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mineofilms · 1 month ago

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Perfection is just another kind of fake

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Faking It: On the Ethics of Fake Musicianship, Perfection Culture, and Why Intention is Important

This isn't gonna be some finely tuned thinkpiece or perfectly structured deep dive. It's more like a sprawl of thoughts I've been having while in a two-week mental and creative rut. I am sitting there watching Adam Neely's The Ethics of Fake Guitar and thinking back on my own creative past and present. I’m not here to lecture anyone on how to do it, and I’m not pretending I’ve got a definitive answer to anything, but I do have a compass, and that compass always points to intentionality. I still feel all I have that is truly my own is intentionality. So let’s talk about what it means to fake something, what it means to chase perfection, and what happens when the internet—and especially social media—gets ahold of all of that and changes that intention to an expectation. With that expectation based on a lie for monetary gain.

Part 1: NO-Budget Filmmaking, Perfection Culture, and Reflections in the Mud

I went to film school from 1999 to 2004. A community college that no longer exists. Part-time. Full-time job just to stay afloat, and I was lucky enough to have family that kept a roof over my head and a plate of food in front of me. But camera gear? Editing bays? Glossy production? Even Time… Forget it. I was scrapping together Mini-DV setups and busted PCs, praying they wouldn’t crash before I could save the project file. That’s where I come from—NO-budget filmmaking. Capital N-O. That mindset never left me. After college I struggled to find stable employment. I basically kept truckin’ along filming what I could and make something out of it. I still make things with what I have. If something sucks in the final product, it’s not because I didn’t care. It’s because I couldn’t afford better. And even if I could, I probably wouldn’t obsess over it. I care more about what I’m trying to say than how glossy it looks. People chasing that “Aesthetic of Perfection” are chasing ghosts. They’re chasing a version of a thing they think they saw, not what’s actually there. Could be a statement on our human society experiment. What happens if you stop chasing that and start creating from where you are instead?

Because Here’s the Truth: Perfection is Just another Kind of Fake.

Part 2: The Line Between Editing and Faking Ain’t as Clear as People Pretend

Now let’s get into the thick of it. Is editing a live performance “faking”? Depends. If you’re just sweetening the sound—cleaning up the EQ, leveling things out, maybe patching a glitchy mic—that’s post-production, not deception. I don’t think anyone should be faulted for wanting to make their performance presentable. Especially if they’re filming on a cell phone in a garage or bar with poor sound and/or acoustics.

YouTube’s compression algorithm noticeably degrades audio quality during upload, especially in the higher frequencies—cymbals, vocals, and clarity tend to get flattened. After extensive trial and error, I found that exporting the final video using VSDC in the .mkv format with PCM S16LE audio encoding preserved far more of the original sound. Unlike standard .mp4 exports with AAC compression, which YouTube compresses more aggressively, the .mkv + PCM combo seems to bypass some of that automatic degradation. It’s not perfect, but the improvement is real—especially for trained ears—and it’s become my go-to method for getting cleaner audio onto the platform. That's not me trying to deceive anyone. That's me working with the limitations, trying to squeeze as much juice out of the lemon as I can with the controls I have. But yeah, if you’re miming along to a studio-recorded track and selling it as live, you’re crossing into a different territory. And here’s where it gets messy: It’s not just what you do, it’s how you frame it. Your, ‘intention…’ If you tell the audience what you’re doing, most people are cool with it. It’s the hiding part that rubs people wrong. Transparency covers a lot of ethical ground. The ones that actually can do these amazing things. They worked incredibly hard to get there. AND in many cases most of them never really got the recognition and real profits from their work, which they should be credited and even paid in my more cases than not.

Part 3: Social Media and the Great Monetization Lie

Here’s where the whole thing twists into something nastier. This drive for perfection—this impulse to fake your way through—it’s not happening in a vacuum. Social media monetization has created an entire ecosystem where people aren’t making art anymore. They’re not even really making products. They’re making content. And more specifically, they’re selling themselves as content. Their personality, their lifestyle, their vibe.

Somewhere between 13 and 45, an entire generation got convinced that if you were fun at parties and worked retail that one summer, you were just a ring light away from being a brand ambassador. What they’re selling isn’t just a product—it’s the belief that if they say it’s cool, it must be cool. And sometimes? That works. Some people can sell that illusion. But most people can’t. Most end up chasing something that was never actually real to begin with: the idea that charisma alone can substitute for experience, skill, or hard-earned credibility. What we’ve ended up with is this fake hustle culture. People “working hard” on building their brand—but it’s all image. It’s cinematic. You know how movie characters only face the parts of life that move the plot forward? Nobody in a movie spends three hours troubleshooting why their WiFi won’t connect to the printer. That’s what we’re doing now. We’re cutting out all the unglamorous stuff—the years of grind, the failed attempts, the dead ends—and presenting a highlight reel as if it were a documentary.

And the result? People think they’re working hard, but they’re not actually doing anything. Because in real life—especially with tech, with music, with film—you have to know what you're doing. There’s work involved. But the illusion sold on social media says you don’t need that. You just need to be seen doing the work.

And this is the part that really gets under my skin: what people now call “influence” or “reach” used to be called resources. It was marketing budget. It was connections. It was a studio or a label or some angel investor quietly bankrolling the whole thing while pretending it was just some quirky girl in her bedroom making videos on her phone. It’s not grassroots. It’s AstroTurf. There’s a whole industry out here trying to convince you that these influencers are “just like you,” and some are. However, in many cases the reality is they’ve got deep-pocketed support, production teams, and years of unseen infrastructure propping them up.

