actually culture ended in 2016

On what we're actually trying to say about 2026 as we ruminate on the past, present, and future via the 2016 trend and why everyone is an actor now and that sucks.

Jan 25, 2026

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🍎 Are you in NYC this Tuesday? I’ll be in conversation with Willa Bennett — editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan and Seventeen — along with Ben Dietz for a live podcast recording at Air. It’ll be fun!!! RSVP here!! Speaking of…
🦿HIP REPLACEMENT🦿was IRL this week, where we chatted with icon Nikita Walia about if Gen Z hates the color black, why being a manager is out of vogue, and that silly 2016/2026 trend: listen now on YouTube and Spotify!

The man killed by a US Border Patrol officer
The ICE Killing of Renee Good is a Watershed Moment
The Minneapolis Siege Is Even Worse Than Videos Show

I am not going to link to the video of Alex Pretti being murdered by ICE as I accidentally watched it and…it’s so sad and so fucked up and so bad. It’s all bad, and a fucked up future reality is having to watch so many executions on camera. You know all this! I don’t need to tell you, all as ice literally takes over most of the country as if a cruel joke: a suffocating weekend. But, like the death of Renee Nicole Good, this does seem to mark a shift: something is changing — but will it break this moment, be that support of the right or a certain type of societal fabric? Unsure, but the dumbass Libertarians speaking up does say something. Regardless, we have to celebrate and appreciate the spirit of Minnesotans, who are illustrating how to confront state power and violence by demonstrating incredible displays of solidarity, illustrating what true patriotism looks like. The revolution has started and Minnesotans are leading the way!

Putin invited to join Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’
Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, UAE join ‘Board of Peace’
180 skyscrapers for Gaza

Nightmare blunt rotation, hell on earth, etc. Can you hear my groaning from where you are? None of this is to mention ICE arresting a five year old! Or the White House digitally altering an image of a protestor!! Villain shit! Who are the superheroes outside of Minnesotans? Mackenzie Bezos??

Trump links Greenland threat to Nobel snub
“Trump depicts Canada, Greenland as part of US”
Trump touts ‘access’ as NATO asks allies to step up
Europe has stopped pretending

One of the stupidest — and dangerous — sagas of the century, rage bait as political compass. It makes me long for shit like “Gulf of America”: what a simpler time! Regardless, this is a real test for Europe to stand up and do something. If they don’t — and if they don’t go harder for Greenland — it will be impossible to recover from.

The TikTok deal is done

So this finally happened. Are things going to change that much? That’s to be seen, but we’ll undoubtedly be following up on how Larry Ellison Oracle’s it up.

UK considers social media ban for children

What’s funny about this is we discussed the Australia ban at the last Trend Report Live™ and people were like “It’s not going to change much of anything!” and…here we are! Not that it’s “actually” happening yet but very interesting that this move might actually spread from country to country. Teens on social media is the new smoking?

Train collides with crane, fourth crash in a week
Tragic chapter sends Spain into crisis

Spain…what is going on this week? Four train crashes? Sad — and get it together!!

At least 17 states declare state of emergency
Heavy snow, ice to impact millions

While Trump was trying to steal Greenland, he didn’t do much to help the people dealing with Greenland at home. Be safe, everyone!

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At this point you and your mother and me and everyone you know has heard about, shared, or engaged with the 2016 trend. It’s the sort of pervasive trend that not only turns nostalgia into a weapon to assault you with memories but is also a scalpel, one in which we must perform an autopsy of culture — and a big thing that I’ve felt during the past two weeks of “this” that I hear no one talking about is that this trend exists because 2016 was the last year of real culture. Life stopped moving forward after that. This is an oversimplification but think about it this way: in 2016, we shifted out of cultural evolution and into a state of history, where time didn’t stop but life did. We were placed in amber, we were put on hamster wheels, we were diagnosed with locked-in syndrome as a species: life has “gone on” but not much has changed. That is what this trend is getting at.

Last summer, I felt hints of this which inspired musing on our being in a cultural recession but this trend has made manifest why life feels stale: we’ve simply been treading water, going nowhere, repeating the same ideas and same tragedies again and again. Yes, there is AI. Yes, we had a whole ass pandemic. But these two things — the recycling of history via the techno scams of AI, the time-stopping-ness of Covid — only reinforce the sham of today, that we are sold progress and change when nothing really has happened. Trump is a huge factor, in that he came in and kneecapped the left and the right to force us to crawl through time, as he dismantles global politics in the name of simultaneously maintaining a status quo (for certain rich and white persons) while actively turning back the clock on rights and progress which means culture doesn’t progress. We are stuck in a time loop of live murders as execution, from George Floyd to Alex Pretti to Charlie Kirk, Jews in Bondi to queer people in Florida to a music festival goers in Vegas. “Thoughts and prayers” again and again and again from the right as we get “we’ve had it” from the left again and again and again. Nothing changes, each day Groundhog Day with a new villain is introduced each morning. But we have Yellowstone! And Suits! Weed has been legalized! Transgender shows and drag shows! A second and third Avatar movie propelling humanoid cartoons! Charli XCX is an actor! Troye Sivan is a writer! Don’t make me laugh, especially when we consider the top grossing movies of this era are all reboots, sequels, prequels, adaptations, and other non-originals: apocalyptic cultural doo doo for the apocalypse we’re in.

