If I go back in time, with the friend group I had at the time, I could conceivably beat Zuckerberg to market with Facebook.

Grays Sports Almanac 2000 - 2025 edition.

Cancel Celebrity Apprentice before it aired

Nothing, no one would listen to me and I doubt I could get away with killing billionaires or destroying their property

I dont know how much I’d be able to actually do, but I could whore bitcoin hard and use the money charitably.

The guy that made LED headlight tech for cars would disappear, that’s for sure.

The one thing I realize about questions like this is that they are simply pointless. There is very little an ordinary individual can do to alter much. Even if you got taken back in time to the right time and place to make a change, what would that look like? People write stuff that predict the future all the time. Technofascist predictions about the internet being used by a few jackasses to monitor everyone and keep people under control have been written in the 90s, but no one listened at the time.

Assassination? Good luck! Even if you got teleported back in time to 1997 and were armed with a gun and right outside a room with an unsuspecting Peter Thiel and Elon Musk (and maybe a few others) would blowing them away genuinely ‘solve’ the problems we have today? Or would it simply allow for another person to step in and do the same shit but just with a different name and face?

Enriching yourself using well timed lottery numbers is practically the only thing that would make things better for you, but while that would mean you can relive those years in complete comfort (even luxury) if your objective is to change the world then it is a hollow one.

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:

• Stomp Jair Bolsonaro to death a full decade before he becomes popular. When he was a nobody state representative from São Paulo who was only there to generate more seats for his party.
• Arrange a convenient accident for Steve Jobs years before the iPod drops. People talk about technology becoming boring, I place the blame for that entirely at Apple’s feet. And it all began with the iPod, which in turn, if you believe the stories told, was Jobs’ baby, to the point he harrassed the engineers at Apple for years until it was EXACTLY as he had planned.
• Stop 9/11 from happening, which slows down the US’s descent into being a Police State, which in turn slows down the rise of neoconservatism/neofascism pretty much everywhere. Oh it’ll still happen, but maybe if it happens more slowly, there might be fewer victims and people might do something about it sooner.

Oh and

• “Disappear” Peter Thiel. People really sleep on how much damage Thiel has done because he doesn’t post cringe as often as say, Musk. But he’s the high priest for the techbro “we are building god” faith.

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.

I mean, I’m still just one person, so uhhhh guess I’m taking out a lot of people before they get security detail.

I’m going to visit the Cincinnati Zoo in 2016 and stop this one kid kid from falling into a gorilla enclosure.

Edit: fixed spelling error

I’d make sure a lot of people causing big trouble today wouldn’t be able to cause that trouble if you catch my drift.

Be really obnoxious about the ballot format in the Florida 2000 election until they either fix it or news outlets do a good job educating people about how to correctly vote for Gore

Find Elon musk and tell him that only betas use ketamine, and real epic cyberlords smoke fent

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.

Pretty sure that’s how we got here in the first place.