For a new generation, 2016 is now known as “the last good year.”
Since the new year, Instagram has been taken over by a 2016-themed “add yours” sticker, which prompts users to post throwback photos from 2016. Users have posted more than 5.2 million responses, creating enough buzz to spill over onto other platforms. On Spotify, user-generated “2016” playlists have increased 790% since the new year, and the company now boasts in its Instagram bio that it’s “romanticizing 2016 again.”
In fairness, 2016 does seem like a simpler time. Donald Trump had not yet served a day in the White House, no one knew the difference between an N-95 and a KN-95 mask, and Twitter was still called Twitter. It was the year of “Pokémon Go Summer.”
But as often happens, the nostalgia skims over a lot of the anxiety that was already palpable at the time. When meme librarian Amanda Brennan searched her archives for the images that defined 2016, she showed me a screenshot that surprised me, given the internet’s current obsession with the year. The post reads, “Can’t believe that the devil put all of his energy into 2016,” with another user adding, “It’s like he had an assignment due January 1, 2017 and forgot until now.”
I forgot how much everyone hated 2016 at the time. It was the year of Brexit, the culmination of the Syrian Civil War, the Zika virus, and the Pulse Nightclub shooting, to name a just a few sources of dread. It wasn’t just the election of Donald Trump — months before that catastrophic night, a Slate columnist sincerely posed the question of how bad 2016 was when compared with notoriously awful years like 1348, when the Black Death took hold, or 1943, the height of the Holocaust.
Image Credits:Tumblr
The start of a new year is fertile grounds for nostalgia. The internet thrives on this kind of engagement bait, to the point that Facebook, Snapchat, and even the built-in Apple Photos app constantly remind us what we were doing a year ago.
This time around, though, our nostalgia feels different, and it’s not just political. As AI increasingly encroaches on everything we do on the internet, 2016 also represents a moment before The Algorithm™ took over, when “enshitification” had not yet reached the point of no return.
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To better understand the state of the internet in 2016, Brennan suggests viewing it as the ten year anniversary of 2006, when the social internet definitively cemented itself in our lives.
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