This week, Instagram became a time machine. Scrolling through my feed, I was struck by the feeling I had somehow traveled back a decade. Instead of the usual fare — mostly content from influencers and advertisements — I was greeted by hundreds of old photos from friends and celebrities revisiting life in the year 2016.
Hyper-filtered, grainy images of açai bowls and sunsets. Skinny jeans, black choker necklaces and Snapchat filters that put flower crowns and dog noses on our faces. It was the era of the short-form video app Vine, Pokémon Go and Kylie Jenner lip kits.
Without even realizing, I found myself humming Drake’s “Hotline Bling.”
“You just had to be there,” Ms. Jenner wrote on Instagram this week below a photo of herself with pastel pink hair and a Supreme sweatshirt. The writer Lena Dunham, the actor Selena Gomez and the model Karlie Kloss have all posted similar throwbacks — which in 2016 might have been accompanied by the hashtag #TBT.
The gaze backward to the not-so-distant past is the latest example of the acceleration of nostalgia online, where trends and subcultures can burn bright and die fast, making the landscape of just a few years ago feel like a foreign country. Today’s yearning for 2016 also plays into a recent cultural obsession with so-called millennial optimism, the presumed mind-set of those who came of age in the 2010s, when indie music reigned, social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter were novelties and the words “novel coronavirus” were a glint in no one’s eye.
It’s an attitude potent among millennials themselves, but also Gen Z, who recall little of the era or arrived on the tail end of it — and whom some older generations accuse of taking too rosy an outlook.
Camrie Farran, a 25-year-old nanny in Kansas City, Kan., recalled feeling at that time as though she and her peers had the world “at our fingertips.” A freshman in high school in 2016, Ms. Farran identifies as a “zillennial,” a micro-generation that sits in between Gen Z and millennials, she added.
This week, she posted a series of old photos to TikTok, flash-lit selfies in the school bathroom, pseudo-artsy nature photos and a black-and-white shot of her and her friends’ Converse sneakers.
The sudden influx of people posting old content seemed like an attempt to “romanticize life again,” she said, adding that the pandemic had warped her sense of time and made her feel nostalgic more quickly. “It’s only been 10 years, but to me 2016 feels like a whole different lifetime ago.”
“There wasn’t so much pressure,” she added. “You didn’t feel like all eyes of the world were watching you. You could just post whatever you wanted. You didn’t care about the likes.”
Kate Kennedy, author of “One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls and Fitting In,” argued that the 2016 resurgence had partly to do with how social media platforms had changed in the last decade.
“On the surface, it seems like a celebration of fashion and music — we were listening to the Chainsmokers and our shirts had built-in chokers,” Ms. Kennedy said. “But I think it really has more to do with 2016 sitting at the intersection of nostalgia and structural change that we didn’t know was happening on the internet.”
In 2016, Instagram shifted the way users viewed content by testing out a non-chronological feed. Instead of seeing a stream of photos in the order they had been posted, Instagram users began to see content selected by algorithms, an unseen hand now choosing what images to feed users.
Users initially complained, but this way of consuming content quickly become the norm, not just on Instagram but also on platforms like TikTok, where a hyper-curated algorithm has become the app’s addictive secret sauce.
“Chronological feeds felt like democracies — every post had an equal chance of being seen,” Ms. Kennedy said. “An algorithmic feed decides what you see based on your predicted engagement with it. It’s not fulfilling your genuine interest. It’s about keeping you on the app as long as possible.”
It also has, over time, meant seeing fewer people you actually know. This week was a brief reminder of the familiar faces that once filled our feeds.
Even with a VSCO filter layered on top, to some, those images felt more real than their present-day counterparts, which may be manipulated by artificial intelligence — or slick enough to look like it — or posted solely as a marketing play.
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Are people really missing 2016, a year that, like every year, contained no shortage of hardship and despair for many people around the world? Or are we just missing an internet that no longer exists?
Top Grid: Photographs by Mike Coppola/Getty Images; Emily Berl for The New York Times; Republic Records; Elizabeth Lippman for The New York Times; The New York Times; Christopher Polk/Getty Images; Jason Varney for The New York Times; Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images
Madison Malone Kircher is a Times reporter covering internet culture.
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