The Testimonial Technique: When the Person’s Credibility is the Proof
The testimonial technique doesn’t only influence us to buy products and services. It also promotes ideas, beliefs, and worldviews.
EVERYDAY PERSUASION
How we form our opinions, make our decisions, and come to believe the things we believe.
Anno Domini to 2012 and The Start of a New Epoch
A companion post and background material to the themes in chapter 23 of the book Confessions of a Professional Conspiracy Theorist, which outlines the PR campaign I worked on to promote the 2012 end of the world narrative.
Chapter Twenty-Three : 2012 An Origin Story
Have you ever wondered why our years are numbered the way they are? Why we started using our system of Anno Domini, and now the Current Era? At some point in the past, someone decided where the clock of modern history should begin. A starting line was chosen, and every year since has simply been counted forward from that moment.
Most of us never question it. The number that marks the present year appears automatically on our phones, our documents and our calendars, as though it were an objective fact about the passage of time itself. Yet it is nothing of the sort. The way we measure the years is simply the result of a decision made long ago about where one era should begin.
In my book Confessions of a Professional Conspiracy Theorist I describe the unusual work I once carried out promoting the idea that the world might end — or at least be transformed in some dramatic way — in the year 2012. Of course nothing actually happened, it was never going to. The aim was not prophecy, but something rather more strategic: to help create a symbolic historical marker that could serve as a turning point in the story of our civilisation.
Why Humans Create New Epochs
Epochs are symbolic turning points used to organise the flow of history into meaningful chapters. An epoch marks the point where people believe the world has fundamentally changed, or is about to.
Sometimes these turning points are tied to dramatic events — the founding of a new state, the birth of a religion, or the collapse of an old political order. At other times they reflect a broader shift in how people understand the world around them. Either way, the act of declaring a new epoch is rarely about astronomy or mathematics. It is about narrative.
Humans have a deep instinct for dividing history into “before” and “after.” Epochs provide a convenient boundary between the old world and the new one that replaces it.
Every new epoch has a year zero, a symbolic starting point of a new chapter in Human history. The world we live in right now is about to undergo a dramatic change as technological advancements will allow Humans to find new ways to do everything we need to function, and so 2012 was chosen as the year zero for our new epoch.
(This transition into our future new society is often called The Fourth Industrial Revolution, but our team referred to it as the Technological Era).
The Concept of a Year Zero
When a culture decides that history has entered a new chapter, it often redraws the calendar itself. The turning point becomes the starting line from which the years are counted — the year zero of a new era.
The 2012 campaign was designed with exactly this idea in mind: a symbolic turning point that a future civilisation could adopt as the year zero of a new technological age.
If the idea of restarting the calendar sounds strange, it is worth remembering that we already live inside such a system. The years used across much of the world today are counted from a moment that was chosen to mark the beginning of a new era — the dating system known as Anno Domini.
Dionysius Exiguus and the Invention of Anno Domini
The system of Anno Domini was not created at the time it supposedly measures from. It emerged much later, in the sixth century, when a scholar-monk named Dionysius Exiguus proposed a new way of numbering the years.
Until then, dates had commonly been counted from the reigns of Roman emperors, including the emperor Diocletian. Dionysius suggested abandoning that imperial framework and instead measuring time from what he calculated to be the birth of Jesus.
The reasoning was simple but powerful. For the growing Christian world, the birth of Jesus represented the beginning of a new age — a moment when history itself was believed to have taken a decisive turn. By making that event the anchor of the calendar, the passing years would no longer be tied to the rule of emperors but to what they saw as the starting point of a transformed era.
In effect, the calendar was reset around a single defining event. Everything before that moment became part of the earlier age, while everything after it belonged to the new one. Like many epochs that would follow, the system revolved around a clear historical anchor — a moment chosen to mark where one chapter of history ended and another began. This is Year Zero.
The same logic lay behind the promotion of 2012. The intention was to place a comparable anchor in the timeline of modern civilisation: a symbolic marker associated with the profound technological and social transformations of the early twenty-first century. Just as earlier societies centred their calendars on events that defined their age, a future technological civilisation could look back to that moment and choose it as the starting point of its own era — the year we called 2012 becoming its year zero.
2012 As Our Future Year Zero
The Anno Domini system—now usually described in academic writing as the Common Era—has organised the numbering of years for well over fifteen centuries. It has proven remarkably durable. Yet it was created for a very different world: a civilisation shaped by agricultural rhythms, regional kingdoms and religious cosmologies, where news travelled slowly and the boundaries of society were largely local.
The twenty-first century is beginning to look very different. Digital networks span the planet in real time. Information moves instantly across continents. Artificial intelligence, biotechnology and planetary-scale data systems are transforming how societies function and how individuals experience the world. Many thinkers describe this transition as the early stages of a technological epoch unlike anything that has come before.
When such shifts occur, history shows that societies often look for a moment that symbolises the change — an event that becomes the anchor point from which a new era can be measured. The birth of Jesus served that purpose for the Christian world when the Anno Domini system was created. The calendar was reset around a moment that defined the meaning of the age that followed.
The promotion of 2012 was intended to place a similar marker into the timeline of modern civilisation. The date was widely associated with ideas of transformation, awakening and the end of one cycle of history. Whether understood literally or symbolically, the moment captured the imagination of millions and briefly focused global attention on the possibility that humanity might be approaching a profound turning point.
Seen from the perspective of the future, that moment could easily become the anchor of a new epoch. A civilisation shaped by digital networks, artificial intelligence and post-industrial forms of society may one day look back on the early twenty-first century as the threshold of its own historical age. If so, the year once known as 2012 would stand at the boundary between two eras — the final years of the old world and the beginning of the new.
In that future reckoning, the moment we called 2012 would not simply be remembered as a cultural curiosity. It would mark the point where the timeline was reset — the year zero of a technological civilisation.
Proclamation of the Technological Era
And perhaps, centuries from now, people will ask the same question about their own calendar — and discover that their year zero was once known as 2012.
Join us for new articles, books. free downloads and special offers.
Once a month, no spam.
NEWSLETTER
Explore More
Anchoring Effect
What makes us think that a £450 washing machine is a good price when we hadn’t intended to pay that amount when we first entered the store?
Plain Folks Propaganda: Hey, I’m Just like You!
If they look like you, talk like you, and moan about the same things, you’re more likely to go along with what they’re saying.
What is Propaganda? From the Church to Carrots to David Icke
Propaganda isn’t only about flag waving and Cold War food shortages, it’s also about selling coffee, bottled water and conspiracy theories
