We’re not nostalgic for 2016 — we’re nostalgic for the Internet before all that decline

For the new generation, 2016 is now known as the “last good year.”

Since the new year, Instagram has been obsessed with a 2016 “Add Your Photos” poster, which prompts users to post old photos from 2016. Users have posted more than 5.2 million responses, creating enough buzz to spread to other platforms. On Spotify, user-created “2016” playlists have increased 790% since the new year, and the company now boasts in its Instagram bio that it is “romanticizing 2016 again.”

In fairness, 2016 seems like a simpler time. Donald Trump had not yet served a single day in the White House, no one knew the difference between an N95 mask and a KN95 mask, and Twitter was still called Twitter. It’s been the year of “Pokémon Go Summer.”

But as often happens, the nostalgia overtakes much of the anxiety that was already evident at the time. When meme librarian Amanda Brennan searched her archives for images that defined 2016, she showed me a screenshot that surprised me, given the Internet’s current obsession with the year. “I can’t believe Satan put all his energy into 2016,” the post read, and another user added: “It’s like he had a mission due on January 1, 2017 and has forgotten about it until now.”

I forgot how much everyone hated 2016 at the time. It has been the year of Brexit, the height of the Syrian civil war, the Zika virus, and a nightclub shooting, to name just a few sources of dread. It wasn’t just Donald Trump’s polarizing election — months before that night, a Slate columnist had asked an honest question about how bad 2016 was when compared to terrible years like 1348, when the Black Death took hold, or 1943, the height of the Holocaust.

The beginning of a new year is fertile ground for nostalgia. The Internet thrives on this kind of flavor of interaction, to the point where Facebook, Snapchat, and even the built-in Apple Photos app constantly remind us of what we were doing a year ago.

But this time, our nostalgia looks different, and it is not just a political nostalgia. As AI increasingly overtakes everything we do online, 2016 also represents a moment before Algorithmic Takeover™, when “crypto” has not yet reached the point of no return.

To better understand the state of the Internet in 2016, Brennan suggests looking at it as the 10th anniversary of 2006, when the social web definitively cemented itself into our lives.

“In 2006, technology changed. Twitter launched, Google bought YouTube, and Facebook started letting anyone over 13 sign up,” Brennan told TechCrunch.

Before social platforms, the Internet was a place for people searching online for a sense of community — people who were “obsessed, for lack of a better term,” as Brennan puts it. But when social media took off, the Internet began to leak, and the barrier between popular culture and Internet culture began to erode.

“By 2016, you’ll see that ten years of time has allowed people to evolve, and people who weren’t necessarily internet nerds to begin with may have ended up on 4chan, and all these smaller little places where previously it was made up of people online, versus people who aren’t online,” she said. “But also, because of phones, everyone is now kind of an Internet user.”

By Brennan’s estimation, it stands to reason that 2016 was the year in which Pepe the Frog — once a cute, stoned webcomic — was turned into a hate symbol and the misogyny that fueled Gamergate came to the national political stage. (Meanwhile, left-leaning meme groups squabbled internally over whether the “dat boi” meme — an image of a frog riding a unicycle — had taken over African American vernacular English.)

At the time, it seemed novel to point out how Internet culture was beginning to inform our political reality. Within another decade, we had a pseudo-government agency named after a meme, which — to name just one of its many atrocities — cut off international aid funding and led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

Another 10 years later, we now have two full decades to count how the social web has shaped us. But for people who were children in 2016, the year still holds some mystery. Google worked well. Deepfakes were relatively easy to spot. Teachers don’t have to direct all their limited resources to determining whether or not a student has copied their homework from ChatGPT. Dating apps are still promising. There weren’t a lot of videos on Instagram. “Hamilton” was great.

It’s a rosy vision of an Internet age that has had its own mess of problems, yet it’s in keeping with a larger movement toward a more analog lifestyle — the same phenomenon that hastened the rise of in-person matchmaking events and digital cameras. Social media has become so central to our lives that it’s not fun anymore, and people want to go back to a time when no one uttered the word “doom scrolling.” Who can blame them?