What they’re selling isn’t a product, or even a skill. They’re selling belief. They want you to buy into them. And that’s wild to me. That’s televangelist territory. And yeah—not everyone online is doing this. There are legit creators, legit businesses, real product testers that influence product trends.

A “confidence game,” or con, is a method of manipulation where someone gains your trust (your "confidence") in order to exploit it. It's not always about outright lying—it's about framing something believable enough to get you to invest, commit, or act… even if what you're committing to has no real foundation. This solely operates on trust and belief, not substance—a more nuanced and stronger word for it could be is "speculative branding" or more sharply, "belief-based marketing." A term that captures the illusion of substance—where the product is really just the belief in the product—without a clear product, goal or vision.

This type of influencing has now krept into the social media world of performance art like guitarists, drummers, even vocalists, all trying to sell the idea that if you "buy in," you’ll be part of something profitable.

But in truth:

The asset is often unproven.

The odds of success are downplayed or hidden.

The story is polished to hide the risk.

You're investing in their ability to attract others, not in a tangible return.

This is classic con structure:

Gain trust through charisma, social proof, or flashy success stories.

Present belief as product, appealing to your emotions or FOMO.

Shift risk onto the buyer, while keeping the seller insulated.

Profit off belief, not substance.

But like anything else—music, politics, religion—the scene gets polluted by people who are just gaming the system. You see it in politics all the time. New tax law drops? Within a week someone’s already figured out a loophole. That’s the American tradition now: don’t work harder, just find the cheat code. Circumvent the rules so you can look better than you actually are. Especially online, where one rarely has to actually prove anything they do. Numbers, views, hearts, likes, even comments can be generated by AI in mass to manipulate how much “influence” a channel, account, business or single person has. That mindset has bled into how we think about success. It’s no longer about doing the most logical, skilled, or creative thing to reach your goal. It’s about finding the path of least resistance that still looks good on camera.

So yeah—when someone fakes a guitar solo, or mimics a live performance, or cuts corners in post and sells it as raw talent, it’s not just annoying—it’s part of a bigger problem. It’s another symptom of a culture that values perception of substance over actual, real substance.

Part 4: Intention Matters More Than Tools

Let me be clear—I’m not anti-AI. Not even close. Hell, this whole essay was structured with the help of AI. When I’ve got too many thoughts colliding in my head and can’t quite nail the phrasing, I bounce ideas off it. I test tone. I reorganize arguments. I care deeply about semantics, and sometimes it helps me not butcher my own meaning. That’s a gift, not a threat. I’m also a scatterbrain, if I’m being real. And AI helps me reign it in. That doesn’t mean it wrote this. It means it helped me shape this. Like a co-writer, or an assistant editor. I’m still driving—it just helped clean the windshield.

What bugs me isn’t people using AI. It’s people pretending they didn’t. Acting like every word or note or design choice sprang perfectly from their untouched genius. Like, why? Most content isn’t made by one person anymore. It’s usually a team, or at least a couple of close collaborators. If your buddy helped with camera work or gave you feedback on your mix, you’d thank them. You’d credit them. So why wouldn’t you do the same with AI, if it helped shape the thing? And honestly, I don’t even mind if AI does a lot of the work. Sometimes that’s necessary. Sometimes that’s how you get unstuck or get something done at all. But just say so. Give the tool its due. Don’t slap your name on an AI-written book like you typed it all out on a typewriter in a cabin. That’s not authenticity. That’s performance.

Same deal with music production. You want to use backing tracks, drum machines, pitch correction—do it. We’ve been doing that since the tape deck. But be up front. Don’t roll out a video where you look like you’re playing note-for-note perfection when it’s really comped to hell and back. The problem isn’t the tool. It’s the pretending. It’s the whole “fake it and act like you’re not faking it” loop we keep finding ourselves in.

But—and this is important—I also get the weird beauty in it. Sometimes the fake stuff does lead to real growth. A kid sees a faked guitar solo, and maybe they don’t know it’s fake, but it lights a fire. They want to play like that. They go chasing that sound. And in the process, they get good. Really good. Better than the faker, even. That’s the contradiction. That’s where I agree with someone like Rick Beato or Adam Neely—it’s complicated. Sometimes the illusion plants real seeds and the fruits from those seeds we all enjoy and get emerged in. And that’s not nothing. That absolutely is something.

So I don’t think it’s a question of “should you use AI or not.” It’s about your intention. Are you trying to express something? Or are you just trying to appear impressive? That’s what separates art from content. One is a reflection of the self. The other is a pitch deck with candy flavored vibes.

Part 5: Genre Codes, Gatekeeping, and the Woke Redefinition Game

The genre stuff at the end of that video? Yeah, that wasn’t just noise to me. What Adam Neely was getting at is that a genre or sub-genre isn’t just a checklist of sounds and styles—like tempo, tuning, instrument choice or technique—it’s a kind of social contract. A shared code among a community about what’s authentic, what’s fake, what’s sacred. And that hit home for me. I’m a metalhead. I’ve watched these battles happen in real-time—arguments over what counts as “real” metal, or who gets to fly the flag of some niche sub-genre like they invented it. Is deathcore “true” death metal? Is nü-metal a joke or a gateway drug? Is Djent a sub-genre at all or just a sound, like an effect? The tribal lines are drawn in every comment section. But here’s the twist: this isn’t just about sound. It’s about values. Identity. Cultural territory. That used to be messy enough on its own. Now throw in woke subculture, and the whole thing gets distorted beyond recognition.

