Two cheers for postmodernism: Living the paradox

The millennium is all around us. It seems so massive as to have been literally unavoidable. What option did any of us have, on midnight of December 31, 1999, other than to be swept into it? (And should it not seem odd that I could have written that sentence in May of 1999?). Yet the most substantial issues arising from the arrival of the year 2000 are very clearly constructed directly by human technical activity, especially by the way we designed computer calendar mechanisms in the 1980s. Those very real and very socially constructed issues have overshadowed the "factual" question of whether a new millennium should be celebrated at the start of 2000 or twelve months later.