Social media is currently awash with images from a decade ago. The format is simple: a photo from 2016, captioned with nothing more than the year itself. The implicit message behind these posts? “Let’s make 2026 be the next 2016.”
What’s Driving the Nostalgia
There are a few practical factors at play here. Snapchat, which was gathering serious momentum in 2016, recently announced it would start charging for memory storage. This has prompted many users to download their archives, leading to inevitable scrolling through galleries of years past. When you’re confronted with photos of yourself from a decade ago, complete with that ubiquitous dog filter, the temptation to share is understandable.
The timing feels somewhat curious though. 2016 wasn’t exactly a golden year by most measures. Personally, it was the year before my Dad died and the year he battled hardest against cancer. The image for this post reminded me about that. The day we found out he had cancer was during a period where I’d quit my smartphone for charity, using only a Nokia 5110. I still remember trying to find the hospital without Google Maps and people wondering why the hell I had an old phone.
Away from my personal life, tt was notable for an unusually high number of celebrity deaths, nearly weekly it seemed. David Bowie, Prince, Muhammad Ali, Alan Rickman, Gene Wilder, Leonard Cohen. The list went on. Trump was elected president for the first time (a phrase that still feels strange to write), and Brexit began its long journey from slogan to reality.
The Appeal of Looking Backwards
Despite the questionable merits of 2016 itself, I understand the impulse behind this trend. There’s something fundamentally human about retreating into nostalgia when the present feels overwhelming. We saw similar retro trends emerge during the pandemic, when the world felt particularly uncertain. When daily news cycles feel traumatic, which they increasingly do, our minds naturally gravitate towards memories of simpler, more innocent times, even if those times weren’t actually that simple or innocent in hindsight.
These posts represent a fairly harmless trip down memory lane. People sharing their past selves, perhaps younger, perhaps more carefree in appearance if not in reality. It’s social media at its most benign, really.
A Cynical Possibility
That said, there’s a more sceptical interpretation worth considering. Could this trend be a concealed effort to get users voluntarily sharing older photos that are otherwise locked away in private archives? Photos that could be used to train AI models on a wider range of images and faces across different time periods?
This might sound a bit tin foil hat, but it’s not remotely unrealistic. We’ve seen coordinated efforts to harvest user data through viral trends before. AI companies are desperate for training data, particularly images that show people across different ages and contexts. A viral trend that encourages mass uploading of decade-old photos would be remarkably convenient for such purposes.
I’m not claiming this is definitely what’s happening, but it’s naive to dismiss the possibility entirely given how valuable this data would be.
Looking Forward Instead
Regardless of the underlying motivations, that’s the essence of the 2016 trend. Personally, I’d rather focus energy on making the future better than either today’s news cycles or the problems of ten years ago. Nostalgia has its place, but it’s ultimately a backward-facing emotion. We can’t remake 2016, and honestly, we probably shouldn’t want to.
