I won’t get deep into how 2016 me differs from today me (less hair and more teeth, for one), because this inescapable trend of people excavating and emptying out their 2016 archives runs so much deeper than changes in appearance, personality and interests. Millennials are the main drivers behind it, but incredibly, Gen Z are not only letting it happen, but joining in. What we’re witnessing is more significant than just another trend - it very well could be a revival in true online authenticity.

-Devin Pike, Guest Editor 💜

At this workshop, join Stanley Henry and the the Attention Seeker team for a 2-hour session to plan out your content strategy for the whole year.

You’ll learn:

✅ What’s actually working on social right now
✅ How to build a viral content strategy for your brand
✅ The exact approach we use to get millions of views for our clients (and build our own audience of 3.3 million)

PLUS we will have plenty of time for Q&A with you.

Wednesday, 28 Jan | 8:30-10:30am NZT | $49

Stop wasting time making content that doesn’t perform. This is your chance to walk into 2026 with a content plan you know will work 👇

The AI boom is great!! If you’re Nvidia or Micron. However, it’s kind of starting to look like a memory supply land grab that leaves the rest of tech eating dust. Massive AI data centers are hoarding DRAM, HBM and NAND flash, the very components phones, laptops and SSDs need, driving prices up and availability down for consumer gear.

As memory makers prioritise high-bandwidth chips for AI infrastructure, base models on your next device could ship with weaker components while “better” versions cost even more. Expect slower upgrades, rising gadget prices, and less innovation at the edges while data centres gobble memory like it’s going out of style.

Enter the horny crossover era. Wellness brand Maude has partnered with Warner Bros. Pictures to launch a limited-edition “Come Undone” intimacy kit inspired by Emerald Fennell’s upcoming Wuthering Heights adaptation, and it’s exactly what it sounds like.

The kit reframes Cathy and Heathcliff’s obsessive romance as a tactile ritual, featuring Burn No. 3, a moody candle scented with sandalwood, vetiver, eucalyptus, cassis and musk, paired with Oil No. 0, Maude’s fragrance-free massage and body oil. Made for film, fragrance, and intimacy lovers alike, apparently.

This is pretty cool. After years of allowing generative art (under strict conditions), San Diego Comic-Con quietly reversed course following a strong backlash from working artists. The convention’s art show will no longer accept any AI-generated material, even non-sale pieces, after creators argued that allowing AI art devalues real work and normalises tools that increasingly replace living artists.

This marks a small but notable victory for traditional creators who have been warning that unregulated AI in art spaces erodes livelihoods and artistic integrity. Whether this stance holds firm as AI tech evolves remains to be seen, but for now, artists scored a win at one of the biggest cultural events on the planet. A win is a win baby.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

They're making hearts with their hair, recreating the precise shade of sepia that made everything look as sun-drenched as humanly possible, dancing and lip-syncing like its Music.ly all over again. The part that shocks me the most is not in fact how open some of y’all are with the state of y’alls photos from back then (don’t make me name names now), but the fact that Gen Z, watching this unfold, aren’t mocking it, they're actually joining in.

What we're witnessing is something deeper than regular nostalgia, and more necessary: the rehabilitation of sincerity itself.

Millennials were the lab rats of social media. We posted everything, everywhere, for no particular reason beyond the fact that we could. We documented our breakfasts and our breakdowns with equal fervor. We created massive, embarrassing digital footprints, the ruins of an ancient civilisation that reveled in sins Gen Z would never dare commit. No seriously, I get scared when Facebook tells me “Sophie, you have memories to look back on today”. God, no, please.

Gen Z learned from watching us get burned. They grew up seeing the cringe compilations, the receipts, the way the internet never forgets and rarely forgives. So they optimised for protection: private accounts, Close Friends stories, ephemeral content, and layers of irony as armor. If Millennials were earnest because they didn't know better, Gen Z became careful because they learned from our innocence.

But, the twist in all of this is, Gen Z seemingly wants that innocence back. They're nostalgic for a sincerity they never got to experience themselves. These edits go beyond standard appreciation; it's trying on an emotional vocabulary that feels forbidden in their own context.