Woke thinking—at least how I see it—tries to take minority arguments and attempt to make them majority arguments. Take a widely agreed-upon bad idea, strip away some of the baggage, repackage it with newer language, and then scold anyone who doesn’t clap along. It’s not progress. It’s marketing. And now it’s invading art, music, genre, and scene dynamics. Suddenly, people aren’t just fighting over whether a band fits a sub-genre. They’re fighting over whether that genre itself is problematic because of what someone said on a podcast or tweeted in 2007 about social dynamics at that specific time to them. You’ll see this play out in ways that sound harmless at first. Someone says a genre is “too masculine” or “too violent” or “too whiney,” and suddenly, the subculture has to shift to accommodate a narrative that was never really part of the music’s DNA. These criticisms start as niche takes, but thanks to social media and algorithmic validation, they balloon into mandates. Then comes the guilt-tripping, the digital shaming, the weird re-education process: This sub-genre is actually about this now, and if you don’t agree, you’re a bigot, gatekeeper, insert buzzword here.

And if you push back? You’re “toxic.” You’re being “negative.” “Out of touch.” Just another troll who doesn’t “get it.” Never mind that the whole point of subculture was to resist conformity in the first place.

It’s like every genre has to go through a weird spiritual audit now. Not just “what does this sound like?” but “what does this say about your politics? You as a person?” Which is insane. Music is supposed to be a place for escape, for release, for raw emotional reaction and entrainment—not a damn TED Talk with fake playing guitar solos.

And then there’s this individualist twist where people experience one thing, and suddenly they try to rewrite the entire genre canon around their feelings. “Well, I listened to X and it helped me through Y, so now this genre is about Z.” I get that it meant something to you. That’s valid. No one is saying one or a few cannot come together and share this thing in a different light. But your emotional reaction doesn’t overwrite the cultural framework that genre came from. Not every genre needs to be soft and affirming. Not every lyric needs to be therapy. Some of it’s supposed to be ugly, aggressive, nihilistic—because that’s what it’s channeling. We’ve got a generation trying to fix things that were never broken to begin with. And what we lose in the process is the texture, the risk, the rawness that made these subcultures worth fighting for. You can’t remap black metal or punk or horrorcore through some feel-good HR training lens. You’ll sand off everything that made it matter.

Community norms didn’t collapse because people stopped caring. They collapsed because people started pretending anything goes as long as you can spin a social virtue out of it and gas light people into treating you like a victim. When you are a victim of your own making. It’s not creativity. It’s control—dressed up in the language of inclusion. And I’m not saying “keep things pure” like some frothing elitist. I’m saying stop treating cultural identity like it’s a choose-your-own-adventure morality tale. Some things actually have context. History. Meaning. Rules. That’s what makes them genres. That’s what makes them powerful. Its ok to change things. That is what sub-genres are for. A variation of the original with nuanced twists. Nü-metal isn’t a joke or a gateway drug to nonsense-core but a nuance of fusion from a decade before. That is all nü-metal is; a fusion of different styles and it was heavy and closer to metal than hip-hop, funk, electro or reggae. At the time it was a huge shift from where metal was in the 1990s. The labeling name makes sense. That is how these things happen. But more importantly ‘why’ they happen.

Part 6: In the End, It’s Still About Intention

Look. I’m not here to say don’t fake anything. I’m saying know why you’re doing it.

If the goal is to share an idea, an emotion, a perspective—and you’re using every tool you’ve got to get that across—cool. Go for it. Cheat the lighting, filter the hell out of it, remix, repackage, whatever. If it’s in service of something real, that intention comes through.

But if the goal is to game the system, farm dopamine, and dress up clout-chasing as “authenticity”? That’s not creativity. That’s commerce wearing a cosplay wig. That’s performance art with no art. And yeah, the internet’s always had fakery—but now we’ve got people with delusions of grandeur being handed tools that amplify those delusions at scale. Taking away from real creators just trying to get some momentum in life with the talents and creative things they do. To fake it to directly take away from lesser people’s efforts and propped one’s self higher than they actually are is the worst kind person out there. The damage isn’t just in the trick—it’s in pretending there wasn’t a trick to begin with.

Social media was supposed to be a quick peek into someone’s day. A way to stay connected during the in-between moments of life. But now it is the day. It’s the job. It’s the hustle. It’s a 24/7 grind machine full of fake smiles, fake stories, fake lives—people living like avatars of their best guesses at what other people might want to click on. This isn’t a shot at real salespeople with real track records who just adapted to new platforms. Sell stuff. Talk about what you love. No shame in that. The problem isn’t sales. It’s when the entire persona is a lie, built to manipulate good intentions for personal gain. That’s where I draw the line. Intention is everything. If your intention is pure—even if the result is messy, flawed, imperfect—no one with a conscience is gonna fault you. But if you use sincerity as a prop, if you twist trust into currency, if you hijack empathy just to raise your stock... that’s not just wrong. That’s objectively wrong.

And yeah, I said objectively. That word still means something. It means something is true regardless of your feelings, your preferences, your influencer score and your influence upon it. It doesn’t need you to function. The universe doesn’t care if you’re trending. It doesn’t care if your lighting is good or if your truth gets applause. The universe is indifferent. It gives zero fucks. But we should care. Because the moment we stop caring about intention—the moment we start pretending that subjectivity is objectivity—we lose the thread. We let the algorithm tell us what matters. And we forget that what we intend is what makes us human in the first place.

So yeah, maybe this all gets me fewer views. Less reach. No monetization. So be it. If I’m gonna be seen, I want it to be me being seen. Not some echo of someone else’s polish. Not a mask of greatness I haven’t earned.

Just me.

Raw, flawed, real.

And that’s enough.

