Why 2016 Feels Like a Different Internet—and What Comes Next (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: if the Great Awokening happened maybe some ten years ago, we're about due for a great de-phoning. And that makes me feel a little bit better because I'm tired of my phone, Audie.

[00:00:11] Speaker 2: This is how you got called Unk, by the way. This is... this is the youth to Unk pipeline in action.

[00:00:19] Speaker 3: -"Youth to Unk pipeline." -...yeah.

[00:00:21] Speaker 2: When you're just like, you know, it's a cycle.

[00:00:23] Speaker 3: It's a cycle.

[00:00:28] Speaker 2: ♪♪ I thought back, I was like, who do I know who is uniquely positioned? -...who was a professional millennial? And people don't remember that when you started at NPR, you had like, you had a young person title. Like, in the politics job.

[00:00:47] Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. When I covered politics at NPR, I covered the 2016 elections. I was on the trail 15, 16. My beat was the intersection of pop culture and politics. And it was like, you're going to get the memes. I had a weekly column called Meme of the Week, where I talked about memes. And I was just like, you know, the young kid who gets the internet. Well, guess what?

[00:01:09] Speaker 2: You guys are the old people now.

[00:01:11] Speaker 1: And what's crazy is like how quickly it happened. I think I went into COVID lockdown, feeling still very much that young reporter who was professionally young. And I tell you what, once Fauci said, go back outside, I was aged. I was aged. AGED.

[00:01:29] Speaker 2: So, before we get started, let's just do the like, delineation. And Pew Research says, anyone born between 1981 and 1996 is considered a millennial.

[00:01:43] Speaker 1: I'm 84.

[00:01:44] Speaker 2: You're 84, whereas I'm like, late 70s. Like the last two years of the set, which is how I ended up feeling like an elder millennial, but not making the cut, quite literally.

[00:01:54] Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah.

[00:01:55] Speaker 2: And I was looking at the markers that they suggested. One was being between the ages of like five and 20 during the 9-11 attacks.

[00:02:03] Speaker 1: I was a senior in high school.

[00:02:04] Speaker 2: Yes, exactly. I was in college, growing up in the shadow of the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan. Being between, being like roughly voting age for the 2008 election. Oh, yeah. Like you guys are si se puede. Like that's your...

[00:02:19] Speaker 1: Oh, my God. It was a foundational moment. It was a foundational moment. The way young people did that election. It was a big deal.

[00:02:25] Speaker 2: And you were the most, you were, because I say Gen Z is now, the most racially and ethnically diverse adult generation in the nation's history. And then lastly, of course, the economic recession. I think everyone remembers those news stories. I was like, they don't move out of their house. They spend money on avocados and coffee or whatever. That was sort of the knock on millennials. And now there's a whole other new round of knocks, which is cringe. The idea that as a generation, you're sort of sincere in a way that is uncomfortable to the youngs.

[00:02:58] Speaker 1: Oh, totally. Totally. I mean, I...

[00:02:59] Speaker 2: Does any of that sound correct to you?

[00:03:01] Speaker 1: All of it sounds correct to me. And when I have to think about those timeline points of how we came of age, it's like, all right, we had a big foreign policy event with the Twin Towers. We had a big financial event with the recession. You know, things like that will continue to happen to all kinds of folks at all ages. But I think what separates us going through that from Gen Z going through that is that they are always online consuming those big hits and having to perform in spite of it. It feels like there's a term a friend used and now all the kids online use, I guess, called the panopticon. This idea that everyone is existing in surveillance of everybody else all the time.

[00:03:48] Speaker 2: Even using the word surveillance, I think, is very particular. Whereas back when there was the, what I would say, the buzz feedification of media, where the goal of a lot of media was to go viral, even whether it was silly or serious, like going viral was sort of a quaint and charming goal.

[00:04:07] Speaker 1: Mm-hmm. Well, and it's like we were surveilled then, but we didn't think it was that. We were just going viral. We were in on it. I, at one point in undergrad, and all my friends did this, we had our personal addresses on Facebook. Personal addresses. So much has changed.

[00:04:25] Speaker 2: It's right there.

