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Paper short abstract:

”Time traveller” memes craft scenarios where a character from the future inadvertently reveals too much about the state of things to come – and how false many notions of the present are. This future knowledge is constructed as a disruption, but the humorous tone helps address current uncertainties.

Paper long abstract:

The future has been a site of memetic creativity for as long as popular culture has imagined alternative paths for human civilization to take. A revealing meme, originating from an abundant pool of 19th and 20th century fiction, is the use of a ”time traveller” as a character who arrives to disrupt our current existence – or, perhaps, a certain moment in the past – by inadvertently giving information that only future people have. For example, as COVID-19 was gaining ground, a meme image had the time traveller first ask, ”What year is it?”, to which ”Me” answered: ”It’s 2020.” The response from the time traveller, ”Oh. The first year of quarantine,” then upsets the Me-character by accidentally revealing that such quarantines will not be over for a long time. Sadly, this meme from almost two years ago did predict the future accurately.

In this paper, I look at the way such images play with the idea of ”future knowledge” and our current (perhaps limited) expectations concerning the future. As disruptions, these memes reconfigure our current epistemological positions by offering an alternative vision of the present moment, filtered through the future. Often, they show pessimistic tendencies, but as such memes ultimately serve a humorous function, this means that they help us deal with (entirely possible) negative future models in a soothing way.