Perfectio est aliud genus ficti Latin: Perfection is just another kind of fake by David-Angelo Mineo with editorial assistance from a Generative Pre-trained Transformative Artificial Intelligence 5/4/2025 3,504 Words

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mineofilms · 2 months ago

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Violation of Time | Review of: PRESENCE (2024)

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Imagine you're watching a movie, and all of a sudden, the main character shows up in a scene before they were even introduced, or someone dies and then just casually appears alive again in a later scene with no explanation. You’re sitting there thinking, “Wait, what?? Didn’t that already happen or didn’t happen?”

That’s a chronology violation — it’s when events in a story don’t follow a logical timeline. Stuff happens out of order, or in ways that don’t make much sense based on when, what, how things are supposed to happen.

Take the 1988 Nico Mastorakis film, “Nightmare at Noon.” Where a small desert town is suddenly turned into chaos when a mad scientist poisons the water supply, turning its residents into rabid, zombie-like killers. A mysterious cowboy, a vacationing couple, and the town sheriff must team up to survive the outbreak and uncover the truth behind the biological attack. As they battle the infected and try to stop the mastermind “bad guy.”

The wife of the vacationing couple gets infected and the husband is able to fight her off and lock her in a jail cell. The movie unfolds where the ragtag survivors have to kill off the zombies and do battle with the bad guy mastermind who doesn’t speak during the entire film. There is no real resolution to how to cure the people. They are simply killed as they attack the survivors. The mastermind is killed and at the end of the film the husband is getting ready to leave, seems happy he survived and behind him is his now cured wife, who when last we saw her was infected and trying to kill her husband before he is able to lock her in a jail cell. We do not know if they found a cure or not or how they cured her, but she is cured, smiling, happy to be alive. We know nothing of what happened to her but she is alive and about to continue her vacation with her husband. Huh???

Chronology violation could be looked at like if someone time-traveled and changed something in the past, but now the present doesn’t line up anymore — or, it’s when the timeline of events gets messed up or violated. Sometimes it’s intentional — like in movies about time travel (Back to the Future, Tenet, Primer), and sometimes it’s a mistake in storytelling or editing. Either way, it throws off the normal flow of time.

Time travel to the past? Not so fast... While it’s a nice idea, the past is done, and no amount of worship, science-fact, science fiction or wishful thinking is going to change its outcome. The Universe is indifferent. The universe doesn’t care about us, our actions, or our struggles. It's not biased, not cruel, and not kind. It doesn’t love, hate, pay taxes or vote — it simply exists, following its own laws and processes without regard for individual human concerns or human concerns in general. Existence doesn’t owe us meaning, justice, or purpose, and it won’t intervene to make our lives better or worse. It’s a cold, unfeeling backdrop to our lives, offering no moral guidance or cosmic hand-holding. The universe doesn’t give a damn about your nostalgia trip, and trying to mess with its flow is like trying to unburn a piece of toast — it’s already charred, and the clock’s not going to rewind, unburn your toast, that strangely, some think looks like Jesus Christ, for your convenience. The only option available is to accept that the past is a ghost, and no matter how much you try to summon it, it's never coming back.

Every moment that ticks by solidifies the next, and it’s all tied together by causality — cause and effect. Causality refers to the principle that everything that happens (the effect) is the result of some prior event or cause. This locked system ensures you don’t mess up the fabric of everything by hypothetically traveling back in time and stepping on a butterfly that somehow had a direct cause to humans ever coming into existence to begin with that would eventually travel back in time and step on the butterfly which would make certain humans never came into existence to begin with. You can't just pop into the past without messing up some delicate web of cause and effect, and that leads to chaos. Science calls this chaos entropy, and tampering with entropy in the past creates what science calls a paradox. One of the famous theories of a time paradox is the grandfather paradox. Where one travels to the past only to kill their grandfather before they could impregnate your grandmother that gives birth to your mother, that gives birth to you, so you are never born to begin with because your mother was never born. Another variation of this paradox involves traveling back to kill a young Hitler before he can rise to power...

Time travel to the past is impossible because it breaks the laws of physics, which breaks the laws of the Universe. If the Universe was a balloon, traveling to the past might pop it. It is considered impossible due to Einstein's theory of relativity and the second law of thermodynamics.

Einstein's Theory of Relativity:

Time travel to the past is impossible under Einstein's theory of relativity due to the way spacetime and causality work in this framework. According to the theory, time and space are interwoven into a single continuum called spacetime. Moving through time is like moving through space, but with some crucial limitations.

Relativity tells us that the speed of light is the universal speed limit. No object with mass can travel faster than light, which means nothing can “break” the timeline to jump backward in time. If time travel were possible, you’d have to move faster than light or manipulate spacetime in some way to loop back — but relativity makes that impossible. The faster an object moves within spacetime, the more its mass increases, requiring exponentially more energy to accelerate it further. As it nears the speed of light, its mass approaches a state of infinity, demanding infinite energy — a resource the universe doesn’t hand out. Physics doesn’t play well with infinities, like black holes, infinity is a barrier we cannot see past. Einstein’s equations describe how massive objects warp spacetime, creating gravitational fields that curve time. These curvatures are predictable and causal — meaning, they follow cause-and-effect rules. The idea of bending time to travel to the past would require conditions that violate this causality.