[00:04:26] Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:04:27] Speaker 2: It's right there. Yeah. Yeah. A simpler time. That probably is what we are seeing in this round of memes that have come up because, you know, it's 2026. 2016 is now firmly a decade away. Yeah. And looking back on it, like, it's a simpler, happier time. Can I tell you? Like, actual, tell me about this.

[00:04:52] Speaker 1: Yes. Okay. So as soon as your team reached out and it was like, we want to talk about 2016 and all the memes, I said, wait, hold on. Let me refresh my memory. I think I actually wrote a piece for NPR.

[00:05:09] Speaker 3: You did?

[00:05:10] Speaker 1: Called, this was December 28th, 2016. The headline was, Should We All Just Stop Calling 2016 The Worst? So we've been saying everything is the worst for a very long time. My first lines in this piece are, Oh, 2016, the year it all went to hell. The year nothing made sense. The year we lost track of reality. The year Merriam-Webster made surreal its word of the year. I'm always really intrigued by how we kind of, sometimes put like new names on an ever-present phenomenon. Like, the world's always burning. The world's always on fire. We find new language for it. And we should, let me just explain this to people. Yeah.

[00:05:55] Speaker 2: So basically, this is a social media nostalgia trend where basically you go onto your Instagram or whatever, and you post a picture of yourself from that time. You got to dip into the camera roll and find yourself in 2016. Showing the sort of pre-pandemic, pre-AI slop life that you were leading. And the thing that is crazy about it, the BBC was reporting you had people on TikTok searching 2016. Like, oh, what was it like? And on Snapchat, like, oh, that's so interesting. And then the other thing that came up is, I don't know if you remember NPR's Tiny Desk Concert with Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zeros.

[00:06:35] Speaker 1: I was in the building.

[00:06:36] Speaker 2: We were there.

[00:06:37] Speaker 1: I was in the building for that. And I'll never forget that same week that Edward Sharp and his team were doing Tiny Desk. They were playing 930 Club. Somebody emailed the all staff to say, I got some Edward Sharp tickets who want some. Please reply just to me. I replied to the whole building.

[00:06:52] Speaker 2: Of course.

[00:06:52] Speaker 1: It was peak millennial.

[00:06:53] Speaker 2: Peak millennial. Yeah, y'all were very, like, lucid with the all staff. Oh, yeah. Like, what are you doing? So the New Yorker described this single as the cranking furnace of the faux lumberjack, mustachioed, mason jar clutching, acoustic guitar strumming, hipster zeitgeist. The Magnetic Zeros were ubiquitous. This is significant because, again, it became this conversation online where someone posted the clip. And they were like, this is horrible. And all of these millennials came out of the woodwork to be like, no, it was a better time. This song is, like, full of hope. And it reminds me of good things. And people were piling on them. And it became a dialogue, I think, that distilled this argument about sincerity, cringe, and, like, the cultural posture of this generation.

[00:07:43] Speaker 1: Totally. I feel like the central tension here when we're thinking about a millennial core and Gen Z core, it's like millennials are seen to be very earnest, Gen Z very jaded. And my thing is, like, having lived through being in that young generation and then going to now, at some point, you'll be both. Like, at some point, you will be jaded, too. I have to remind myself of that.

[00:08:09] Speaker 2: Again, I feel differently. Like, I feel like the Gen X cynicism, the Gen Z version of that has curdled into nihilism, and that we see it in their political movements, right? So whether it's their right wing movements, which are very much rejecting multiculturalism, rejecting the liberal world order, reject, reject, reject. Or the left wing version of that, which is when you're talking to a young person and they're like, oh, well, I mean, it is late stage capitalism. And you're like, what? Wait a second, what are we saying? Like, I feel like the social contract that was fraying with millennials feels fully ruptured for Gen Z. And they just have a completely different idea of, like, their relationship to society, what they're getting out of it, what they were promised. Like, I think, I feel like they're more than jaded. Like, they're really fundamentally disappointed.

[00:09:03] Speaker 1: What do you think are the biggest reasons for it? I have some theories.

[00:09:06] Speaker 2: No, tell me your theory first.

[00:09:08] Speaker 1: I feel like so much of it is the way that we absorb the world. I think that the internet that you and I were consuming 10 years ago, 15 years ago, it seemed simpler.

[00:09:19] Speaker 2: It was. It was less populated. What color is this dress? Yeah. Is it blue or gold?

