Safety Not Guaranteed

April 4, 2018 6:02 AM

The Rise in Self-Proclaimed Time Travelers: They’ve come from the future for two reasons: 1) To save us from ourselves; and 2) to make YouTube confessionals.
posted by Cash4Lead (44 comments total)

That they're all white dudes means things to continue to function as always in the future.
posted by Kitteh at 6:28 AM on April 4, 2018 [41 favorites]

As opposed to those who didn't come from very far in the future, and posted their proclamations on Vine.

But it's part of the whole, I think, "I'm not special so this makes me special" taken to a diagnosable level (I'm not a diagnostician) but at least without cults or guns.
posted by tilde at 6:30 AM on April 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

Before the election, I saw a commercial for Hillary’s GOTV that was a vlog from a time-traveling embattled Democratic activist in the hellworld of Donald Trump. We’re actually there, and I don’t like that commercial any better then than I did then.

It’s true what the article says that there’s something very American about the idea. It takes for granted that the present is impossible to change by the usual means and that only One Man with a lot of science behind him can etc. etc.
posted by Countess Elena at 6:30 AM on April 4, 2018 [7 favorites]

Quick verification check: how many of them have won the lottery?
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:30 AM on April 4, 2018 [4 favorites]

Wouldn't a time traveler have come before before the election? You know... to stop it?
posted by xammerboy at 6:39 AM on April 4, 2018 [10 favorites]

Wouldn't a time traveler have come before before the election? You know... to stop it?

Unless that's what originally happened and made things worse!! 9-12 or a Ted Cruzpocolypse!!!2!
posted by UltraMorgnus at 6:44 AM on April 4, 2018 [4 favorites]

In the future we are all demonitized.
posted by srboisvert at 6:49 AM on April 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

I realize that pieces like the one linked here are themselves click-bait, but there's an interesting story here—who are  ApexTV and Paranormal Elite?—what are the mechanics of this scam? It's a shame the author doesn't devote the tiniest bit of effort to answering that question.
posted by octobersurprise at 6:54 AM on April 4, 2018 [5 favorites]

There was an episode of Futurama about this in which a disastrous political environment led to a robot uprising, so a lone human (with humanity's last suit) was sent back in time to win the presidential election and steer the future in a better direction. Unfortunately, since he won the election, he negated the bad future which means he never went back in time in the first place, erasing him from history and restoring the status quo that will eventually lead to the robot uprising.
posted by Servo5678 at 6:54 AM on April 4, 2018 [10 favorites]

He goes on to explain that what we typically think of as UFOs aren’t spaceships — they’re actually time machines that travel through spacetime.

So, they have Repo Man in the future.
posted by chavenet at 7:08 AM on April 4, 2018 [8 favorites]

I knew this would happen.
posted by ardgedee at 7:16 AM on April 4, 2018 [5 favorites]

Special relativity pedantry: everything travels through spacetime.
posted by runcibleshaw at 7:17 AM on April 4, 2018 [21 favorites]

everything travels through spacetime

Not me, I'm too lazy.
posted by AzraelBrown at 7:20 AM on April 4, 2018 [16 favorites]

Also, one thing people often miss about potential time travel technology is that it's possible that a time traveler from the future can only go back to the moment the time machine is invented. So, it might be that the only way to know if there's (backwards) time travel is to invent a time machine.
posted by runcibleshaw at 7:22 AM on April 4, 2018 [4 favorites]

You know, I was just thinking a couple of weeks ago how awesome it would be to have 10 minutes with myself from 10 years ago. I never thought about monetizing it.
posted by nubs at 7:38 AM on April 4, 2018

Well this certainly won't help...
posted by Naberius at 7:41 AM on April 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

"We've sat down to talk to this man in an undisclosed location." (Shows panoramic view of a most likely easily-identified public park.)

He has a photo from the year 6000. It is, of course, distorted, because in the time-travel process, photos get distorted to look like Photoshop. They also are still printed on glossy paper, and he couldn't bring back anything else like, say, technology or a genetically-engineered DragonKitten to prove himself further.
posted by xingcat at 8:02 AM on April 4, 2018 [3 favorites]

Not a time-traveler, but until someone writes an article about the rise of OOBE videos on Youtube, I feel compelled to share the greatest of the genre with you.
posted by dobbs at 8:42 AM on April 4, 2018 [3 favorites]

Is there nothing Youtube can't ruin? John Titor and the Coast to Coast nutcases were fun, this is just sad and stupid.
posted by Sangermaine at 8:48 AM on April 4, 2018 [9 favorites]

Is there nothing Youtube can't ruin? John Titor and the Coast to Coast nutcases were fun, this is just sad and stupid.

It's all been downhill since the demise of the Weekly World News :(
posted by mikelieman at 9:01 AM on April 4, 2018 [11 favorites]

ApexTV has a very "We report, you decide" patreon page:

Our mission, here at ApexTV, is to bring you the stories that no one else will.

We try not to give our opinion on the stories we distribute, because we don’t want to influence your opinion.

We simply bring the stories to you and let you decide. Far too many modern media outlets try to push their agenda on you. We take special pride in letting you decide.

