Y2K Millennium Aesthetic Analysis - Techno-utopian futurism of early 2000's

Makes me miss 1999 especially with this era. Trying to drive while searching for that one CD you put behind another while smoking a cig being up for 2 days while driving to the weed guys house after paging him a phone number from the payphone with 40 at the end .... hanging out in the parking lot waiting for it to ring, friends see you and stop by while you waited.
The whole revival of some 60s and 70s fashion was okay. The spiked bleach tipped hair with those pretentious ass oakleys was our gens "broccoli tops" and being 20 in 1999 and into the 2000s it was pretty fucking dope era even if it was cheesy at times. Just glad i could witness it and clean EG civics not riced out by fuccbois and vaping. Just tweakers smoking newports with the addidas tracksuits. occasionally huffing gas. wish i could type more but hand hurts

I think anyone who grew up during the 90's and early 00's would love to enter a time machine and re-live the last decade of the 20st Century if they could. All was good back then.

Hitler was a teetotaler 🎉

I made an Ed Edd n' Eddy Y2K AU last year and I was struggling to capture the aesthetic(stylistic and fundamentally, as well as its storytelling tropes) accurately, while still making it good. Granted, I wasn't taking it 100% seriously as it is based on a cynical slapstick cartoon, but it was still a little bit of a downer since there weren't many guides as to capturing it outside just experiencing the examples for yourself. But that wasn't what I needed, I needed someone to explain the things I was thinking but couldn't put into words.

This helped me so much, and now I want to actually continue it. I feel inspired and I love this vibe even more.

My favorite sorta-example of Y2K is the Mega Man Battle Network series. Not even just by visual design, it perfectly embodies the apart-together and "information super highway" concepts.

This was an excellent watch!

This video was so good! Lots of memories and feelings with this. Also, I would like to add and share some hope. Because my feelings of hype about new tech has never really faded, we have more VR and AR developments coming, and also ofcourse AI which is developing like crazy at the moment. Something like this could still be coming up again.

Uuuuhm lava lamps are from the 70s lol

This was amazing, you held my attention the whole video. So much nostalgia

HIV was prevelant during tnis era.

Loved this, so interesting

Ahhhh, 35 seconds in and we have the Deus Ex JC Denon sunglasses, I'm in for this one!

Thanks for this interesting video, I never realized how my vacuum cleaner actually looks 90s and the desk lamp I’m still using looks actually 2000s

I'd like to note how the flat panel screen changed how the whole living room was decorated. Look at the floor space required for a 60-inch projection screen CRT vs it's LED counterpart.

Y2K was pretty much the Frutiger Aero early beta

Crazy to think about the fact that Michael Jackson pioneered the Y2K aesthetic with his Scream Video in mid-1995. Dude was a whole 2 years ahead of the curve.

Goddamn silver apples of the moon-ass intro

Great content, you got a new subscriber sir!

The Lego Star Wars lightsaber hilts used to have a chrome coating but they now are just gray plastic. Pretty symbolic when you think about it 😔👌

Born in 1990 and miss this time period so much used my income from past nearly 4 years of military service as well as 10+ years of working while in college to preserve it in my life so that ill never lose it again. Almost every main game console from 3rd to 8th gen, an old CRT set with decades of games and anime/media from the period, even a still running laptop with Windows 98SE installed time to jump back in the time machine screw this decade! 😂

Insane amount of work behind this video! Thank you for this magnum opus 🙏

Very Kaminoan aesthetics overall xD

It looks very weird nowadays to see the aesthetics of those years of my childhood, there was so many new eyecatching trends flooding our retines, the market and products for us childs, that it seemed that the future will be brilliant.... And also the way that traditional media tried to portray this whole concept of the internet for the minds of all ages audiences that was a bit cringey also hahhaha there was this funny and quite omnipresent phrase "The world at your fingertips" to encourage people to learn anything about computation, from the most esential of word, excell etc, and accesing to internetXD... hahaha Accesing to the Internet xD Now sounds a bit weird to remember that being like the pro of the pro of those times xD

Very informative. Thanks for your hard work.

this was really cool

This was truly fascinating to learn about. I was around 5 or 6 years old when this aesthetic was at its peak, so I remember noticing it as a kid, but not really understanding that it was just a “product of the times”/ Fad. It’s fun to explore retrospectively because you can really appreciate how truly alien and futuristic it was. Though I will say, it’s easy to look at this sort of thing with rose colored glasses - I think there were some cool things back then, but a whole lot of not so cool parts of it. (Hairstyles, clothes, music) Personally I hope this trend stays dormant for a while because the resurgence of it nowadays feels waaaayyy too early. Just my take, but we need another 10-20 years before this should come back.