[00:09:24] Speaker 1: It was also less populated by so much content. I think the shift from text-based internet to video-based internet to infinite scroll internet.

[00:09:37] Speaker 2: Infinite scroll, OK.

[00:09:38] Speaker 1: That's made us all feel overwhelmed perpetually. Our phones went from being a thing where we shared with just our friends to a platform where we experienced sensory overload amongst strangers all the time. And I'm not sure that we, our brains and our bodies haven't caught up to that big change. Like, it's a very big shift. Like, if you go online now and open Instagram, it's like you are at a music festival and you can hear everybody talking at the same time, but you still want to hear the music.

[00:10:14] Speaker 2: It's interesting because even though TikTok is participatory, even though it feels like they have a voice, I feel like millennials grew up on, you know, Facebook walls and Messenger and Tumblr and quizzes and things that actually were fundamentally more social. Like, I now, when I'm on these things and I see comments, I'm like, is that a bot? Is that AI? Like, I don't have any sense that I'm, like you said, that concert. It's like, I actually feel like I watch social media now more than I am social on social media now.

[00:10:48] Speaker 1: I really blame a lot of this on the decision, and Facebook led the charge, when they moved all of us over to a newsfeed.

[00:10:58] Speaker 2: Yep. You know who was behind that? Adam Massary came up with the newsfeed. He is now in charge of Instagram, fighting for his life in the age of AI.

[00:11:06] Speaker 1: Yep. But in the early Facebook days, you posted stuff and you only saw what you and your friends posted in chronological order. And that was it.

[00:11:15] Speaker 2: To people who wanted to see it, wanted to participate, and wanted to be in a conversation with you. Whereas now, rage bait means, by definition, almost the person paying attention to you might hate your guts.

[00:11:26] Speaker 1: And it's not even rage bait. It's like half rage bait, half AI slop. So on top of all of this, yeah, it's like, I see so many videos every day that I send to friends and they write back and say, that's AI, bro. That's AI. I can't tell. So, like, that further complicates all of this.

[00:11:42] Speaker 2: Okay, so I'm going to turn to something that may not feel related, but is. Okay? Which is the politics of this moment. And the story around ICE in Minneapolis, the death of Alex Pretty, the death of Renee Good, for a couple of reasons. Number one, both of those people were like millennial age. Like, they're in their late 30s, right?

[00:12:06] Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.

[00:12:07] Speaker 2: The other thing is that, um, the conversation around their deaths is so radically different if you're on TikTok and Instagram versus Facebook and X. Right? So again, that sort of, like, it doesn't feel like a socially cohesive media experience, and that really shapes the dialogue. And then the thing I want to put to you, and you can tell me if I'm wrong. If Pearl Harbor, if 9-11 was the millennial Pearl Harbor, I wonder if these deaths in Minnesota are your Kent State.

[00:12:45] Speaker 1: Mm. Probably yes, but I think the biggest difference between Kent State and now is that for most Americans in that era, if you wanted to find reliable information about what happened, there were a handful of news sources who most folks just trusted. And now, we have seen traditional news media diminished. We've seen these apps that are ascendant become more beholden to shareholders and also full of AI. And the biggest thing is that, like, now our version of the internet, if you think about it, it is unique for every single individual. And the content that is the most prioritized is the stuff that's the most incendiary. The biggest difference, I think, when you compare it to 10 years ago, 20 years ago, any idea of a free and healthy public square and discourse has been, if not eroded, challenged greatly. You know, we talk about fixing healthcare and fixing our military, fixing our borders. I also want to have a conversation about, like, fixing whatever our public square is. It's broken. It's broken. Sorry, there's no answer there. Just more questions.

[00:14:09] Speaker 2: No, no, no. I mean, in a way, I'm asking that because, like, you know, you were that original, professional young person in politics. And there's so much about this story that has to do with how this generation has grown up alongside its technology. I mean, you have ICE officers wielding their own cell phones. Monitoring, observing through your phone has become one of the most specific and concrete acts of defiance and resistance in communities like Minneapolis and others. And it's also now being called violence or terrorism, right, by people like Kristi Noem and the state. It does feel like the generation that brought us virality is still, like, relying on it somehow. Even though the system doesn't work the same way. Like, virality doesn't make accountability.

