Time Travel. A History

“Internet time” became a term of art. Andrew Grove, chief executive of Intel, 1996: “We are now living on internet time.” Often this was just a cool-kids way of saying “faster,” but our relationship to time was changing yet again, even if no one quite understood what or how. On internet time the past bleeds into the present. And the future? There seems to be a feeling that the future is already here. Blink and it has happened. Thus the future vanishes.

“Increasingly, our concepts of past, present and future are being forced to revise themselves,” wrote J. G. Ballard in 1995—science fiction, as ever, the canary in the coal mine. “The future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all-voracious present. We have annexed the future into the present, as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us.”

We are annexing the past as well. Institutions from Scientific American to The Bridge World spill open their archives to reveal what was new 50 Years Ago. The online front page of the New York Times recycles its first reporting on bagels and pizza. Backward reels the global mind. Just when the obsession with newness seemed more ferocious than ever, Svetlana Boym, a time-twisting theorist of nostalgia, observed: “The first decade of the twenty-first century is not characterized by the search for newness, but by the proliferation of nostalgias that are often at odds with one another. Nostalgic cyberpunks and nostalgic hippies, nostalgic nationalists and nostalgic cosmopolitans, nostalgic environmentalists and nostalgic metrophiliacs (city lovers) exchange pixel fire in the blogosphere.” For all this blooming shape-shifting nostalgia we can thank the time travelers. “The object of romantic nostalgia must be beyond the present space of experience,” Boym writes, “somewhere in the twilight of the past or on the island of utopia where time has happily stopped, as on an antique clock.”

What a strange ending for the twentieth century! The new century—the new millennium, for those who were counting—arrived with televised fireworks and bands playing (and computer panic) but scarcely a glimmer of the glorious optimism that lit up the year 1900, when everyone seemed to be rushing to the prow of a great ship and gazing hopefully toward the horizon, dreaming of their scientific future: airships, moving sidewalks, Schönwettermaschinen, underwater croquet, flying cars, gas-powered cars, flying people. Andiamo, amici! Many of those dreams came true. So when the new millennium dawned, what bright dreams for the year 3000? Or the year 2100?

Newspapers and websites polled their readers for predictions. They were disappointing. We will control the weather. (Again.) Deserts will become tropical forests. Or the reverse. Space elevators. But not much space travel. Warp drive and wormholes notwithstanding, we seem to have given up on populating the galaxy. Nanorobots. Remote-control warfare. The internet in your contact lens or brain implant. Self-driving cars, a comedown, somehow, from i futuristi and their fearsome roaring racing machines. The aesthetic of futurism changed, too, without anyone issuing a manifesto—from big and bold, primary colors and metallic shine to grim, dank rot and ruins. Genetic engineering and/or species extinctions. Is that all the future we have to look forward to? Nanobots and self-driving cars?

Credit 14.1

Card produced c. 1900 by Hildebrands chocolate company

If we lack space travel, we do have telepresence. “Present” in this context pertains to space, not to time. Telepresence was born in the 1980s, when remotely controlled cameras and microphones came into their own. Deep sea explorers and bomb squads can project themselves elsewhere—project their souls, their eyes and ears, while the body remains behind. We send robots beyond the planets and inhabit them. In the same decade the word virtual, already by then a computer term, began to refer to remote simulations—virtual office, virtual town halls, virtual sex. And, of course, virtual reality. Another way to look at telepresence is that people virtualize themselves.