In his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn launched the term paradigm into the pseudo-intellectual vernacular. He used it to describe sets of circumstances that, for a time, establish modes of inquiry, progress, and (dare we say?) normality. In defining “paradigms,” Kuhn wrote: “These I take to be universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners.”

Y2K may not have yielded any one universally recognized (or accepted) scientific achievement, but it did provide a model problem. In the insurance industry, the myriad computer-scientific achievements of Y2K's post-compliance period defined the sub-industry we now know as insurance technology. Insurance technology engendered the systems, applications, and programs to which we now refer ubiquitously and ever-more meaninglessly as solutions. And those solutions manifest the modes of inquiry and progress by which a community of practitioners now proliferates.

But where did all of these solutions come from? Why are there so many of them, so seemingly fragmented? Are they all as different from each other as their proponents-and the trade media that touts and advertises them-would have us believe? Are they spinning away from each other-from some central source or cause-bound to be lost, just so many experiments conducted, then forgotten, in the pursuit of scientific achievement and market share? Or are they hurtling inward toward some point of implosion-insurance technology's version of a supernova-leaving a few consolidated giants to reap the market share that aggregates at the edges of the black hole?