I've concluded that people nostalgic for 2016 are nostalgic for the last moment when culture still felt like it was progressing. It was the last time culture allowed itself to evolve in interesting new directions before that door mostly slammed shut.
Everything is inspired by something that came before it, but culture used to be better at spinning inspiration into a whole new creative direction. Over the past 10 years, it feels like we've just been recycling things one-for-one. Gen Z fashion, for instance, is just the clothes I wore in the early 2000s — gigantic jeans and oversized shirts handed down to a new generation with almost no original twist.
I've heard too many pop songs that lazily sample tracks from that same era, making almost no attempt at subtly incorporating the elements into a new track. It feels hacky to point out that Hollywood isn't even trying anymore, either. Since Marvel became the dominant force, everyone is pillaging intellectual property to create reboots, sequels, and prequels. The logic is that people only want things they are familiar with. But is that true? Or have we just spent 20 years conditioning generations that the only things worth making are things you already know exist?
Nostalgia isn't just a romantic feeling anymore; it's a business model. This doesn't mean daring stuff isn't happening, but it's buried under a tidal wave of "content slop" churned out by creatively bankrupt executives and content farms. This has created a kind of creative inflation: any new idea gets copied immediately, its edges sanded off, and mass-produced back to us within seconds, threatening to kill the daring new thing soon after it was born.
This has always been the case, but technology has sped up the process. Nirvana had about three years of explosive relevance before being watered down into post-grunge irrelevance by bands like Creed. Now, Nirvana itself is a trendy T-shirt, and that entire process of dilution takes about a year.
AI is the perfect, depressing symbol of this endpoint. It doesn't create; it remixes. It statistically predicts what should come next based on what already exists, which is exactly what culture has been doing to itself for years, but now it can cheapen originality in an instant. The machine can do it fast and without shame.
A culture that only looks backward eventually collapses under its own references. Real innovation feels alien, but it isn't extinct. Hollywood is creatively destitute if you only pay attention to big studios, but every year there are films of legitimate audaciousness that take inspiration from the past without stealing it whole cloth; they just don't get the same marketing budgets as Avengers.
The signal-to-noise ratio has never been more in favor of noise. The creative geniuses are out there; they're just being buried under "slop." Nostalgia isn't all we've got left, but it is easier to mine. If you want to find the original stuff, you're going to have to put in a little more effort to find it.