If, like me, you found yourself scrolling through social media in the first weeks of 2026, it may have been momentarily unclear which decade you were living in. With dozens of celebrities posting decade-old flashback montages and “#2016” rising by 450% on TikTok at the start of January, 10 years later, the trends and aesthetics of 2016 have come screeching back into fashion.
It is tempting to equate simpler social media with a simpler world. In 2016, online platforms felt more casual. X was still Twitter and not overflowing with sexually explicit AI slop. Instagram still functioned as a genuine mode of connection between friends and family, before the app’s decline in actual posters. But our obsession with 2016 is not simply innocent nostalgia — it reflects a desire to return to a time when it was easier to remain ignorant of the world’s perversions.
The world of 2016 was by no means tranquil. The mannequin challenge did not freeze history in place. In January, Al-Qaeda attacked a hotel in Burkina Faso. In March, ISIS killed nearly 30 people at the Brussels Airport. And that summer, the U.S. witnessed the deadliest mass shooting in its history when 49 people were murdered at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Perhaps our domestic politics have grown more charged since Trump’s election in November of 2016, but his tumultuous campaign was going on for the majority of that year. So why do social media feeds from the time create a mirage of hypersaturated tranquility?
In 2016, online culture, and social media as a whole, had not yet become an inherently political space. Major news organizations were only beginning to make their foray onto social media sites, noticeably treating platforms as primary distribution channels rather than merely promotional tools. The New York Times only created an Instagram account in May of 2015. At the time, only about 16% of US adults used Instagram, and roughly 4% of Americans reported getting news from the platform at all. Today about 20% of American adults report getting some form of news from Instagram — a fivefold increase in less than a decade.
Instagram, Snapchat and even Facebook were created under the distinction of being social networks, but once official news sites entered the platforms, this opened the portal for almost anyone to start reporting about the news through social media. It has become a public square which is constantly confronting its users with the extremes of geopolitics. We can see into the graphic and intense daily lives of Palestinians on Instagram as they post amidst ruble. In Bangladesh, sites like Youtube and TikTok are used more and more as political tools to win votes and even topple governments.
Social media is now undeniably political. This shift is crucial for understanding our nostalgia for the internet in 2016. It wasn’t that the trends were funnier or that we really so desperately miss water bottle flipping. It’s that sites like Instagram and Youtube offered an overwhelmingly apolitical experience, one defined by sociality and distraction. That experience is now contrasted by a social media which is constantly confronting us with geopolitical woes.
Our yearning for 2016, then, reveals a deeper fatigue: the exhaustion of knowing what’s going on all the time, all over the world. It might be tempting to retreat into Pokémon Go, avocado toast and the first season of Stranger Things, but we should not allow nostalgia to erase the social progress the internet has enabled over the past decade. The politicization of social media has made atrocities harder to hide, empowered marginalized voices to document their own lives and deaths and allowed grassroots movements to mobilize at a scale once unimaginable. We must resist the urge to stick our heads back into the sand.
A part of attending Brown and receiving an education is resisting any such temptation to treat ignorance as comfort. We can revive the aesthetics of 2016, but we cannot afford to revive its ignorance. So if you’re going to go #2016, remain engaged with 2026 on campus. If you really feel the pull of 2016 trends, try integrating those back into your life without forgetting that we need to live in our current moment. We can bring back the Chainsmokers’ music, but let’s leave the rest of 2016 where it belongs, in the past.
Clara Murray ’29 can be reached at clara_murray@brown.edu. Please send responses to this op-ed to letters@browndailyherald.com and other opinions to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