[00:15:06] Speaker 1: Not at all. I remember, I was covering Black Lives Matter protests many years ago. And there was this moment when that movement said, oh, we have video now. It will change everything. We have video now. Once they see it, of course they'll stop. And I remember tracking this story years after those first big, high-profile cases of Black people being shot by police on camera. Every year, the number of police-involved shootings in this country either went up or stayed the same. So you're totally right. Just because we see it doesn't mean we fix it.

[00:15:43] Speaker 2: SHANNON... But we feel like it's still possible. The act of holding up that phone means you feel like... down the line, if it's not today, if it's not tomorrow, or even if it's the fact that there are gonna be some people who believe what they see. And that did happen with the death of Alex Pretty, right? This administration was coming out hot calling him an assassin, calling him a domestic terrorism, this, that. And there were just one too many phones out there for that to fly.

[00:16:10] Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, and we've also seen, um, as much as newsrooms have been decimated in this new media climate, there has been, I think, a really good shift on the way that a lot of newsrooms cover incidents with the police, with ICE, with Border Patrol. When I first began... SHANNON... With law enforcement. Exactly. Like, I first began covering these kind of shootings, and any time that we got a statement from the police, we just believed it.

[00:16:38] Speaker 2: SHANNON... That is a really good point. Um, even now, as we have all these questions about Kash Patel and the FBI and this administration and who they investigate, we're all more comfortable with the idea of saying, maybe law enforcement isn't always telling you the whole story.

[00:16:55] Speaker 1: Exactly. Exactly. And like, for me, the challenge is, as a news consumer, someone who still believes in journalism, there's this conundrum, right? Because of all this new technology that we're talking about, you can see more. You can uncover more. You can show more. But it exists at a time in which we're all overwhelmed by information and content anyway.

[00:17:19] Speaker 2: Yeah. Like, I didn't watch the video of Alex Pretty's death. It's just like, you know, he is being shot in the street. Because I remember having nightmares after the death of George Floyd. And, sadly, you kind of have learned over these years that if you don't see this video, you might end up seeing the next one.

[00:17:42] Speaker 1: Exactly.

[00:17:43] Speaker 2: Right? There's not this, um... And that social media, like, facilitates that. Instead of there being a real conversation, it's sort of up to you as just like another spectacle for clicks. Yes.

[00:17:56] Speaker 1: I, I, I... It's funny. I haven't been sleeping well this last week. The news has just been rough. I've been a little sick, because it's that time of year. And one of the things I've had to do to just help myself get ready to sleep as I recover, I've had to delete a lot of these apps from my phone. Because especially in light of these ICE shootings, you know, you open Instagram, and immediately, it feels like that app is punching you in the face. It is combative. And I think the worry and the challenge and the fear that I face, as someone who is concerned about this, I'm like, oh, am I doing a good job if I'm not in that fray as well? Am I caring if I'm not there?

[00:18:38] Speaker 2: Is that your millennial coming out, though? Because if you were raised in the age of hashtag activism, where the power of spring... Yeah, you had to perform it. ...and rise and fall, yeah, and BLM and Say Her Name and all of these things, the performance was also considered a contribution.

[00:18:54] Speaker 1: Exactly.

[00:18:54] Speaker 2: That's been way diminished, especially on the left, I think, in a lot of ways.

[00:18:58] Speaker 1: Oh, for sure. For sure. I think that, you know, there have been moments in which you've seen people build entire careers off of that online performance of activism. I'm not gonna name names, when I say the Black Lives Matter movement. Yeah. But it's real.

[00:19:19] Speaker 2: Though some of the names are very clever.

[00:19:21] Speaker 1: Yeah. But I also know that, like, you know how all these marches get organized? On the apps. You know, they're also galvanizing tools. I think for me, what I try to just keep as a central focus in my life, as I navigate media and talking about the world, it's like, how do I make my phone and these apps a tool that I use, not a device and a thing that uses me? It's like, who's in charge? There's some days when I open my phone where it feels like the phone is in charge. I try to fight that. And that means putting it down.