Also:

... by becoming a Patron, you get a "Verified "✔️ role and stand out from other members on our Discord. Also, you get access to our Patron-Only channel.

On twitter, ApexTV follows conspiracists, ufologists, some gamers, Alex Jones, and your usual assortment of bots. Lots of bots among their followers, too.

This UFO site describes ApexTV as:

Heavily focused on profit, each video of this YouTube channel begins with an appeal for you to subscribe (with an offer of a cash prize for a randomly selected subscriber) and includes multiple ad breaks per video. Using a compilation format with voiceover and sometimes an unidentified on-camera host, ApexTV creates collections of CGI hoaxes, manipulated photos, misrepresented images and hoaxes aggregated from other sources, all with titles that include the phrase “Caught On Tape.” Topics include teleportation, strange and mythical creatures (mermaids, dragons, demons), aliens, time travel, and the usual viral UFO hoaxes from Secureteam 10, Thirdphaseofmoon, Streetcap1 and others. The formula has been successful: ApexTV has racked up over 92,000 subscribers as of February 2017.

Last summer, ApexTV was looking for content producers on Upwork.

... We will pay you $5.00 per written script, and you will write one script per day.

After you send us the script, we will send it to our host, who will narrate the script you wrote. Then the audio file will be sent to our video editor who will add visual reference to the work. After that, our YouTube expert will upload the video and promote it.

They were also looking for writers at SEO forums. Big Money was offering 6 bucks a script there!

ApexTV's viewer stats are available on Socialblade.
posted by octobersurprise at 9:13 AM on April 4, 2018 [5 favorites]

This is ludicrous, and no one got themselves accidentally transported to the 21st century after an unreported accident with the first nuclear test and they where just delivering coffee damn it.
posted by The Whelk at 9:19 AM on April 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

At a friend's wedding another guest hypothesized that my partner and I were time travelers because we had clearly attempted to dress ourselves to blend in during some era, but had not quite succeeded in nailing the one we were actually in.
posted by little cow make small moo at 9:59 AM on April 4, 2018 [18 favorites]

I have a time machine. It can only travel forward through time, though. At normal speed. Actually, I think it might just be a toaster. :/
posted by sexyrobot at 10:15 AM on April 4, 2018 [16 favorites]

It occurred to me, I promise, a few days after the November '16 election, that I now know definitively and conclusively that this civilization will never invent time travel.
posted by gauche at 10:25 AM on April 4, 2018 [9 favorites]

The glorious automated gay communist space empire of the year 3018 sees no reason to go back and undo a primary factor in its creation
posted by The Whelk at 10:56 AM on April 4, 2018 [22 favorites]

I agree with Sangermaine, conspiracy theory things use to be fun, and now they all seem like money-making schemes by weird crypto-fascists, although they probably always were and I was just too naive to know. Ignorance was bliss.
posted by gucci mane at 11:24 AM on April 4, 2018 [14 favorites]

everything travels through spacetime

I have come here from the year 1973 to confirm this.

And boy, are my arms tired.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 11:48 AM on April 4, 2018 [7 favorites]

That they're all white dudes means things to continue to function as always in the future.

It reminds me of Chris Rock's comment that he doesn't like Throwback Thursday on Facebook or the idea of time travel: "I don't want to be in anything before the Jackson 5."
posted by jonp72 at 12:40 PM on April 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

So there's no stored state in the universe. There's no time travel. There's no time outside of the present to travel to. If God is a blind watchmaker then time is a ratchet cog. Your body tries desperately to create memory where none exists and it succeeds against everything even though memory is fleeting and fallible.

Also geez these morons are all bullshit artists.
posted by GuyZero at 12:53 PM on April 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

When I was a kid, maybe about 8 or 9 years old, I told some of my friends that I had a psychic connection to a mysterious alternate-universe world called "the Other," which I could mentally travel to by entering a sort of trance-state, which I would occasionally demonstrate during recess at school. Everyone on Earth had an alternate-universe equivalent on the Other. Mine was named Enoch (I don't think I knew the reference). I would regale my friends with tales about their equivalents' adventures on the Other. Evidently my stories were so compelling that at least one of my friends was actually convinced it was true, approaching me years later when we were teenagers to ask, "So, uh, I was thinking about it recently, and you just made up all that stuff about the Other, right?"

Anyway, I grew out of it.
posted by biogeo at 1:12 PM on April 4, 2018 [5 favorites]

Before the election, I saw a commercial for Hillary’s GOTV that was a vlog from a time-traveling embattled Democratic activist in the hellworld of Donald Trump. We’re actually there, and I don’t like that commercial any better then than I did then.

I don't know if y'all have seen this, but for Halloween 2016, The Daily Show did a whole show (cable subscription required, or you can watch a segment of it on youtube) where the joke is they're broadcasting from Halloween 2020. Everything is terrible since djt won the 2016 election, and uh... I'm rewatching it now and so many of these things are so plausible it's just fucking awkwardly funny.

