A Look At Time Travel In Internet Culture, As Explained By Memes

As a pursuit primarily intended to entertain and distract, memes have a monopoly on the escapism business. It’s no surprise that they commonly experiment with the realm of the impossible. With its sci-fi leanings and promise of the unknown, time travel has proved to be a consistent source of material for a long time. Worlds of possibility are condensed into these two small words, and it’s made them into a well-loved content mine.

This has been especially true recently with the advent of the "Time Traveler / Timeline" meme. Drawing upon the Butterfly Effect, the time-traveling protagonist inadvertently does something that adds a bizarre change to the timeline with unexpected outcomes. The result is remix culture on steroids — combining specific cultural cues in strange ways because the format demands it. Taking a cue from surreal memes, the effect is jarring, although its impact is more through its perspective change than weirdness for its own sake.

Time Traveler / Timeline gives an alternate viewpoint on a meme that has been spread in preceding years. Time Traveler Conversation expands on another sci-fi plot point, in which the eponymous individual accidentally hints at their identity when they learn which year they’re in. Its more direct approach showcases a watershed moment as opposed to a more seismic change.

These formats take obvious cues from movies and TV on the subject, which are ingrained in internet culture through things like Back To The Future Day or the Doctor Who fandom. Their ability to compress their knowledge into these soundbites depends on them, but it’s also a departure. Dealing with profound, complex and somewhat fantastical ideas within the constraints of the form, the focus is on the whiplash — despite the fact that their tropes are so well worn in pop culture, the execution is more important than the moment.

This is something that other memes on the theme have departed from, as in the Wojak comics format Men With A Time Machine. Comparing how men and women might take the opportunity of time travel differently, its original iteration operated hypothetically instead of presenting its events as reality.

That is not the only way it is characteristic of many contemporary Wojak formats. The imaginative leap is made by the protagonist themselves, leaning into the fantasy rather than the logistical issues of other time travel memes and presenting itself as if proving a point. The element of surprise may still be there, but it is given a deliberately ridiculous, bogus social-science coating that moderates the weird factor.

At the other end of the spectrum, there is also the type of content that does not focus on these inspirations but has taken the genre to its most self-referential point. Taking things to a meta-level, time travel memes have even focused on the memes themselves. At the height of its popularity, This Meme Is From The Future took on a trend-forecasting role by claiming to present parts of memes to come.

Much like Time Traveler / Timeline, the emphasis is on being purposefully strange, except the focus is on what is yet to happen. Its seemingly inconsequential subject matter both highlights the stupidity of the premise and makes a case for its novelty. Like most time travel memes, it satisfies the question of "what if" that no one particularly wanted to ask, but everybody ends up knowing the answer to.

Memes about time travel rely on the promise of an open-ended universe, but they remain confined by the rulebook of memetic thought. References become more potent and creative appreciation is heightened, but every example remains a reminder that we’re forever stuck in the present. However, that doesn’t have to be a completely bad thing. The current times still offer us the near-infinite possibility for variation, which allows these kinds of memes to be refreshed again and again.

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