[00:19:53] Speaker 2: Well, it is the algorithm, right? I was talking with someone today about the new TikTok ownership, and I asked, so, unknown unknowns, what do we know about how the new US Trump-aligned owners will retrain the TikTok algorithm? And he said, the truth is, we don't even know how the algorithm works anyway. Even before the purchase. And so, yes, when you click on something, when you watch something, whether it was the attacks on people in Gaza, or whether it's the shooting of a protester, the algorithm serves you more.

[00:20:27] Speaker 1: More. More.

[00:20:28] Speaker 2: You'll get 50 more versions. Exactly. Like you said.

[00:20:31] Speaker 1: And half of them might be AI. That's the worst. Well, and it's, for me, I think millennials imagined, at the start of this social media internet age, that this version of internet would bring us into a new world and save the world fully in the process. Right? And when I look at the data around consumption habits of the biggest platforms in the world right now, they don't feel like they're pushing towards a future. They all feel stuck in feedback loops, and at best, nostalgic. This is a kind of different tangent, but on Spotify, on Spotify now, 70% of all listening is catalog. That means old music, less than new music. When I look at TikTok, a lot of the trends that Gen Z is embracing are throwbacks to what we did 15, 20 years ago. Yeah. And I think when I see that happen, it's proof that all of us right now feel less secure about the world that lies ahead than the world that we were seeing or saw through others 15, 20 years ago.

[00:21:45] Speaker 2: My controversial take on this is that post the awokening, post going after the authors of the 1619 Project, post this sort of realignment of history and framing of history around Black civil rights struggles, okay, which all of these millennial Obama era reporters and columnists and writers all became, came of age.

[00:22:13] Speaker 4: Oh, yeah.

[00:22:14] Speaker 2: Being public intellectuals in a way that was enabled by online dialogue, right? Your Twitter, Roxane Gage, your whatever.

[00:22:25] Speaker 1: And we should say like Black Twitter. It was a phenomenon.

[00:22:28] Speaker 2: It was Black Twitter had an academic wing. But that academic wing actually undergirded a lot of the mainstream conversations in progressivism.

[00:22:39] Speaker 1: Yes.

[00:22:39] Speaker 2: With their retreat, I'll use the word retreat, or aging out, right, as they're off doing other things. They're professors now. They've written other books. They're on other topics. And with the anti-woke movement so powerful in the administration and in social media, I think the people who would have made the arguments you're talking about, their platform has been destabilized.

[00:23:08] Speaker 1: Oh, for sure.

[00:23:09] Speaker 2: But that was, I mean, yeah. They're scattered. And I feel like that's why your feed is not what it was. Exactly. In 2017.

[00:23:17] Speaker 1: I think that a lot of how I've been changing as I get older, experiencing these things, as I have to say to myself, oh, it's a cycle. It's a cycle of progress and then retrenchment. And then progress and then retrenchment. And when I remind myself of that, I feel a bit more fortified. This won't be the last time that this kind of wave happens. The activists will always be there. The folks thinking about these issues seriously will always be there. I think the biggest challenge in our moment is how we find a way to communicate those ideas to each other. And increasingly, when I talk with folks, they're saying it's going to happen offline. If the Great Awakening happened maybe some 10 years ago, we're about due for a great defoning. I think the reality of what needs to happen in this country and how it needs to be done, it's going to have to happen outside of the phone. And that makes me feel a little bit better, because I'm tired of my phone, Audie.

[00:24:20] Speaker 2: This is how you got called unk, by the way. This is the youth to unk pipeline in action.

[00:24:28] Speaker 3: Youth to unk pipeline.

[00:24:29] Speaker 2: Yeah, when you're just like, you know it's a cycle.

[00:24:32] Speaker 3: It's a cycle.

[00:24:34] Speaker 2: Sam, I'm so glad that I still know you. You have no idea. And it's been so awesome watching your career. And tell people where they can find you these days, online, on Newsletter Nation. What are you up to?

[00:24:49] Speaker 1: Yes. So my show, all about entertainment and fun things like movies, music, TV, books, et cetera, it's called The Sam Sanders Show. You can get it wherever you get your podcasts. And some radio stations across the country play it. I publish episodes of that show every Tuesday and Friday. I'm also most active on Instagram. I still use that app, at Sam Sanders.

[00:25:14] Speaker 2: At Sam Sanders. All right. Sam, thanks so much.

[00:25:18] Speaker 1: Thank you. Appreciate it.