If you had the opportunity to travel back in time to the 2000s or 2010s, what would you change to make the world a better place?

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.

Just download a copy of Wikipedia and become a God. By the convoluted bttf rules, it should update anytime the timeline changes, and you'll know everything that happened.

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

Cancel Celebrity Apprentice before it aired

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

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

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

Cincinnati. 2 n's 1 t
- Thank you. Maybe that's why I failed the first time. I must've went to the wrong city.
- Cccinnciiiiinattttttiiiiiiii!
- Cinncinati, got it!
- 3 N:s
  2 C:s
  3 I:s

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.

9/11 was convenient, but 90% of what happened was already happening at the time.
Bush was planning on invading Iraq as soon as he got elected. The housing crisis was set in motion by Clinton, and exacerbated by Bush. LA had already built the blueprint for a militarized police state with the Olympics in 84.
This shit was coming.

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

Better yet, help Elián González make it to Florida with his mom. That saga made Democrats lose a lot of votes in Florida in that election.
It's all Chad's fault. We should just hang him
- No! That's how we got here!

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

Savage!

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

- Life imitates art.

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

Do I just get one shot or can I keep trying until I get it right?

Basically anything that reduces Republican power in the US is probably a win overall.

So, the Republican shift toward the far right was already in full swing by the 2000s. You'd need to go back to at least Reagan to head that off. Trickle down economics, Two Santas, etc. was already decades in the making. My dad had already been fully brainwashed by talk radio in the 90s.
But on the flip side, the Democratic establishment has made it painfully clear even to this day that their only priority has always been to maintain the status quo for the privileged NIMBY class. The Republican party didn't need to do anything to keep unaffordability rising, they all want to maintain the housing market bubble to protect the wealth of boomers.
- We make it so Reagan still runs but doesn't win presidency, ever, until he dies. We make sure Bill Clinton doesn't do that incident with Monica that got him impeached so he can still have some goodwill with the people enough to make them think we want the current path he paved to continue.
If it's just a single shot, then preventing the Brooks Brothers Riot would be the best use of your time.
All it would take is an industrial sized can of pepper spray. Just like the kind police regularly use on leftwing protesters.

Convince a guy in Google to not publish a paper that started this AI nonsense.

Considering I’d just be some guy, I’d invest all of my money in Nvidia and Bitcoin then when I get back and have millions, I’d spend it on passing wealth taxes and raising the minimum wage.

Invest on Apple first, their profit curve and stock price gets absurdly higher after 2010
This 1. Buy bitcoin 2. Bribe, but for good
- Yeah, a focus on altruism, but make investments to be more effective at it. Hey, you could even get ahead of the game and start a crypto exchange!

Do what I could to stop the passing of the SCOTUS Citizen's United ruling
Write a letter to then Senator Obama that there's a major recession coming and that holding the banks accountable and buoying the lower and middle class is a better option than a bailout of the private sector
Warn about various impending natural disasters around the world to try to save as many folks as I could

Well if you allowed one more year, I really feel that stopping the Columbine shooting would have an exponential improvement on the quality of the timeline.

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.

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.

I'd call and write to every newspaper and law enforcement agency and report the perpetrators of 9/11 a couple of days before it happened. I'd also place a decent bet on it happening anyway

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.

I would get everyone to sign the Paris agreement and give it real teeth for non compliance.

Even Bob?
- nah, fuck him, he still owes me five bucks

Diplomacy.

After 9/11, when the world weighed an invasion of Afghanistan, America could have skipped the invasion, taken the Al Qaeda leadership the Taliban offered up, and continued to seek O/UBL. A forensic investigation and specific arrests, extradition, trials, and convictions would have been much better than a disastrous 20 year war that accomplished two things: enriching military contractors and the impoverishment of a central Asian nation.

Diplomacy.

Deposing Saddam Hussein with the same type of pressure that, later, led to the ousters of Hosni Mubarak, Ben Ali, and Bashar al Assad. Some might say that 2003 created the pretext for the Arab Spring. I'd counter that time and tide created the conditions. Operation Iraqi Freedom was a pipe dream and an extension on the GWoT piggy bank.

Diplomacy.

Building a better, more sustainable future demands a move away from fossil fuels. Making driving, urban sprawl, warfare, agribiz, and Amazon packages into a socially toxic soup of ideas would have done wonders for green initiatives. Instead a turn away from the largest industries of the time was — and still is — regarded as heresy.

I'd pump the brakes on technology. Especially the internet.

"Does X need to be improved?" "No" "Then we don't progress it because its current state functions and does things as efficiently right now" "Does Y need to be improved?" "Yes" "Then we research, fund and progress it"

Phones would be fun again and not just a series of rectangles with silicone. They'd have any design that they want, so long as it still functions normally as a phone would.

I'd write a list of future events and share it everywhere I can, editorializing of course to make sure them coming to volition validates my political views, and then use the eventual fame to shape the world in my image.

Ignoring that path, and with no political sway of my own ...

I've got nothing. I'd be like 5 years old and Australian. And overall Australia's doing pretty fine. If there's one issue I'd focus on it's digital privacy and my biggest adversary there would be Google. IDK, there's not really one domino I can affect to change things. Maybe warn about 9/11 and the subprime mortgage crisis but I'm pretty sure other people already did both of those to no avail. Plus I'd be 2 or so years old at the time of 9/11 so that'd probably not go well.

Probably do everything in my power to ensure the gaming landscape isn't as predatory in terms of having to pay for online access on consoles and seeing the Devil itself ( big red N ) go down in flames. Also, try to make console exclusives seen as something nobody is interested in anymore and are unwilling to purchase, more or less towards the 2010s rather than the 2000s, otherwise some of my favorite franchises wouldn't exist.

XboxLive? Find a way to fudge all the numbers to make it look like absolutely nobody was buying it!

GameCube? Find a way to ensure little to no 3rd party devs make anything for it by any means possible!

PSN? Keep that free like it was for PS3!

Would need to spend months, if not years, to figure out how to make all of that and ending console exclusives a thing, but a world without all that, IMO, would be a better world.

Darling if you want to stop Nintendo from becoming Nintendo it's not the GameCube you have to fuck with. The GC was already a gigantic flop (although home to 5 or 6 amazing games). Nobody cared about it in the early aughts and in fact it carried the stigma of being "for little kids" and you could be bullied in school for having one.
You need to hit them where it actually hurts.
You need to stop Pokémon. I feel stopping Gen2 from dropping might have done the trick, made it into just another fad that passed instead of STILL TO THIS DAY THE BIGGEST MEDIA FRANCHISE IN THE WORLD.
Nintendo would have died in the n64 years if Pokémon didn't carry them on its back (and also completely change the face of pop culture by getting the west into Anime).
Every time they made a flop, Pokémon is what saw them through it.
- I've definitely had one of those "if I could go back" style scenarios innmy head and didn't choose pokemon because the question didn't include the 90s.
  My plan for that would be to go back to the beginning of the 90s and basically convince Sega that I'm from the future and give them a copy of gens 1 and 2 for gameboy, alongside a bunch of ads for the game, and let them most likely mess everything up like we know they would.
  But that plan hinges upon me being able to travel back in time with things instead of Terminator popping into the past with no clothes or possessions. Also depends on whether I could travel back with a translator as well because my Japanese is not good enough for a forced business meeting with Sega of Japan.

Prohibit social media.

The other half of states that do not have ballot initiatives should have them. So the drug war would have ended peacefully. Contaminated overdoses and corruption would have been prevented.