We’re not nostalgic for 2016 — we’re nostalgic for the internet before all the slop

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.

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.

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.

“In 2006, technology changed. Twitter was launched, Google bought YouTube, Facebook started allowing anyone above 13 to register,” 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, nerdy,” as Brennan puts it. But when social media took off, the internet began leaking, and the barrier between pop culture and internet culture began to erode.

“By 2016, you will see that ten years of time has let people evolve, and people who necessarily were not internet nerds to begin with maybe ended up on 4chan, and all of these smaller little places where previously, they had been made of internet people, versus people who are not as online,” she said. “But also, because of phones, everyone is kind of an internet person now.”

By Brennan’s estimation, it makes sense that 2016 was the year that Pepe the Frog — once an amiable stoner from a webcomic — was corrupted into a hate symbol, and the misogyny that fueled Gamergate showed up on the national political stage. (Meanwhile, left-leaning meme groups sparred internally about whether or not the “dat boi” meme — an image of a frog riding a unicycle — had appropriated African American Vernacular English.)

At the time, it felt novel to point out how internet culture had begun informing 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 international aid funding and led to the death of hundreds of thousands of people.

Another ten years later, we’ve now had a full two decades to reckon with how the social internet has shaped us. But for people who were children in 2016, the year still holds a certain mystique. Google worked well. It was relatively easy to spot deepfakes. Teachers didn’t have to funnel all of their limited resources into determining if a student copy-pasted their homework from ChatGPT. Dating apps still held promise. There weren’t that many videos on Instagram. “Hamilton” was cool.

It’s a rosy view of an online era that had its own mess of problems, yet it aligns with a larger movement toward a more analog lifestyle — it’s the same phenomenon that precipitated the resurgence of in-person matchmaking events and point-and-shoot 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 before anyone had ever uttered the word “doomscrolling.” Who could blame them?