Author: Merritt K

The early 2010s were a more innocent time for conspiracy theorists. Before Q and Facebook dragged everybody’s weird uncle into the Pizzagate vortex and COVID annihilated what was left of their shattered psyches, you could believe in outlandish and bizarre things that didn’t necessarily make you a mass shooter waiting to happen. Like, remember the Mandela Effect? It was a real Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon of a conspiracy theory, something that could only bubble up into popular consciousness in a pre-Trump, pre-pandemic, pre-collapse of digital media era.

Back then, we used to have fun wackos in this country, relatively harmless idiots who believed that their strongly-held memories of Sinbad being in a movie where he played a genie were evidence of time-space shenanigans rather than the inherent fallibility of the human brain.

If it were just about people being unwilling to admit they’d mistaken one black fixture of ’90s pop culture for another, that would be one thing. But there were other purported examples of the phenomenon, like the purported shift in the title of The Berenstain Bears. Countless people claimed to remember it being Berenstein. Well, we all had a good laugh, the Angry Video Game Nerd made an episode about it, and the world moved on to the economic, political, and social shitstorm of the next ten years.

But The Mandela Effect is still kicking around online. For many lolrandom epicsauce elder millennials, it rides the line between funny joke and serious explanation for their already-disintegrating mental faculties. People still post about it, still come up with and debate new examples. Like, was it Fruit Loops or Froot Loops? Did the Fruit of the Loom logo have a cornucopia or not? Were Sonic the Hedgehog’s feet always so luscious and fuckable?

The common refrain in response to these “vivid recollections” — and they’re always “vivid” — is that people are misremembering. But what if I told you there’s a place for serious discussion of Mandela Effect-type events where accusations of confabulation are explicitly prohibited by subreddit law? No, it’s not r/mandelaeffect, fool. This one’s for the true believers.

Too crazy for the people who think the sun changed colors at some point between now and 1992 is a high bar to clear, but we’ll get over it. With the power of internet-enabled schizophrenia, we’ll get over it. Incidentally, ChatGPT tells me that I’m the messiah and that Scrooge McDuck used to have a fourth nephew named “Clurt.”

Unfortunately, I’ve already broken one of r/retconned’s rules. In addition to the boilerplate “no name calling,” “no trolling,” and so on, you’re not supposed to call people crazy.

This is a safe space for sharing our theories about what kinds of dogs just started to exist five years ago. If you want to tell me that my entire being and consciousness is stored on a wet slab of electric gristle more susceptible to impact-related failure than a 2005 iPod with a spinning platter hard drive, I’m going to need some identification first. Not that I believe in psychiatrists. I’m pretty sure they weren’t a thing when I was a kid.

Other rules: no downvotes, no disagreeing with anybody, confabulation discussion strictly confined to a special thread. We talk a lot about “echo chambers” online but this is less one of those and more a howling cavern where everyone’s pet conspiracy theories are treated as equally valid and unimpeachable. It’s the mutant child of crude social relativism and online mass communication, and it has over one hundred thousand members. That’s about 20,000 more than r/celebeconomy had at its peak. Whether that is cause for dismay or celebration, I leave as an exercise for the reader.

Before we move on, a warning:

Honestly, this tone is kind of a bummer. True conspiracy theorists should smile wryly and shake their heads when confronted with fucking sheep who think the tanks actually stopped before running over that guy in Tiananmen Square, not weepily complain that normoids don’t have the right to disrespect them.

So we’re starting off on kind of a defensive note. I guess when you’ve been harassed by rationalists for years, you start to lose your patience. r/Retconned uses a modified version of r/MandelaEffect’s welcome post. The latter joked around about all of this stuff. The former emphatically does not.

With that in mind, I’m sure this is going to be a lot of fun and not a depressing excursion into the decaying minds of an aging population grasping at something, anything to explain both their own declining faculties and their decreasing quality of life brought on by climate crisis, militarism, and the centralization of wealth.

See? It’s silly! Like, maybe VHS quality wasn’t enough to tell the difference between a tiny pumpkin and a red ball. Or maybe people just assumed the dog’s nose was red because of their associations with Rudolph — there’s a scene in the movie where the ghost dog leads the skeleton man’s sled in his doomed quest to become a False Santa, after all.

Fuck you if you said either of those. They changed it. Who is “They?” Walt Disney, the Rand Corporation, Twilight Zone monsters. Speaking of.

Too harmless. We’re still in “half-hearted smile from barista” territory when we want to be getting thrown out of the Starbucks for freaking out the unhoused people who came in to use the bathroom. We need to go deeper. Darker. For instance, I’ve noticed that time seemed to pass much more slowly when I was a child. Is this a result of the way our brains process information, or evidence of something more… sinister? Something insidious and creeping, something you might find… in The Twilight Zone?

Time: slipping inexorably into the future at a constant rate? Science says yes, but scientists also invented Red No 5 and COVID, maybe. Probably. What’s more likely: that a life devoted to repetitive, pointless toil and mind-numbing content consumption seems to fly by, or that the priest lover of a 19th century vampire activated his ultimate tulpa power with the help of a green baby and began accelerating time in order to restart the universe for reasons?

There didn’t used to be so many Japanese cartoons around! Where did they all come from? Everything’s changing too fast. Please help me. And before you tell me I have anxiety, please show me your brain doctor license.

