If you had the opportunity to travel back in time to the 2000s or 2010s, what would you change to make the world a better place?
If you had the opportunity to travel back in time to the 2000s or 2010s, what would you change to make the world a better place?
Pretty sure that’s how we got here in the first place.
3 N:s
2 C:s
in 2003 Tesla was formed. Tesla is one of the world’s most valuable companies in terms of market capitalization.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla,_Inc.
Invest in it and then use the capital to create political action committees to support candidates that believe in science.
Do I just get one shot or can I keep trying until I get it right?
Basically anything that reduces Republican power in the US is probably a win overall.
If it’s just a single shot, then preventing the Brooks Brothers Riot would be the best use of your time.
All it would take is an industrial sized can of pepper spray. Just like the kind police regularly use on leftwing protesters.
So, the Republican shift toward the far right was already in full swing by the 2000s. You’d need to go back to at least Reagan to head that off. Trickle down economics, Two Santas, etc. was already decades in the making. My dad had already been fully brainwashed by talk radio in the 90s.
But on the flip side, the Democratic establishment has made it painfully clear even to this day that their only priority has always been to maintain the status quo for the privileged NIMBY class. The Republican party didn’t need to do anything to keep unaffordability rising, they all want to maintain the housing market bubble to protect the wealth of boomers.
That's dumb.
What would've really needed to happen is to speak to the parents and the school about "hey, your child and student is doing some pretty fucked up things and they're raising the stakes soon, so you may want to commit them somewhere or talk or smack some sense into them"
I'd pump the brakes on technology. Especially the internet.
"Does X need to be improved?" "No" "Then we don't progress it because its current state functions and does things as efficiently right now"
"Does Y need to be improved?" "Yes" "Then we research, fund and progress it"
Phones would be fun again and not just a series of rectangles with silicone. They'd have any design that they want, so long as it still functions normally as a phone would.
Diplomacy.
After 9/11, when the world weighed an invasion of Afghanistan, America could have skipped the invasion, taken the Al Qaeda leadership the Taliban offered up, and continued to seek O/UBL. A forensic investigation and specific arrests, extradition, trials, and convictions would have been much better than a disastrous 20 year war that accomplished two things: enriching military contractors and the impoverishment of a central Asian nation.
Diplomacy.
Deposing Saddam Hussein with the same type of pressure that, later, led to the ousters of Hosni Mubarak, Ben Ali, and Bashar al Assad. Some might say that 2003 created the pretext for the Arab Spring. I’d counter that time and tide created the conditions. Operation Iraqi Freedom was a pipe dream and an extension on the GWoT piggy bank.
Diplomacy.
Building a better, more sustainable future demands a move away from fossil fuels. Making driving, urban sprawl, warfare, agribiz, and Amazon packages into a socially toxic soup of ideas would have done wonders for green initiatives. Instead a turn away from the largest industries of the time was — and still is — regarded as heresy.
Probably do everything in my power to ensure the gaming landscape isn’t as predatory in terms of having to pay for online access on consoles and seeing the Devil itself ( big red N ) go down in flames. Also, try to make console exclusives seen as something nobody is interested in anymore and are unwilling to purchase, more or less towards the 2010s rather than the 2000s, otherwise some of my favorite franchises wouldn’t exist.
XboxLive? Find a way to fudge all the numbers to make it look like absolutely nobody was buying it!
GameCube? Find a way to ensure little to no 3rd party devs make anything for it by any means possible!
PSN? Keep that free like it was for PS3!
Would need to spend months, if not years, to figure out how to make all of that and ending console exclusives a thing, but a world without all that, IMO, would be a better world.
Darling if you want to stop Nintendo from becoming Nintendo it’s not the GameCube you have to fuck with. The GC was already a gigantic flop (although home to 5 or 6 amazing games). Nobody cared about it in the early aughts and in fact it carried the stigma of being “for little kids” and you could be bullied in school for having one.
You need to hit them where it actually hurts.
You need to stop Pokémon. I feel stopping Gen2 from dropping might have done the trick, made it into just another fad that passed instead of STILL TO THIS DAY THE BIGGEST MEDIA FRANCHISE IN THE WORLD.
Nintendo would have died in the n64 years if Pokémon didn’t carry them on its back (and also completely change the face of pop culture by getting the west into Anime).
Every time they made a flop, Pokémon is what saw them through it.
I’ve definitely had one of those “if I could go back” style scenarios innmy head and didn’t choose pokemon because the question didn’t include the 90s.
My plan for that would be to go back to the beginning of the 90s and basically convince Sega that I’m from the future and give them a copy of gens 1 and 2 for gameboy, alongside a bunch of ads for the game, and let them most likely mess everything up like we know they would.
But that plan hinges upon me being able to travel back in time with things instead of Terminator popping into the past with no clothes or possessions. Also depends on whether I could travel back with a translator as well because my Japanese is not good enough for a forced business meeting with Sega of Japan.
That was why I mentioned Gen 2
It dropped in 2000 after a LOOOONG development hell. And one flap of the butterfly’s wing would have stopped Gold and Silver from being released
Which in turn would have killed the franchise’s momentum.
Do I have the power to change things on a large scale? Cuz like, I was already an adult by 2011, and I still just sorta watched as shit went to shit. I did ‘my part’, and I warned people when I could about alarming trends they were unwittingly contributing to, but no one cared, and to be honest, unless one can actually hit the powerful folks, there is very little an individual can do.
If I have power to change things, to actually affect the powerful people, then I’m going to Y2K and I have a few ideas:
Oh and
I can’t exactly do much about Climate Change with the time given. For that I’d need the same power-scale but to go back to the 60s, when the first scientists took notice of the trend but had their research suppressed by big oil.
9/11 was convenient, but 90% of what happened was already happening at the time.
Bush was planning on invading Iraq as soon as he got elected. The housing crisis was set in motion by Clinton, and exacerbated by Bush. LA had already built the blueprint for a militarized police state with the Olympics in 84.
This shit was coming.
Build a multinational resistance of ‘extremist terrorists’ willing to kill and be arrested, team with Anonymous, and wait for Luigi Mangione to be ready to join us.
Because, as the US and UK governments would have us believe, the term ‘terrorist’ means someone who threatens not the lives of the innocent, but the possessions of the financially rich, morally corrupt and politically powerful.