NPR: Pretend to Be a Time Traveler Day

Pretend to Be a Time Traveler Day

A few months back, someone proposed designating Dec. 8 as "Pretend to be a Time Traveler Day." And it's gaining steam online. The rules are simple: You can be from a utopian future or a dystopian one, or, "for beginners," the past.

Here's my favorite, the dystopian, from the proposal:

- If you go [for] the "prisoner who's escaped the future" try shaving your head and putting a barcode on the back of your neck. Then stagger around and stare at the sky, as if you've never seen it before.
- Walk up to random people and say "WHAT YEAR IS THIS?" and when they tell you, get quiet and then say "Then there's still time!" and run off.

- Stand in front of a statue (any statue, really), fall to your knees, and yell "NOOOOOOOOO"

People from places as far afield as Florida, Holland, Australia, Canada, Belgium and California have already signed up. There's a Facebook event with more than 2,000 confirmed guests. There are pages and pages of ideas and costume proposals.

One of my faves:

One of the ones I've done in real life was to get my friend to shave his head, draw a bar code on the back of his neck, stagger up to people and say "WHAT YEAR IS THIS" then run off. Then a second person walks up to that same person later with a photo and says "HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN"? It helps if you have a little eyepiece or small piece of obtuse technology on you.

Now, I have no idea if anyone will actually pull this off, but the enthusiasm seems to be running high, with blogs and sites talking about it. It's similar, perhaps, to the zombie day in San Francisco earlier this year. Or the incredibly insane anime dance number done in Tokyo, where a bunch of people met up online and decided to do the dance in the street, until the cops came. Kind of like a flash mob, like the 4,000 people who showed up during rush hour at London's Victoria station and danced. For two hours.

Of course, these kinds of things can be used in ways besides just odd public art pieces: protests, marketing, whatever. It might be the next step in linking virtual and "meat" space. And it's not moderated or organized by anyone really; it just comes from an idea that people build on. Open-source action.

- JJ Sutherland

2:20 PM ET | 09-28-2007 | permalink

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