole appeared, so it ended up in the trash: a flattened heap of gray PVC, unrecognizable. I blamed myself for not being more careful with it, but the thing was made cheaply. The structural integrity was the problem; it wasn’t made to last.

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