We are already more or less disconnected from our history and thus also from its destination. That means, then, that time can slow as it nears its end and that the year 2000, in a certain way, will not take place.

Baudrillard is arguing that late-modern society has lost a lived, narrative relation to history—both to its past and to any sense of historical “destination” (a telos such as progress, revolution, or salvation). In his view, media saturation, simulation, and the circulation of signs detach events from continuity and meaning, producing a kind of temporal disorientation. The claim that time “slows as it nears its end” is less a literal prophecy than a diagnosis of an “end of history” mood: when history no longer feels like a directed process, the future becomes repetitive, deferred, or unreal. Thus “the year 2000…will not take place” suggests that even major calendrical thresholds can be absorbed as spectacle—anticipated, marketed, and consumed—without delivering genuine historical rupture or renewal.