Second Law of Thermodynamics:

Time travel to the past is also impossible under the second law of thermodynamics because it directly contradicts the natural progression of entropy — from more ordered states to more disordered ones. The second law states that the total entropy (disorder) in a closed system must always increase or remain constant, never decrease. This is fundamental to how time works, as the "arrow of time" points toward the future and greater disorder. The universe constantly moves forward, with all processes naturally tending toward states of higher entropy. In simpler terms, things tend to fall apart, decay, and move toward chaos, and there's no going back. We can slow time down if we travel fast enough in a straight line and slow down time even more if you apply spin along with that greater speed, but one can never stop time altogether or go backward under this standard model of understanding. What this is saying is that to travel backward in time, you’d need to reverse entropy — to rewind all entropy processes in the universe, all at the same time, everywhere, from broken eggs to decayed stars, not just the point of reference you are trying to travel back to—which is the same as reversing time itself.

This doesn’t mean or imply that we know everything on the subject. Just that our current understanding of science doesn’t allow for that to happen. If there is a different form of science. Perhaps a “theory of everything,” that unifies quantum gravity and macro gravity could give us new insights on the subject or new concepts. Quantum gravity would be how gravity works at the subatomic level and macro gravity is how we feel gravity at our macro level of living on a sphere that is rotating around a core and this sphere also rotates around a Star.

Time travel to the past would require reversing this process — moving backward in time to a point of lower entropy, effectively reducing disorder. The problem is that this would violate the second law, which is one of the most well-established rules in physics. If you could somehow travel to the past, you’d need to reverse the increase in entropy that has already occurred, returning a disordered system (like the present) to a more ordered state (like the past). But that’s not allowed. Any attempt to decrease entropy — to undo the disorder and bring things back to a more ordered state — would violate the fundamental principle that entropy in a closed system can only increase.

Basically, the universe doesn’t let you "rewind" things. The law of entropy ensures that time only moves forward and that we can't simply go back and fix things by traveling to the past. The increasing disorder isn’t just a feature of the universe — it’s an inescapable part of how everything works. Trying to reverse it would break the very fabric of how time and physical laws operate, making time travel to the past not just improbable, but outright impossible. One might just pop that balloon after all.

If time travel to the past is possible from what frame of reference hypothetically could it be seen as?

Maybe not a machine, a DeLorean, a phone booth, or even technology at all, but instead, something stranger, weirder, and a little more existential. What if time travel to the past isn’t a place in time where one resides but more a point of reference on a 4D map.

No Flux Capacitor, Federation Starship, no botched faster than light test, no black hole jumping, no wormholes, or super suit that shields you from time paradoxes. You don’t even get a body at all. Just... awareness. Maybe it’s consciousness. Maybe it’s just a mechanism of how the universe processes a conscious mind. Just a single point, a zero-D dimensional point of awareness. You become nothing but a point of view — no mass, no energy, no ability to interfere outside of what has already happened in the timeline, (we’ll get to that.) A pure observer. Confused as to what it is, where it is, how it came to be there and most importantly, why…

This is the loophole the universe might allow — not participation, not alteration, but witnessing. You don’t change the past. You relive it. You see it again. But you can’t scream at your younger self to dump that toxic relationship. You can’t tell yourself to pull out sooner. You can’t stop a war. You can’t even blink. You're there... but not there.

If you think that sounds depressing, it is. You get all the pain of hindsight with none of the power of hindsight. You get to watch your regrets unfold exactly as they did, unable to touch anything outside of what has already been touched. It's a form of time travel, sure — just the most useless one imaginable. And maybe the only one that fits the rules.

This idea isn’t just science fiction either. It’s not -not science fiction, but it has some strange roots in physics. General relativity already treats time as a dimension, like space. Some interpretations of the "block universe" imply that all points in time — past, present, future — still exist, in a sense. They’re just not accessible. The past isn't destroyed. It’s just… not accessible from your current frame of reference. Unless something — say, your consciousness — could untether from its moment in time and slip backwards into that previous coordinate. Not to change it. Just to float above it like a drone. Silently recording. I look at the block universe in the context of its not that all points in time and events have happened already. I do not see it that way. The perspective I see this as the math is laid out so heavily in concrete that the only answer to the equation is what happened before that moment and then causality goes to the next moment from the cause to the effect. Not that it happened before in the literal sense, but more in the sense that the math cannot be change. 1+1=2. It is hard coded and cannot be altered. So in a sense it can be said in terms of all events have happened already. The reality is they have not. However, the math says, that is how it is going to go down and there isn’t an influence that can untether the math (entropy). We have already established one cannot do that. Another way to think of entropy is you are not trying to undo a moment in time and space. One would have to undo all moments in time and space from that point, all the way to the beginning. That is what is being said when it is said that entropy cannot be reversed. That is what we are talking about. Not a moment, but all moments from the present and the past. Probably even the future because of the way the math is laid out in our framework of physics.

In the case of being a Zero-D point of reference observing the past by being there, but not there in the physical sense of your body being in the place during that time. We wouldn’t be breaking causality because we’re not a cause. We’re not even an effect. We’re just there, a massless zero-energy point wedged into a moment that already happened. A zero-energy stowaway, perfectly harmless, as far as physics is concerned. Causality remains intact. Entropy doesn’t reverse. But you get to play ghost while you are there. Maybe you always were. This could help explain déjà vu, premonitions, hauntings. Perhaps even within the frame of a hypothetical God, or the version of you sitting in the dark wondering if time has really passed at all — or if you’re just watching it all again.

Besides; If time travel isn't possible, then how did John Titor create the phrase "Hold my beer?" 😂 It got me thinking—what if time travel to the past is possible, but you can only experience it as a passive observer? Perhaps in the same vain as the 2024 experimental film by Steven Soderbergh, Presence. In it, a spirit—or "Presence"—appears in a house before a family moves in and can only passively watch and lightly interact with them.

