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In this article, Rylie Revercomb talks about why 2016 is making such a big comeback in the big '26.
2016 revival
2016 revival
By: Rylie Revercomb
By: Rylie Revercomb
2025 was crazy. For a lot of seniors at GPHS, our last calendar year of being kids has just ended. Welcome to adulthood, WHOOP WHOOP! On top of ending childhood-- forever-- 2025 was just throwing curveballs and fake-outs left and right. It doesn’t matter where you fall on the political spectrum, whether you’re rich or poor, homeschooled or not-- this year has just been off. Pretty much everyone agrees… at least, on the internet, that is. Thankfully, the New Year always comes around and raises everyone’s spirits! After all, some things have to get better in the next 365 days. Right? Well, the hype this year is a bit different. Instead of celebrating the new and throwing out the old, the online trend this year is to pretend like 2026 is actually 2016. But… Why? What makes 2016 such a big part of online culture this year, and why do people so desperately want to wind the clock back ten years? It seems to be a mix of the craziness of 2025 and a desperate nostalgia attached to the 2010s, in particular. Flip back the calendar: diving into fidget spinners and the whip nae nae, 2016 has a lot to unpack-- and with new meaning! WAKE UP, GUYS, IT’S 2016!
First of all, why do people want to jump back ten years, in particular? Well, 2016 was the start of a new age. We still had technology, of course, but phones still had a home screen button at this point. Yeah, a button. This digital era was a lot simpler than what we have now: Instagram was barely six years old and still growing, TikTok was barely a thought in the developer’s minds, and there were still headphone jacks on phones! In fact, Apple’s removal of the headphone jack from the iPhone 7 sparked a lot of controversy. Wireless headphones and Bluetooth pairing were brand new, making a lot of people skeptical and even more people frustrated due to the inconvenience. Now, digital technology has become a daily part of pretty much everybody’s lives. After the COVID-19 pandemic, pretty much every public school student in the USA has a portable Chromebook for their classes; in 2016, playing on a computer was considered a luxury. We have become so attached to our digital way of life that most people don’t even form a cohesive thought when they first wake up in the morning. We all just rush to check our phones. The big question, however, is why are we suddenly rushing to go back to a simpler time? When we were supposedly “less evolved” in the ways of technology. What makes a simpler life so enticing? One awful, terrible, no-good, very bad word can sum this up for us. AI. Blegh.
Image of the 'Rainbow Cracked Phone Trend by: Instagram
AI SLOP is taking over the internet at a rapid pace right now. All of the aforementioned social media platforms are cramming in new AI quick-searches, AI videos, AI “art”, and AI chatbots. If you open up Instagram and scroll down on the homepage, you’ll be met with a bunch of chatbots with prompts for just about everything under the rainbow. While all of this new technology might sound “AMAZING!” and “FANTASTIC!”, it is having the opposite effect. Pretty much everyone, their mother, and their grandmother hate AI. As of right now, AI (which was supposed to do the boring jobs for us) is trying to steal the quote-unquote "fun jobs": artists, actors, graphic designers, and writers. It’s hard for artists to catch up when a computer can create a piece of artwork in seconds, whereas it takes a real person hours… Maybe even days or weeks.
While human art may have soul, determination, and true emotion-- there is still a looming fear surrounding AI. With new, massive data centers popping up, affecting the way of life of those living close to the data centers, fear is rising. In an interview on the BBC, Clay Routledge talks about the effect AI is having on the 2016 revival: “We tend to be especially nostalgic when the world feels like it’s going through some major change… When generations are going through this kind of upheaval, they tend to look back to their youth for comfort and for inspiration, for guidance.” With the fear that this generation will possibly have to give up their jobs to AI, of course they want to go back to a time when that wasn’t even a thought! Most people facing problems with these kinds of thoughts and fears were elementary or middle school students in 2016. At that age, we were just worried about who had the coolest Pokémon cards, getting the newest TsumTsum or Hatchimals, or just playing with our friends outside. Instead of making us crave the future, like those big companies want us to, AI is making us desperate for a time when making a blanket fort, hearing the familiar tweet of those childhood birds in the morning, and pushing your sibling aside to get a turn on the Wii were the most important moments in our little lives.
One of the biggest events of the 2016 turn-back is what the internet is now calling “The Great Meme Reset”. The trend started on TikTok, and is urging users on all social media platforms to revert to posting memes that originated in the early 2000s, specifically the 2010s. Again, with AI, people are sick of seeing slop all over their “For You” pages. That, combined with what the internet classified as a “meme drought” in the spring of 2025, is what has led to the revival of dank memes over brainrot. According to an article on Wired, “Memes lack dankness these days. If anything… internet culture has prided itself on somewhat meaningless content like “67” and absurdist, seemingly AI-generated 'Italian brain rot’."