The most cringeworthy completely plausible things:
- The only news out there is TNN, T**** News Network. djt used new libel laws to shut down all legit news sources.
- John Oliver got deported.
- Obamacare is repealed and replaced with an energy drink.
- djt turned against Europe, alienated Asia, told Africa to go back to Africa, sued South America for copyright infringement, and banned from Antartica for sexually assaulting a penguin.
- 4 years and the wall is still being built, and currently only stand at 4 feet tall.
- Jordan Klepper as a white guy building the wall: "I guess if I had to nitpick anything it would be the total economic collapse, I didn't realize that white men would be subject to that sort of thing. And someone could've mentioned that deporting the immigrants meant we'd have to build the wall ourselves."
- Ronny Chieng: "Things are great in China. We're all super rich thanks to Trump's dumbass trade policies."
- Jeff Ross was hired as Secretary of Offense, writing insults for the twitter account, and then got fired for not being mean enough.
- djt let all the refugees in, but only the hot ones.
- djt's new book: Mein Kampf is Bigger Than Your Kampf
- The Grand Canyon got turned into a golf course open only to people born in the US.

The most ironically sad thing:
- Chris Hardwick and @midnight forced to be on air 24/7 to praise djt. I don't know if I'm happy or sad that the show is cancelled so that reality won't be true. Although in 3 years the show could be forced to come back for that purpose... so... gah?
posted by numaner at 2:20 PM on April 4, 2018 [4 favorites]

So that time travel drama "The Crossing" has superpowered characters called "Apex" while the big YouTube time travel channel is "ApexTV"? I sense something viral. And lame.
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:57 PM on April 4, 2018

time travel: it's what plants crave.
posted by wibari at 4:11 PM on April 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

There's a famous-because-creepy-pop-culture group photo from times past; a guy in the crowd looks uncannily like my son. So much so that when I showed his father, he complimented my photoshop skills, but wondered why I'd put Jr. Lock-is-Lit in the photo. He had to search for the photo online, and spot the man in every instance, before he'd believe it was real. I have tried, unsuccessfully, to find out who this guy is and if he's an ancestor, or if it's just a random genetic happening.

We have amused ourselves on certain slow social occasions by telling folks that 1) Jr. Lock-Is-Lit will be a time traveller in the future; 2) that we have proof in a historical photograph that he arranged to be in, knowing we'd see it, and 3) if they swear to secrecy we will show them.

We make them do the search. Jaws drop.

Tl;dr: genetics are weird, people enjoy being mildly freaked out, and my son is awesome because it has NEVER crossed his mind to monetize this.
posted by Nancy_LockIsLit_Palmer at 4:57 PM on April 4, 2018 [4 favorites]

Self-Proclaimed Time Travelers

As opposed to...what, actual time travelers?
posted by davebush at 5:07 PM on April 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

I am disappointed on so many levels with this.
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:26 PM on April 4, 2018

I, too, am a time traveler who has sworn to use time travel only to correct my typos.

Crucially, my vessel can only travel backward in five-minute intervals.
posted by mistersquid at 5:31 PM on April 4, 2018 [4 favorites]

I am trying to think “the medium is the message”-wise about this but I dropped out of college way before I got to that 400 level media studies course, so what the fuck is it with YouTube that the message is conspiracy theory videos, time travel put ons and makeup tutorials?
posted by chrchr at 8:18 PM on April 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

My thoughts reading this were:
Explain why you weren't at the party.
Ha ha as if a polygraph test actually proves anything.
Oh good I'm not the only one asking about the party.
posted by ckape at 11:25 PM on April 4, 2018

I should at this point confess in this Metafilter comment thread that will gather only minimal attention, that the whole ApexTV thing is a ruse, cleverly implemented by advanced psy-ops agents from the 24th century so that real time travellers can do their job unnoticed as the whole concept is branded as ridiculous hogwash and no one serious will ever (well for the next 2 centuries anyway) believe any claims of time-travel. This is critical for our operation. I should also mention that the first attempts in time travel were kind of a disaster, as we found out that returning people from the past was a bit more complicated than we imagined. So in the famous (in the 24th century AD) Mesopotamian case, 100 time travelers were stranded in the 4th millenium BC, turned native, interbred with the locals and were instrumental in founding the Sumerian civilization. But we fixed that. Oh and one of these youtubing fools is legit, but his days in any century are numbered.
posted by talos at 2:57 AM on April 5, 2018 [2 favorites]

Self-Proclaimed Time Travelers

As opposed to...what, actual time travelers?

As opposed to time-travelers vetted and approved by an independent, credentialed, and board-certified organization specializing in the identification of time travelers, like the kind of person Rick at Gold & Silver Pawn in Vegas calls when somebody comes into his store claiming to be a time traveller. "OK, I hear ya, but I'm no expert on time travel so I know this guy who specializes in time-travellers I'd like to give a call to and have him come down here and verify your self-proclaiming, if that's OK."
posted by AzraelBrown at 9:58 AM on April 5, 2018

I made up a time-traveling neighbor who masked his activities by lying about it all the time many years ago on this very site. I feel like I should be charging royalties.
posted by JHarris at 12:00 AM on April 6, 2018

Nice work on the post title.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:28 PM on April 13, 2018