2026 is the new 2016. At least, that’s what people are saying. There’s been this trend going around, maybe you’ve seen it, of people posting themselves from 10 years ago, and I am absolutely eating it up.
My contribution is this one picture of me at the Twenty One Pilots concert in sixth grade. I’m wearing a Blurryface shirt — that I got from Hot Topic, duh — and I have a red-and-black flannel tied around my waist. I’m wearing a red beanie that I’d just picked up from the merch stand, and it’s holding my hair in a fake side-bang situation that shows off my terrible, grown-out bleach job. I have on these pleather Dr. Martens, and to top it all off, I’m hitting a double peace sign pose that covers half of my face.
I was cringe, but I was free. That’s what seemed to be the universal motto at the time. We had Buzzfeed quizzes, Musical.ly, bottle flipping, Harambe, and of course, Twenty One Pilots. Truly,
never a dull moment.
And now, with 2016 being back in the mainstream, I wanted to relive that era and know what people were up to at the time.
Here’s Communication sophomore Vincent Perez.
VINCENT PEREZ: 2016. I was 10 years old. First half of the year, I was in 4th grade, then I went into 5th grade. And it was in 5th grade that I started my slime business.
Y’know, as most of the world was at that time, I was obsessed with slime. I wanted nothing more than to make slime every day. Every single kind. For my birthday, I remember I actually asked for Daiso clay so that I could make butter slime, because, whatever, the Crayola air-dry didn’t work.
YUMI TALLUD: Wow, so you were getting fancy with it.
PEREZ: Oh yeah, I needed top-tier ingredients.
PEREZ: My slime business itself actually wasn’t really that successful. I think I had like three customers, and two of them I gave away for free as birthday gifts. But I think I made $5. So, you know, big money, big money.
Slime wasn’t the only thing Perez was obsessed with at the time.
TALLUD: That was when Hamilton came out, no?
PEREZ: Oh, yeah, that was Hamilton. Oh yeah, that was 5th grade. Oh wow, I just
remembered that. Yeah, big Hamilton time. For a school project, we were learning about, yknow, the US government and the Revolutionary War, and we made up a rap between Jefferson and some other character as a group project. I’m sure it sounded awful, but my fifth-grade teacher loved it. And I remember we had to make a graphic for the project, so we made a poster, and we cut out the heads of the portraits of these US, I don’t know, founding fathers and pasted them on there with their lines next to them.
TALLUD: Oh my God.
[WHAT’D I MISS from HAMILTON]
Most things about that era, we left in the past. But some still refuse to budge
Communication third-year Ricky Wu is still an avid player of Pokémon Go, a small but mighty community.
RICKY WU: There was the Pokémon World Championships in Anaheim, California, this past summer. It was crazy because it was people coming from all around the world, and obviously, the game — Pokémon Go — they had to make a lot of exclusive features for people that were there to make it really cool, and that was pretty awesome. That really felt like I was back in 2016 because it’s Disneyland, that area, and you could see the number of people that were just there playing. It’s like, i f you join a raid, it would immediately fill up, which is pretty rare, but there, every single one would fill up instantly.
Pokémon Go never really outright disappeared from the general consciousness, but plenty has. That doesn’t stop something from making a comeback 10 years later, though.
ASH ARANHA: In 2016, the draw to Dan and Phil was like…
That’s Communication third-year Ash Aranha.
ARANHA: I don’t know, I had been watching them, and I was this closeted kid — sort of— in my little, small white town in Missouri, and Dan and Phil weren’t together, but they were definitely, like, something was up with them. And I think that they hadn’t come out as gay yet, but there was all this fan fiction, and that was when I first started reading fan fiction too, for other things that I was interested in. And so, fan fiction about two sort of popular gay guys that played video games was a big thing for me, that like, they played The Sims, and I really liked The Sims, and they had this Sim household together, and I think that was a big draw for a lot of people, was how on the Internet they were. It was like an escape.
And then now, I think it’s sort of similar, right? Trump’s in office, and Heated Rivalry is this escape, which I think is really big for people. Dan and Phil were in some ways kind of mainstream for YouTube, and Heated Rivalry is also something that’s gone kind of mainstream. Even if you caught it like right at the start.
That’s another place that has also been an escape for me personally, because Hudson Williams is Wasian and he might not be like my Asian, but he is Asian, and he’s in this really racy — and also full of love — gay TV show, and it’s like an escape from our present.
[ALL THE THINGS SHE SAID by T.A.T.U]
Not everything that made a comeback from 2016 is as exciting or hopeful though.
Medill grad student Eleni Tecos remembers when Trump won his first election.
ELENI TECOS: My mom and I went over to a family friend’s party. It was, like, a Hillary party. There was a photo booth, and… y’know, the little cutouts you have for a photo booth, where it’s on a popsicle stick? I think there were Hillary wigs on popsicle sticks.
TALLUD: Wow.
TECOS: There were also… I don’t know how we got these — there were cookies with Hillary’s face on it. My mom, my aunt, and I were all at a museum, at the museum that my mom worked at at the time, and we all took pictures with the Hillary cookie at the museum. It was serious.
TALLUD: Oh my God.
TECOS: But yeah, that was the first time I remember staying up for an election, and I remember very vividly watching all of the states go red when Trump first won in 2016. So that was kind of a core memory for me. And I also remember… and I think this happened again in the 2024 election, where both elections, I was like, “There’s no way that Trump will win. There’s just no way.”
Cause it was 2016, so what, I was, like, 12? And so, I didn’t really know anything about politics. I just was there for the cookies, y’know? But I remember it was a very big deal watching all the states go red. Everyone was crying, and I was like, “Seems bad, but I don’t really know, like, what that means.”
TALLUD: [laughs]
TECOS: And then in 2024, I remember thinking, “We all saw how that happened. There’s no way that like Trump’s going to win again because everybody hates him,” and blah, blah, blah. And then he won again.
TALLUD: Shoot. And here we are.
TECOS: And here we are.
For better or for worse, 2016 is back, but hopefully, we’re moving in the right direction.
For WNUR News, I’m Yumi Tallud.
[STRESSED OUT by TWENTY ONE PILOTS]