Major SPOILERS ahead…

Presence (2024) Writer: David Koepp Directed by: Steven Soderbergh Stars: Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Callina Liang IMDB Rating: 6.1/10 Stars Rotten Tomatoes Score: 88% Runtime: 1 hour, 25 minutes

The movie starts with a formless ‘presence’ in an empty home. This presence then winks out or blinks and the next moment it is another day where a realtor is about to show the home to a family. The family is a husband, wife and two teenagers. One a boy and one girl. It is not stated which one is older or if they are twins, but seem close to the same age and grade in high school. The family wants to buy the home because they had to move due to the daughter’s emotional state after two of her close girlfriends died suddenly and close together of asphyxiation due to synthetic fentanyl. This entity, ghost, form of awareness, point of reference, or presence seems to wink in and out of existence at random times moving forward from this moment. The Presence isn't there every second. It will witness an event and then its point of view will shift days/weeks later like how we blink our eyes. When the Presence does, blink, that is what it does.

The movie plays out like a typical haunted house story but from the presence’s point of view. It cannot be seen directly, make noise or even do anything at first. It seems more interested in following the daughter around the house, whose struggles with her mental health and emotional well-being after her friend’s deaths. The son, meanwhile, is a typical high schooler obsessed with his social status and trying to maintain a “cool” persona. He often clashes with his sister’s emotional issues, feeling embarrassed and frustrated by her need for attention, which he perceives as a threat to his popularity. The presence watches over the family, especially the daughter, with a strange, detached, and passive perspective. As the family tries to settle into the new house, strange occurrences start to happen. The daughter feels more sensitive to these subtle supernatural events, and her mental state becomes more fragile as she senses something is wrong in the house. The presence is not an active force at this point; it merely observes, unable to influence anything, while she can feel its presence upon her. The presence begins to do some light interactions like stack books neatly when the sister is out of the room. The brother is more concerned with being “cool” at school, a sort of bully of the school, often indifferent to his sister’s struggles. He has a mean streak and struggles to understand his sister’s emotional issues, often dismissing her as a hindrance to his own social life. The brother meets a popular kid at school and, in an attempt to help his sister, tries to set her up with him. The sister begins to spend time with the cool kid from school. As her depressive state increases she becomes more brazen with drinking alcohol and having sex with the kid. Not really caring about how she feels about him but more about how she doesn’t want to feel depressed as she is, so she does a lot of the typical rebel without a cause-type teenager behaviors.

As the plot of the movie unfolds an argument ensues where the brother and sister get into a heated fight. The presence then rushes up to the brother’s room and trashes the room. The family hears the racket and comes to witness the presence affects onto the environment. After this moment the father hires a spiritual seer to come to the home in an attempt to understand whether or not what the family is experiencing is a haunting. We get some important exposition here about ghosts not really understanding what it is that is happening to it as it is experiencing time non-linearly and does not understand the true context of what it is that is happening. This would be an important exposition dump when we get to the end of the film.

Towards the end we realize the cool kid the sister has hooked up with is responsible for the sister’s friends’ overdosing, as they did not overdose but were drugged by the cool kid and then slowly suffocated using a thing piece of plastic wrap. The cool kid has a rather long monologue about why he does this to girls and you can tell he really enjoys this. The cool kid, drugged the brother who passes out on the downstairs couch. The cool kid then drugs the sister and attempts to kill her. The presence frantically attempts to wake the brother by trying to influence reality in any way it can. It is able to make some very high pitched audio distortions directly into the kid’s ear and he wakes up, frantic and afraid. Drugged and dazed, all he can do is stumble up the stairs to the room and tackle the killer out of the window where both boys fall to their death. The next moment. The house is empty and the family is moving out. The mother distraught hears a very high pitched frequency. She walks into the living room, where it gets louder and louder. She looks into a mirror and sees the presence in the reflection. The presence is the dead brother wearing what he wore at the time of death with a blank emotionless stare. The mother screams and the father and daughter rush in to consult the mother. There is an instant where the daughter looks into the mirror but I do not think she saw it. She acts like she didn’t. The mother, hysterical, says, “he came back to say goodbye.” As the presence now begins to slowly back away and out the open front door, away from the house, up and seemingly out into space. The movie ends on that note.

Here time travel is not mentioned, talked about or even explained at all outside the exposition dump when the spiritual seer attempts to describe how spirits operate in and with our reality. It is said in that exposition that time is experienced differently for dead spirits occupying our reality. That is pretty much all we get for an explanation but it does lay down the foundation for this entire essay. I wrote this entire essay just so that I can talk about this movie and what that could mean about time travel to the past.

The Break in Causality and the Nature of the Presence’s Influence:

In Presence, causality breaks only once: at the moment of the brother’s death. His fatal fall triggers his death but also instantly sends his consciousness to the past—on the day his family first tours the house. This is the only moment in the story where the arrow of time folds back on itself, thrusting a future consciousness into a past moment. From that point forward, time resumes its forward march, with causality restored and functioning normally.

Yet what unfolds is not passive limbo. The presence—the brother’s post-mortem consciousness or awareness—can observe events as they occur and, crucially, interact with the physical world. However, it is only able to influence events in ways that already happened inside the timeline. It is not changing the past; it is fulfilling it. The presence is not rewriting history, but participating in it exactly as it unfolded. A clear example from the film is the destruction of the brother’s bedroom. It happened. It was part of the timeline. The brother, when alive, saw it—or at least knew of it—and even if he didn’t witness it or know of it -it became an established objective fact. When the presence later enacts that destruction, it’s not altering anything; it’s simply occupying the causal role that was always meant to be there. It is not a haunting—it is a loop closing.

