Artificial intelligence now allows us to transcend space and time.
Deposit photosOver the holidays, I was hanging out with friends when someone said something odd: “I feel like I’m on a weird Insta algorithm right now. I keep getting all these weird videos in my feed.”
Let’s stop here because there’s a lot to unpack.
First of all, ask yourself if this sentence would make sense if you had heard it in 2005? Certainly not. Furthermore, I find it interesting that we have all, more or less, come to terms with the fact that algorithms are now deeply influencing the content we consume, supporting consensual reality.
AICcontentfy asks a key relevant question at this point: “Have you ever noticed that when you visit a website or app, you’re often presented with suggestions for content you might be interested in? Whether it’s a movie on Netflix or a product on Amazon, these recommendations are often tailored to your individual preferences and browsing history. This is an example of personalized content recommendations and is a feature made possible by artificial intelligence.”
Along these lines, a YouTube algorithm recently decided, for whatever reason, that I would enjoy watching a clip of shoppers at a Kmart store in 1992.
Spoiler alert: The algorithm was onto something. I did dig this video.
It’s fascinating to travel back in time to see how people once behaved—especially before those smartphones in our pockets changed our daily lives. If you haven’t already seen this kind of video, check it out. It’s what I might call the poor man’s version of time travel. No, they don’t give you all the freedom Marty McFly enjoyed to interact with the past Back to the Future. But you get a little bit of time travel. Plus, consuming videos of unsuspecting people going about their daily lives in a different era is mind-blowing.
They offer a representation of life in a bygone era.
The key to this phenomenon is that the participants in the video are unaware that they are being captured for posterity. Footage found. Those involved don’t act or pretend like you might find in a movie set in 1992. Instead, through a harmless voyeuristic process, viewers like you and me in 2025 can jump back in time to observe people and objects that have been lost since old as it once was.
(Sidenote: If you watch these videos, two things will immediately stand out. One is that people were much thinner. The other is that they were paying more attention to each other without screen distractions.)
As fascinating as this cultural artifact is, there’s more to AI time travel—than YouTube. Channels like Glamourdaze deliver snippets of life from more than 100 years ago with stunningly restored footage—powered by artificial intelligence. Watching these videos is like the Kmart effect of 1992—but supercharged. After all, many of us lived in 1992. We may have even shopped at Kmart that year.
This makes such video display nostalgic.
But watching ice skaters cruise a frozen Montreal lake in 1899? Now this is something outside of our life experiences. Unless, of course, you’re actually running with geniuses like Dr. Emmett Brown and you secretly traverse the incredible threads of time. If so, drop me a line. We need to talk.
Yet another YouTube favorite of mine comes from the NASS channel. It shows life in the Hollywood Hills back in the 1920s in full color. Of course, if you’ve seen color-enhanced movies, such as It’s a Wonderful Lifeyou are familiar with the process of upgrading black and white cinematic wonders.
It’s not that.
Why? Again, no one is playing. No one steals for the camera. Instead, we get the closest facsimile to real life with existing technology. It looks like Yuval Noah Harari’s interesting 2015 book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. In it, the artificial intelligence futurist explores the potential of technology to one day allow us to literally experience the consciousness of another. We are nowhere close to possessing such abilities, but advances in artificial intelligence are opening the door for them.
But there is more impressive content on YouTube for your algorithm to enjoy. Mine recently gifted me with a treasure from a channel with the provocative title Abandoned Films.
Combining old Panavision styling with new AI technology, it creates a Hegelian dialectical video output: reimaginings of shows and movies that never were. I encourage you to check out his many exciting offerings, including his 2022 performance Super Mario Bros.—with 1950s sensibilities. The calm voice of a bygone Radio Days narrator plays over a rich Mushroom Kingdom color palette. Meanwhile, violin strings swoon as actors – who never existed – peel back from Old Hollywood to make thrilling cameos.
Whoever trained the AI to produce these futuristic relics nailed the sensibility of the post-WWII era. The screenplay features a simpler, black-and-white depiction of good and evil that is almost entirely absent from today’s thin filmmaking. Heroes are heroes in these reboots. Bad guys are bad. Not in between. Also proving their allegiance to the Panavision aesthetic, all of these AI-generated videos feature movie stars looking amazingly good.
Growing up, it never occurred to me that technology—especially artificial intelligence—could be used to summon and reimagine the past. As I watch Panavision fare, I’m put in the mind of Philip K. Dick. Perhaps only sci-fi literary oracles like him, Kurt Vonnegut, and Ray Bradbury could conceive of a future in which the past returns to both inform and challenge our understanding of reality.
The novelist, F. Scott Fitzgerald, is no one’s idea of a pulp science fiction writer. However, he best describes our strange moment with the final words of his American masterpiece, The Great Gatsby: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgasmic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s okay—tomorrow we’ll run faster, stretch our arms farther. … And a fine morning—Thus we strike, boats against the current, endlessly returning to the past.”