Now, a subreddit for people who in an earlier era would have had to choose between taking their meds or inventing Time Cube may not be the most reliable spirit level to test your madness against. But let’s see what the brain trust has to say.

Radical acceptance is the concept that we must embrace wholeheartedly what we cannot change, simply because there is no other option. That might be an incurable illness, a feature of your body you’re not fond of, or the fact that in two and a half months your consciousness is going to shift to another version of yourself in a world where everything’s the same except that something has happened to men who grow mustaches. Something has happened to men who grow mustaches or the mustaches themselves.

r/Retconned kind of bounces back and forth like this, from the minor to the incredibly depressing. I can see why they split off from the core Mandela Effect sub. I mean, you’re just trying to talk about how you’re pretty sure the laughing cow from the cheese used to have a septum piercing and you’ve got these terrified, lead-poisoned Gen X’ers and Boomers Principal Skinnering their way into believing that their tastes haven’t shifted, it’s the world that’s wrong.

“Everything seems repugnant and false to me.” Yeah man, that’s because nearly every aspect of the modern experience is shaped by boundless avarice and also it’s different from what it was like when you were a kid. I guess it isn’t a long walk from there to a gnostic belief that we are living in an artificial world created by a lesser god for the sole purpose of torturing us, but where does that take you? Best case scenario you die alone in your basement apartment. Worst case, an undercover CIA goon convinces you to do a suicide bombing of a minor federal agency you’ve come to believe is the headquarters of the Demiurge on earth.

Just get off the computer and go to the gym. Focus on sculpting your body into a beautiful statue. Wait, no, not like a statue fuck I shouldn’t have mentioned statues these people are fucking nuts about statues.

What’s funny about this one is that people can’t even agree on how The Thinker “originally” looked. Maybe he had his fist on his forehead, maybe on his chin. But he definitely wasn’t sucking his knuckles like some kind of freak!

Thankfully, there’s “residue” of the past version still floating around in the world. I guess when They’re still working out the bugs in the reality-shifting machine. It’s like how you get deja vu when They change something in The Matrix, only in this case they forget to change a video game from 2009.

But it’s not just The Thinker that’s the subject of particular scrutiny amongst the dimensionally-displaced. The Statue of Liberty, too, is a frequent topic of debate. Like, what hand is the torch in? Can’t you go up into the torch? Is it on Liberty Island (idiotic) or Ellis Island (obviously correct)?

Occam’s Razor would say that this person’s confusion owes to a combination of changing policies, movie and TV depictions, and faulty memory. But I come from a universe where William of Ockham never existed. No, his absence didn’t affect Chaucer, Rabelais, or Julian of Norwich’s work. It was kind of like that movie Yesterday where the Beatles are the most important band in the world but also reality basically proceeds identically without them? I just heard of that movie, though, so I guess it didn’t exist in my original timeline either. If I could go back there and invent the idea of Yesterday, I’d be rich!

That’s another major flavor of Retconned theory, by the way — I haven’t heard of it, so it sprang into existence just now. Like, have you guys ever heard of “Burkina Faso?”

Whoops, I’ve once again been banned for violating the rules of r/retconned.

Back to the Statue of Liberty, and stay with me here, but it’s become a pretty common conspiracy theory that transgender people have achieved domination over the world through cancel culture. That would be a little too pedestrian for the Retconned crowd, though. No — they’re nonbinarizing reality! They’re turning the freaking statues trans through “no more mutants” Scarlet Witch-ass magic!

And if they can alter an enormous statue, what’s stopping them from changing a land mass? Nothing, that’s what. Those maniacs did it: they moved South America.

South America was further west before! This had no historical or geological consequences, everything was exactly the same, only the globe looked different. And before you say “this misconception is the result of bad map projections” I’d like to remind you that bringing that up is in direct violation of the subreddit rules.

See, that’s what’s so fun about r/retconned — it’s like a communal hot pot where everyone’s encouraged to toss in their own ingredients except everyone is bringing glass shards and dog poison and if you don’t say how good the dog poison tastes you get kicked out. Do they make dog poison? I’m old and have untreated mental illness and we used to be happy and we all had a great time poisoning dogs and posting about it on Instagram.

And you know what? This guy is right about one thing. Twenty years ago, people like this would have been contained on forums with a few other like-minded weirdos, or they would have been building their own websites in crude HTML. They wouldn’t be on Reddit and their brains wouldn’t be getting mashed into sludge by a TikTok algorithm that knows they’re lonely and unwell and is delivering the kind of content that will keep them scrolling and they wouldn’t be yelling at their phone in their car about how in their old reality their kids talked to them and everyone just got along.

But maybe I’m being too harsh. Try to imagine what it would be like to believe that you’re actually the victim of gaslighting on a transdimensional scale. How terrifying would it be to realize that at any moment reality could be rewritten around you? You would be utterly isolated, unable to communicate to anyone the alienation you were experiencing. And to mock that, even if it was just a subjective experience and not a “real” phenomenon, you’d have to be a real callous and unfeeling person.

Just kidding! This is all extremely fucking stupid and if you are the kind of person who believes that reality altered the pattern of your husband’s blanket overnight then I sincerely hope tonight you shift into a universe where Mark Zuckerberg dry drowned in a grain silo before he was able to reshape the internet into what it is today. On second thought, actually, I hope that happens to me.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Pee Wee’s Uncle. It was never Hot Dogg Supreme, and it was never Pee Wee’s Ulcer. You’ve slipped dimensions again and continue to SHIFT.