The weight of this idea can be illustrated by a thought experiment: imagine a can of Coke taken from the fridge, carried upstairs, and placed on a dresser. Later, it topples over mysteriously. At the time, no one knows why, only that it fell off the dresser. Now imagine the presence is in the room in the past, sees the Coke placed down, or doesn’t. It actually doesn’t matter if it knows or not but nudges it over spilling the Coke—perhaps out of frustration, perhaps just instinctively. From the presence’s perspective, this is a decision. But from the timeline’s perspective, the Coke was always going to fall, and the presence was always going to knock it over. Now, did the presence cause the Coke to fall? Yes. But it did so only because the fall already happened. It is bound to act only within what happened in the past by causality. Its agency is an illusion—it can “choose” to act, but only in ways that fulfill the already-written script of events of reality. The past cannot be changed, but it can be inhabited and even participated in. This frames the presence not as a ghost in the traditional sense, but as a closed-circuit loop of consciousness—trapped in a causally consistent replay. This idea resonates more with speculative physics: the presence, as a soul or form of negative energy, exists outside the bounds of classical thermodynamics. Once the loop completes—once it has witnessed all it was meant to witness and fulfilled its limited role in the timeline—it is released. Perhaps, metaphorically or metaphysically, or perhaps it is drawn into a black hole: the soul rejoining the absolute, collapsing into singularity, into timelessness of multiple dimensions of reality. There is no contradiction here. Only the illusion of one. The brother dies. His consciousness loops back to the beginning of the story. The past plays out. And when all things are as they were, he fades—not because he is erased, but because his role is complete. Time, having used him as a thread in its own design.

I immediately saw these small interactions the Presence does as part of a time loop. The entire movie is seen strictly from the Presence's point of view, and it never cuts away from that unapologetically, unrelenting locked perspective. Perhaps one day we figure out how to send our consciousness back in time using some unknown tech or science we’ve yet to discover. But the universe won’t allow our physical body in that space—only our awareness or at least the laws of physics say if our awareness was somehow in the past, under these rules, it doesn’t break the Universe. We’d exist as a formless presence, unable to actually change anything. Any interaction we attempt just ends up fulfilling what already happened. Because that interaction was always part of the event. You can’t create new events. Even when you try, nothing happens. And when something does happen, it’s only because it already did happen. Hello block Universe… I don’t know, just a fun thing to think about. I’m not sure why Presence pulled me in like it did. A lot of people didn’t seem to like it, but the slow-burn drama and the way the Presence learns things through indirect observation really worked for me and got my mind working on Time Travel again. I also appreciated the "rules" or internal logic of the universe it is built on. I would have loved to sit in these round table discussions on how this was all established to create a very different type of ghost story. Honestly, I felt like it was a quiet little thriller made for smart people.

The Presence isn’t omniscient, it doesn’t know everything, let alone, anything, doesn’t have god-like perspective, and doesn’t even know its role in the story. It just; watches. Like real people do when they're dropped into unfamiliar situations. And when they act, they’re not rewriting history—they’re fulfilling it. The lights flickering or doors creaking were always supposed to happen. There’s a tragic futility in it, but also a quiet inevitability. The idea that the universe “lets” you observe the past, but only as part of a loop you were always inside of. Maybe that is what hell actually is. Perhaps why we think of hell in those terms because most people that would witness their last days/weeks/months of life and the frustration of not being able to change it in anyway could be seen as a sort of waking hell. I mean, think about it. If what is left after death is this negative energy, this massless awareness. All you know is observation. All one can experience is that relentless watching. In this case, its watching one’s self and someone you love be in harm’s way or consistently unhappy. That could be perceived as a terrifying experience. What if one died and was brought back? What if they said they felt trapped for years, decades, just watching people suffer, but they were only dead for seconds? We just do not know enough about consciousness outside the body.

So maybe the only way to travel back in time is the way Presence did it — not with flashing lights or spinning wormholes, but with silence. With stillness. You don’t arrive in the past; you haunt it or it haunts you. A formless voyeur stitched into a moment, doomed to watch what’s already played out, play out again, like a ghost following footprints it can never alter. The spirit in Presence isn't really a character in the traditional sense. It's more of a lens — an observer or passenger. Even when it shifts something, it only shifts it in ways that always happened. The loop was closed before it began. That’s the trapdoor loophole this entire theory is built on: If you “affect” something, it’s only because that affect already existed. There’s no butterfly to crush, because the butterfly was always dead. Maybe you stepped on it, maybe someone else did — the point is, it was always going to get crushed. In that sense, it’s not really time travel. It’s deterministic surveillance. It’s emotional recursion. It’s repressed memory made manifest. And like the Presence in the film, it’s passive. Lonely. Inescapable. You’re not breaking the laws of physics, you’re obeying them so well they feel like prison bars because they literally are. Even interaction is an illusion — because anything you "change" is just the fulfillment of what always was. There’s a kind of horror in that, but also a strange peace. You’re not God. You’re not the hero. You’re just... there. A cosmic dashcam recording the inevitable. And that’s where it ties back to the block universe and entropy. The universe isn't rolling out time like a red carpet. It’s already laid it down — from the first moment to the last. You’re not walking through time. You’re experiencing and reacting to it. So if there’s a form of time travel allowed by the laws of physics, maybe it’s not “changing the past,” but being reinserted into it as a point of reference. Like loading an old save file from a game — except you can’t play. You just watch the non-playable characters (NPCs) move exactly as they did before, heartbreak and all. You don’t even get closure. You just get clarity. If you’re lucky. And maybe that’s what déjà vu really is: a brief flicker of the observer breaking through. A reminder that your consciousness, for a split second, lagged back to a frame it already saw. A ghost of yourself haunting your own timeline. Maybe even that’s what the Presence is — not a spirit of the dead, but of the living, watching themselves from the far end of the road. So no, you don’t get to go back and stop the fight, or save the girl, or dodge the car crash. But you do get to watch. You get to remember, in the most literal, cinematic sense. And if that’s the best the universe will allow, maybe it’s enough.