But it doesn’t end there, largely as there seems to be a great disinterest by the larger consumer audience and creative class to push and challenge this status quo, likely because to do so is “not profitable.” It’s not just that things like Netflix all the way down to TikTok have made dumbing down and over-explaining de rigeur, but every edge has been softened, every crisp puréed to baby food: the illiteracy problem as operating system. This is why people like Taylor Swift just repackages herself into infinity and why Harry Styles wanders down the sleepy dance trend as Meghan Thee Stallion and Jesse Ware put out the same song again and again for a decade — and a lot of people eat it up Tate McRae and Addison Rae and their Y2K facsimiles? The supposed height of culture! Not one, not two, but three years of brat? Sure! Acid green as Millennial pink: I get it! Why would you want real, substantive change or challenges in the arts when life has been so hard? That’s just an excuse for cultural sloth, for intellectual vacuousness: complacency as laziness as an inability to do much of anything, bread and circuses versus thoughts with teeth. Yes, yes: a remarkable feat that Sinners got the most Oscar nominations of any movie ever, which seems to be less about innovation but more a decent movie forced through entertainment’s value signal prism. Where were the films that offered searing self-reflection and critique (Eddington) or that represented the future of global content (Ne Zha 2) or that questioned what a soundtrack could be (Daniel Lopatain for Marty Supreme, Nine Inch Nails for Tron)? Not there, as both audiences and industries are disinterested in that: the same, the same, the same because “history” is changing, changing, changing. These really are the times of reheating nachos, as all of us are stuck in khia asylum (versus just Bebe Rexha and Meghan Trainor).

New “aesthetics” emerge — which are themselves flat cultural contributions, collage as culture — but no new genres or art forms or articles of clothing have emerged, as mumblecore wheezes in the background and Holly Herndon continues to try to make slop art and leggings and barrel jeans offer the final “frontier” of novel design. The closest things we have to “the future” and cultural evolution are things that 99% of culture dismiss as uninteresting, uncool, and or unadult: the world of multimodal entertainment as expressed through games. During Covid, we opened a very small window to experience the future of experiences as such, of people watching things together in different places and playing games together in multiple locations, experiencing stories and culture in more-than-one-way at once. Jackbox is a more advanced idea than Jack Black’s Steve. Fortnite is more advanced than any Facebook metaverse idea. A game like Balatro posits such a mindblowing reinvention of something as ubiquitous as poker that you would think it would be the most successful media of the century — but it’s not, despite wide critical acclaim. We let some of the best forms of story of our times — Sam Barlow’s Her Story, Telling Lies, and Immortality along with Lucas Pope’s Papers Please and Return of the Obra Dinn — disappear. The inspiring Sleep No More may have morphed into You Me Bum Bum Train, both of which suggest the excitement of escape rooms as the future, novel concepts that are now reduced to silly suburban “games.” The 24 hour digital party that was Club Quarantäne is now dust as we bemoan the lack of electronic music evolution. Mind-melding immersions like Christo’s The Floating Piers now just lifeless infinity rooms. Possibilities dashed, perhaps suggesting that maybe every decade doesn’t need massive evolutions but that we’re still awaiting what our internet or telephone will be for the 21st century. It’s not huffing shit! It’s not YouTube, as that’s older than this decade! There are many worthy and challenging new items that emerge in alt and mainstream culture (Los Thuthanaka! Blawan! Lux! Eusexua!) but they are lost to the churn, as we choose overconsumption and too much content in our wander toward a Wall-E future in the present.

The silver lining of “2026 is the new 2016” is that it is an urgent call to evolve. The nostalgia for the so-called “good” time of 2016, a time that suggests the beginning of the end, is not a longing for the past but hope for a better future: it is a wake up call, a cold spray of water telling you to get up. Take care of your mind and body because, for the past decade, we have done so little. You cannot bite back if you have no teeth. “Damn, bitch, you live like this?” the aliens that have been watching us for decades say. Proudly, we say yes, dismissing our potential as we comfort ourselves into oblivion. “This is the way the world ends,” T.S. Eliot once said of hollow men. “Not with a bang but a whimper.” Let us whimper no more.

‘Freedom plane’ to take US founding documents on tour

This would be cool if they committed to or had the forethought to correct America’s train problems in time for this — but alas! It’s very Trump’s America to literally fly a bunch of old papers around as the world burns.

Patagonia sues drag queen Pattie Gonia

Patagonia outing itself as losers with this. Really reveals how the brand and drag queen really are not fighting for the same things. Capitalism always does it’s thing!

Americans Are Turning Against Gay People

Not to depress you, but this is true and interesting given that these psychologists tie the rise of anti-queer sentiment to anti-establishment sentiment. Fascinating, even if it is bad. Anyway, thank you to the queer person who created the Erika Kirk drag queen, as it either charms people or reinforces this feeling.

Grief over pet death can be as strong as family

Very obviously true, and very obviously a conversation now as pets move up the ladder of beloved family figures.