Complex explanation in Y2K yes

this is such a good breakdown, thank you for putting this together

Please somebody tell me what shoes are those !!! The ones by left eye thanks

Why there is jamiroquai or robie Williams "Millennium"

damn thanks for bringing up cyberdog I got big into tech-wear over the recent years because it was an aesthetic very similar to those 90s/y2k futuristic rave clothing and then i go to cyberdogs website and it got lots of amazing options that are just straight out of the early rave scene i was too young to experience but old enough to remember wishing i could.

the 2000s feel like peak kitch. Even worse than the 70s.

I want Art Deco to come back. It is long overdue.

What about Y2J!?

what a day what a lovely day!

I remember being in Greece in the summer of 1999. People from all over the world were at this beach nightclub and the Venga boys song was blasting loud

I the think the song American Dream by Jakatta really fits this aesthetic.

This is the future we were deprived of

the 90's were the longest period of US stock market growth in US history due to NAFTA, the jobs left but the stock prices shot up and up. maybe that was supplanted recently, but everyone forgets NAFTA which is insane considering impact on the US.

Wait ... is that the futuristic look of " I, robot" (the movie) ?

I always wondered wich kind of "something-punk" it was. (Steampunk, cyberpunk, ect...)

Here it is 2023 on the dawn of 2024 yet there’s no flying cars but can you blame them drivers today can’t drive for shyt. 911 came then, all of the flu’s 2020 pandemic hits and people are all on edge

Another movie that has a HARDCORE Y2K aesthetic is a 2004 French film that was dubbed in English titled Immortal (or Immortel in French).
It was written by French sci-fi writer Serge Lehman aka Pascal Fréjean & French comic book creator/artist & director Enki Bilal, who also directed the film & who's comic book, titled La Foire aux immortels (The Carnival of Immortals), served as its inspiration.
It was one of the 1st major films shot ENTIRELY on a digital/virtual backlot, meaning that pretty much everything seen in the movie besides the actors was computer-generated & added in post.
The French video game studio Quantic Dream helped produce a lot of the special effects.
I think that the involvement of the video game studio & the inclusion of the new-at-the-time digital/CGI/greenscreen format, the comic book element, & the aesthetic style that was popular when the film was being made (Y2K aesthetic was still being used in 2002, though it may have begun its decline by that time) all combined to create a perfect storm that ultimately produced a creative & unusual piece of visual media entertainment that might as well be pure Y2K concentrate mixed with several drops of dystopian dinge, a pinch of cyberpunk desperation, & a metallic golden drizzle of relict Egyptian deities with futuristic mechanical upgrades.
It bombed pretty badly in the box office, but I think it's definitely worth a watch- especially if you're looking to tap into some early 2000s Y2K energy.

Here's a quick explanation of the plot WITHOUT spoilers:
It's set in a hyper-futuristic New York City in the year 2095. Linda Hardy plays a waifish human-looking but not human woman with blue hair & pigmentless white skin named Jill who's a type of being that real/pure humans tend to treat rather poorly.
She gets kidnapped by an evil eugenics corporation that basically runs the government & experiments on the aliens & other non-human beings that they can get their hands on. While imprisoned there, one of the doctors discovers that she has some very unusual & special abilities & physiological characteristics.
Jill ends up escaping from the corrupt corporation, meets a man named Nikopol who may or may not be possessed by a divine being, & she becomes intimately involved in the ancient Egyptian god Horus's master plan for survival because the other ancient Egyptian deities deem him "too unruly" & decide that his punishment will be having his immortality stripped followed by execution within one weeks time.
But, in order for Jill to help Horus, he & Nikopol must keep her alive & safe from the eugenics corporation & eventually even the police. Horus must also complete his plan before his one week is up & before Jill completes a mysterious transformation that has begun.

PS5

I remember the late 2000's... man, it was great times. It's just obvious that our society has been decaying over the time and still.

I remember a lot of translucent blue and a lot of silver. I also remember the dark cyberpunk aesthetic. PC gaming was more exciting and moved very quickly meaning you spent a lot of money on something only for it to be completely outmoded in a month. A big moment for me was building my Pentium 4 PC at 11 and then having Half Life 2 come out a couple of months later.

Did the whole talk about the 'age of aquarius' also have to do with the water morphing?

Unbelievably thorough analysis on this aesthetic. Please do 70s/disco/ colorful psychedelic aesthetic

Great video, really explained everything in depth and detail. Happy to have had my childhood in this era, you could sense the general public were very different to how everyone is today. One reason being the 9/11 bombings, it birth fear into the collective consciousness.