We do not get any insight on the mechanism that propels the presence to the past. Only that it does.

If we accept the premise that time travel to the past is only possible in the form of passive observation — a zero-dimensional point of consciousness with no mass, negative energy, no direct influence on entropy — then Presence becomes something more than just experimental cinema. It becomes a demonstration. A visual case study of what that kind of travel might feel like. The camera never cuts in Presence. There's no omniscient third-person view. We are locked into the point of view of the Presence itself — this incorporeal observer who sees everything in the scene and is not seen, understands very little, and can only interact in the most minimal, abstract ways.

From a physics perspective, it's poetry.

In our framework, this is how limited interaction might be modeled: not actual change, but pre-encoded causality. Like a ROM chip on a motherboard. Unchangeable data that can be viewed, used but never manipulated into something else.

Whether intentionally or not, a world with very strict rules. No jump scares. No camera cheats. No omnipotence or god-like powers. The Presence doesn’t know what’s happening any more than we do. It learns through context, through patterns, through repetition of watching. That’s the experience of our theoretical time traveler. They don't step into a moment with full access to memory or purpose. They’re just... THERE... Trying to make sense of what’s unfolding. Maybe watching their own life. Maybe someone else’s. Perhaps another era altogether.

The way the film deals with time — nonlinear, disorienting, often repetitive — mirrors how memory works, or how a mind might process existence when decoupled from chronological sequence. That’s another haunting idea: what if time travel isn't movement through time, but memory in its purest form? A looped, liminal space where perception is all that exists. And what if déjà vu, intuition, and grief are echoes of the observer — the Presence in us — brushing against events we’ve already experienced, we’ve already seen?

This theory reframes Presence not as supernatural, but as a thought experiment on consciousness and time. The spirit is you — or something like you — a consciousness slipped out of sequence. Not a ghost of the dead, but a ghost of the displaced.

This is why the film feels strange even to audiences who expect weird. It’s not just that it breaks visual norms — it breaks metaphysical ones. All the angles are from the presence’s point of view. They even use a very warped wide angle lens to give that feeling of ultra-claustrophobia. The horror isn’t in the family’s unraveling, it’s in your own helplessness. You’re in the room, in the moment, watching people suffer, and you can’t do a damn thing about it. Just like our model of time travel. Just like real memory. Just like real life. So if Presence disturbed you but you weren’t sure why, maybe this is it: it’s not a haunting. It’s a reminder. A memento of something you already saw. You just forgot until now. It is never clear whether the presence knows it is the dead brother’s spirit from the future or not. Memory isn’t mentioned in the exposition but we might be able to assume that memory is also treated in the same respect. Fractured, fragmented, familiar but not familiar all at the same moment in the same place, all at once, everywhere.

In this view, time travel isn’t about changing history—it’s about witnessing meaning. And in doing so, maybe it becomes more about understanding ourselves than altering outcomes. Humans tend to lump things in a binary logic of this/that, yes/no, zero/one, true/false, man/woman, real/fake, love/hate, black/white, but most of us tend to see and experience this reality in gray. Not black or white but somewhere in between never actually being all the way black or all the way white but in a constant brushing against it as a gray space that makes this idea so goddamned eerie and effective.

Ah, cosmic determinism. There you are my ole friend. That phrase really wants to sit at the table of crossroads in philosophy, physics, and narrative structure.

Cosmic determinism is the idea that everything in the universe—every action, event, thought, or anomaly—is part of an unchangeable pattern that’s not just fated, but baked into the fabric of reality itself. It goes beyond simple cause and effect. It’s not just that A leads to B. It’s that A was always going to lead to B because the universe itself is constructed in such a way that no other option was ever truly on the table even though all options seem possible or at the very least seem not impossible.

A time-traveling essence that can only observe and interact in ways that were always part of the original timeline—cosmic determinism becomes a kind of philosophical paint color. It’s the computer code within the code, behind the rules. The Presence doesn’t get to choose what it does. It’s not even clear if it knows what it's doing. It just reacts, moves, shakes the lamp, wakes the drugged brother, and stumbles into its fate—because it always did. Because it always would.

So, under this lens, cosmic determinism is not just saying "everything happens for a reason." It’s saying, "everything happens because it already happened—and it could never have not happened."

It’s different from religious fate, or even classical determinism, which assumes a kind of clean logic to events. Cosmic determinism adds a metaphysical weight to it, like the whole universe is a closed loop of inevitability that you’re only just waking up inside of. You might have feelings, questions, confusion—but it doesn’t matter. The wheel was already spinning. You’re just seeing the spokes flash by for the first time and it scares you or many so much they are willing to believe in God or any god for that matter with no proof other than a subjective feeling it could be true because we cannot prove it to be untrue.

That’s what gives something like Presence its existential dread: not the idea that the ghost fails or succeeds, but that he never had a choice. That whatever hope, panic, or tenderness it experiences in that liminal state, it was always just the echo of something that already happened, following the crumpled groove on the sheet of paper we call spacetime. It’s when the story of the universe isn’t just written—it’s already been published. You're just flipping back through the pages in a dimly lit room, wondering if that light you saw at the end of the tunnel was just you looking back at yourself.

How existential…

Contra Tempus Latin for (Violation of Time) Review of: Presence (2024) by David-Angelo Mineo 6,246 words Audio/Video: 00:36:23

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