For the new generation, 2016 is now known as “last good year.”
Since the new year, Instagram has taken from the 2016-themed “add yours” sticker, which asks users to send throwback photos from 2016. Users have sent more than 5.2 million responses, creating enough buzz to spill over to other platforms. On Spotify, the user-created “2016” playlist has been added 790% since the new year, and the company now boasts in its Instagram bio that it’s “romantic 2016 again.”
In fairness, 2016 seems like an easier time. Donald Trump hasn’t served a day in the White House, no one knows the difference between an N-95 mask and a KN-95 mask, and Twitter is still called Twitter. It’s the year of “Pokémon Go Summer.”
But as is often the case, nostalgia surrounds many of the anxieties that have been evident at the time. When meme librarian Amanda Brennan searched the archives for images that defined 2016, she showed me an image that surprised me, given the internet’s current obsession with that year. The post read, “Can’t believe Satan put all his energy into 2016,” with another user adding, “Like he had a job due on January 1, 2017 and forgot until now.”
I forgot how much people hated 2016 at the time. This is the year of Brexit, the height of the Syrian Civil War, the Zika virus, and the Pulse Nightclub shooting, to name a few sources of fear. Not only the election of Donald Trump – months before the night of the disaster, the Slate columnist sincerely ask questions how bad 2016 is when compared to infamous years like 1348, when the Black Death took hold, or 1943, the height of the Holocaust.
The start of a new year is a fertile ground for nostalgia. The Internet thrives on this engagement bait, to the point where Facebook, Snapchat, and even the built-in Apple Photos app continue to remind us of what we did a year ago.
But this time, our nostalgia is different, and not just political. While AI is increasingly breaching everything we do on the internet, 2016 also represents a moment before The Algorithm™ takes over, when “sensitization” has not reached the point of no return.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
|
13-15 October 2026
To better understand the state of the internet in 2016, Brennan suggests looking at it as the tenth anniversary of 2006, when the social internet definitively took over our lives.
“In 2006, technology changed. Twitter launched, Google bought YouTube, Facebook started allowing anyone over 13 to sign up,” Brennan told TechCrunch.
Before social platforms, the internet was a place for people who looked online for a sense of community — people who were “for lack of a better term, nerds,” as Brennan put it. But when social media took off, the internet began to leakand the barrier between pop culture and internet culture began to erode.
“In 2016, you will see ten years of time to allow people to develop, and those who should not be internet nerds to begin with can end up on 4chan, and all these small places where before, they have been made of internet people, versus people who are not online,” she said. “But also, because of the phone, everyone is now an internet person.”
According to Brennan’s estimation, it is understandable that 2016 was the year when Pepe the Frog – once a friendly stoner of the webcomic – was destroyed into a symbol of hate, and misogyny that caused Gamergate to appear on the national political stage. (Meanwhile, the meme group is leaning left sparred internally (about whether the “dat boi” meme – a picture of a frog riding a unicycle – has been adapted to African American Vernacular English.)
At the time, the novel felt like showing how internet culture began to inform our political reality. In another decade, we have a pseudo-government-agency named after a memewhich – to name just one of its many atrocities – cut international aid funding and lead to the death of hundreds of thousands of people.
Ten years later, we now have twenty years to reckon with how the social internet has shaped us. But for those who are still children in 2016, the year still has a certain mystique. Google works well. It is relatively easy to spot deepfakes. Teachers should not channel all of their limited resources into determining whether students copy-paste homework from ChatGPT. Dating apps keep their promises. There aren’t many videos on Instagram. “Hamilton” is cool.
It’s a great look at the online age which has its own problems, but it’s in line with a larger movement towards a more analogue lifestyle – the same phenomenon that’s fueled its resurgence. matchmaking event in person and point-and-shoot digital camera. Social media has become so central to our lives that it’s no longer fun, and people want to go back to the days before anyone said the word “doomscrolling.” Who can blame them?