Which Animal Could Humans Domesticate Next?

There has been a lot of buzz around raccoons becoming domesticated, and this story really digs into those claims. There’s good news though: this logic also means fellow urban animal travellers like foxes and possums are also in the running too. I’d for sure have a pet possum!

“either partially or wholly written by ChatGPT”
“Shy Girl by Mia Ballard. Was it written by ChatGPT?”
“i’m pretty sure this book is ai slop”

I did not watch the full near three hour video that is the last link, but apparently there’s a book world drama as a new book that was self-published and is getting a wider release was written in part using AI. It’s very interesting and, while what I read is not good, it does represent how close-to-the-knives some artists are if their work isn’t good. Siri, read the story “You write like ChatGPT” from two years ago!!

A New Rhythm Goes Viral in Venezuela
How a Pro-Greenland Song Became an Anthem

A very interesting trend of protest anthems, both inspired by Trump. What’s the American version of this? Listen to the Venezuela song here and the Greenland song here. On a sonic level…the Venezuela one is way better. Will an American protest song emerge this quarter? (Also of interest is that most Latin Americans support Trump’s abduction of Maduro. I keep having this nightmare where we wake up in twenty years and people look back on Trump favorably, pointing to shit like that.)

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We are all actors now. No longer reality stars, we have leapt from unscripted to scripted TV — or we’ve been forced to do the same work that aspiring actors do just to survive “in this economy.”

I’ve been thinking about this a lot as it has been a huge theme during my time in New York: we are increasingly in a world where success comes from being cast in something versus your actually earning something based on merit, as telegenicness is rewarded over hard work “paying off.” As Max Berlinger and I grabbed lunch, we shared a longing for the era of being able to simply write but instead we are challenged to always share our faces just to “sell” said writing, keeping up appearances now a prerequisite to being read. At brunch with the Selleb Sisters, we shared the annoyances of making the simplest of TikToks to get ourselves out there, to help grow our respective projects and work, which racks up hours of our time lost to scripting ideas, to getting “camera ready,” to acting, to editing, to uploading: creatives as small business owners as actors all in one. A friend that I stayed with who is a photo archivist vlogged her life for the past week to help raise awareness of what archivists do, which is very clever and fun but also a symbol of what one “has to do” in order to be seen as legitimate in 2026. None of these people are actors, nor do they have aspirations to be: they’re forced to tap dance just to survive.

This may seem like a creative professional thing but it goes beyond a simple having-to-be-creators problem and increasingly is another hurdle in the hiring process which has enabled a trend of video cover letters. This also came up in chats with friends this month. “They hired me on vibes alone,” a friend told me days ago as we were catching up over drinks, about a job where they were an analyst. “I didn’t even know how to use Excel.” Three weeks ago, Olivia Choi told me she had to give an on-camera interview via digital prompter before getting a proper interview for a job. What does this mean? I went on a tear about this days ago, which I’m surfacing via a discussion with Nikita Walia and Ben Dietz: your having to do a video submission or edit your own video as if a resumé reflects a changing dynamic in the workforce — and society — where those who hire and who are in power aren’t looking for skills but are casting someone who “fits the part” and critiquing video performance instead of reviewing resumés, thereby bypassing skill and trying to find someone who looks respectable, physically able, and good looking enough to “work” with them, thus fulfilling a future-horror that will always ding the minority, be they from a distant land or with a disability or a queer identity or “not clean enough.” The camera’s lens rewards the hot funny white American man in Patrick Bateman’s apartment over any non-white foreign woman who lives with her family, a reality show trope slathered across our livelihoods. When the hiring manager is a casting director, it doesn’t matter how good you are for the job — or if they’re human or not — because these same biases are baked in. Yes, hiring managers have always done this and creatives have always had to “sell” themselves but now that is required of everyone at all levels, these barriers of entries a ceiling that is also the floor. No wonder getting a job now is hell!

The future has largely proven to be stupid and it’s such nuances that we brush past that corrode us all. It won’t end here either, as such “casting” issues and actor problems are bleeding out of the working world and increasingly into how we are governed: look at how criminal justice and human rights are dissolving as companies like Palantir use AI to reinforce racist power structures via image capturing. None of this is to mention the “central casting” presidency either, which prizes the pretty over the competent. How will this end? Perhaps Ted Chiang knows (or even Ryan Murphy), but life will continue to be measured one audition at a time until the system collapses much in the way that Hollywood itself is experiencing now. Isn’t it exciting that we get to be film stars too? Get ready for your close-up — which means constantly being in pursuit of the day’s dime in a world that values non-human workers and those who fit a fascist agenda over anything else.

“LEAKED IMAGES”
“This picture of Victoria Beckham”
“Freud would love this”
“Victoria Beckham:”
“ takes me out every fucking time lol”
“I always struggle”

The Brooklyn Beckham versus his parents thing was fascinating, not only because it’s so clout chasey on his behalf but because it seemed to continue Brooklyn’s ability to almost crossover into a main storyline but not really (considering no one will remember this event in a month) (but some of the memes and posts were great, which is why I wanted to share them).