Memes have become unrecognizable and empty. The Italian brainrots, previously mentioned, have sparked soulless merch. AI-created products are being sold at real stores near you-- even the nearest Target in Medford! With all of this slop popping up left and right, it’s no wonder that people are craving a timeskip back to when memes had meaning behind them. They are oversaturated, and quote-unquote “unfunny”.
Enter classic memes like Nyan Cat, It’s Raining Tacos, Do You Know Da Wae?, Peanut Butter Jelly Time, and Big Chungus. Of course, some older folks still hated some of these popular memes at the time they came out-- but a big difference between 2010s dank memes and 2020s brainrot memes is that the 2010s had effort and soul. Popular meme ‘It’s Raining Tacos!’ was a completely handmade, animated music video that went on to garner 96 MILLION views on YouTube and also inspired hundreds of spin-off animations on the platform. This video, unlike the brainrot consistently flooding us now, took time and effort to make! It wasn’t just a quick press of a button but hours of hard work and hand-drawn frames to create these nostalgic internet relics. This is one of the many reasons why the 2016 revival is so popular-- because the Great Meme Reset is one of its biggest selling points.
Time is clearly being turned back for many reasons, whether it’s to combat AI or just to relive a time when the internet meant something. However, what were some of the trends that really made 2016 stand out from the rest? For starters, pop culture in general really popped off at the time. 2016 featured the debut of many well-loved movies, musicals, and TV shows that we love today. It was a big year for kids’ movies, with the releases of Finding Dory and Zootopia, but also a good year for memorable action and superhero movies-- Like Captain America: Civil War, Deadpool, and Rogue One. Of course, we can’t forget about Stranger Things, one of the most nostalgic shows released in the past few years that just ended a month ago. Now, with the Stranger Things kids grown up, and Captain America long out of Marvel, it is no shocker as to why nostalgia is hitting so hard right now. For film, 2016 was a good year. Music was also one of the best parts of 2016. Right now, many Ariana Grande fans in particular are longing for ten years ago. After Ariana’s debut in Wicked and her supposed affair with Ethan Slater, her fans are begging for her to return to her roots. 2016 was the peak of Ariana’s ponytail era, and when her music had a certain bite that it lacks now. Of course, Ariana’s peak wasn’t the only good thing about music ten years ago. In one year, we saw the release of insanely popular songs like ‘Closer’ and ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ by The Chainsmokers, ‘Can’t Stop the Feeling’ by Justin Timberlake, ‘Work’ by Rihanna, and ‘Cake by the Ocean’ by DNCE. These are songs still listened to today, or used as audio on social media platforms.
Speaking of which, 2016 saw an explosion of internet trends and new apps. Pokémon Go! was insanely popular from the moment it was released on the App Store, and its popularity even got so concerning that the developers had to install warnings on the app to watch out for cars, trains, and drop-offs! Selfie Culture became the daily norm, as well, with the Puppy-Dog filter on Snapchat being added to basically every selfie taken. One of the biggest trends, however, has to be the Mannequin Challenge. It consisted of a group of people, sometimes even entire schools or companies, doing absolutely nothing. Just standing still. In most videos, when the beat drops, something crazy happens. Not with the Mannequin Challenge, though! It’s like stepping back into ye olden times, when you had to stand still for four hours to have an artist paint your portrait. In The Guardian, Arwa Mahdawi talks about why this trend was so important at the time: “the fact that just being quiet and still for a moment has been so enthusiastically embraced by everyone from high schoolers to imminent presidents is a sign.” These trends made 2016 so memorable and, for some reason, the nostalgia just hits different now. Not 2015, or 2017… But 2016. It was just special. As Arwa mentions in her article, 2016 was also a kind of draining year-- but the internet at the time was actually an escape from reality. Movie theaters still had mostly full auditoriums at the release of new movies, digital technology was a part of daily life but not too advanced, and we were quite cringe but still free. That’s what has made 2016's trends so nostalgia-inducing.
2016 saw some cringe moments. After all, skinny jeans were still popular during the entire year, even though most people hated how uncomfortable they were. However, in the end, it is the simpler times and the fun moments that make the year so nostalgic and memorable for us in the present moment. Skinny jeans, blue and pink Starbucks frappes, Stranger Things, the Mannequin Challenge, and old music are a few of the moments that made the year so fun! With AI on the rise and gaining more presence on the internet, it can be hard to find human-made things that have meaning for us in the way that things from our childhood have had. The effect just isn’t the same. Of course, it’s important to keep moving forward and finding joy in the current moment, but a leap back to the cringe and fun days of 2016 isn’t a bad idea either. So, whip out your old Pokémon Go! Account, dive back into the dark days of Tumblr and Instagram, and revisit some of the old, maybe cringey things that you did ten years ago. The 2016 revival is here!
Image of the 'Mannequin Challenge' by: YouTube
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