That 2016 aesthetic: the Instagram sunsets with Helvetica overlays, the earnest vision boards, the unironic belief in personal transformation and social progress, got dismissed as naive precisely because those hopes didn't materialise the way an entire generation expected.

The cringe was a defence mechanism against disappointment. We're now in a moment where irony poisoning has run its course for many people. There's a hunger for permission to hope again, to be whimsical, and explore childlike happiness. But the conditions that made 2016 optimism possible don't really exist anymore. We're more informed, more exhausted and a whole lot more aware of systemic intractability. The question becomes: can you choose hope as a practice when it's no longer a default setting?

This is where the trend becomes more than aesthetic recycling. What we're witnessing is sincerity nostalgia, not longing for the past itself, but for the emotional posture it represented. A time when it still felt reasonable to be earnestly optimistic, before constant crisis mode became our baseline.

Here's the beautiful part: maybe in performing hopefulness, we become hopeful. You can't just decide to feel optimistic through sheer willpower, but you can do the behaviours, wear the aesthetic, engage in the rituals, and I guarantee that somewhere in that repetition, the feeling will catch up.

Think about how you fall asleep. You can't fall asleep by actively trying to fall asleep. The effort itself keeps you awake. Instead, you have to pretend you're already asleep. Get still. Close your eyes. Slow your breathing. The performance creates the conditions for the real thing.

Posting the sepia-filtered TikToks with Drake's "One Dance" blasting in the background is like a rehearsal. It's practicing the muscle memory of optimism. Doing the cringe earnestly enough times that it stops being cringe and starts being just what you do. Just how you are.

And there's something crucial about doing it collectively. One person being earnest in a sea of irony is vulnerable, exposed. But when enough people start performing hope together, even semi-ironically at first, it creates cover. It becomes safe to mean it.

The hope of 2026 would be fundamentally different from the hope of 2016. The earlier version was almost accidental, pre-reflexive, we didn't know enough to know better. Now, any return to optimism would have to be deliberate, chosen in full knowledge of everything that's happened since. And tbh that's actually what makes it more powerful. 2016 hopefulness was naive. 2026 hope would be an act of defiance.

Millennials who lived through 2016 the first time have a strange advantage here: they know what that hopefulness felt like from the inside. They remember the taste of it. And maybe that's their weird contribution to this cultural moment, being willing to be cringe again, showing that you can survive it, that there's something on the other side of self-consciousness worth reaching for.

Nostalgia isn't just about reliving the past - it's about rediscovering an idea that seems to have been lost. In this case, it's hope for hope itself. The belief that believing in something better might actually matter.

Apathy and irony served their purpose as protective mechanisms, but they've run their course. If we want to create a happier 2026, we need to start believing that better is possible. Not because we have proof, but because the alternative (being permanent detachment) is unbearable.

So we make the edits. We post the photos. We put on the sepia and lipsync for our lives. We perform hope until the performance becomes real. We pretend to sleep until we actually fall asleep.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to delete a 15-year-old FB status of my to do list, in which, the only task is to "marry Oli Sykes".

-Sophie Randell, Writer

Today's trend is about appointing yourself as the spokesperson for taste, logic, and basic common sense when someone - whether it's a brand, a friend, or a complete stranger - makes a choice so obnoxiously wrong that staying silent feels like being complicit. Like when your Spotify Wrapped shows your top artist being someone you played once as a joke, or when you watch your friend get back with her ex for the 47th time this year. The gist is you're stepping in as the self-appointed quality control manager of life, pumping the break for everyone before sh*t hits the fan.

The audio comes from an episode of the reality show Bad Boys on Zeus, where Natalie Nunn delivered the now-iconic shutdown "that's not what the fans wanna see" after witnessing a particularly cringe-worthy performance from one of the contestants.

Creators are now using it to publicly call out questionable decisions and choices that completely miss the mark - whether it's "a 'photo dump' and it's just a picture of the sunset once a month", or "when I get mad and they think giving me space is the best option", or even "when I Google if I can mix two substances and all I get is the self help number".

Take this audio, film yourself with maximum disappointment. Lip-sync to the line "that's not what the fans wanna see". The key is looking both unsurprised and deeply exhausted by the poor judgment on display.

A few ideas to get you started

-Raewyn Zhao, Intern

😂Yap’s funniest home videos Gaslighting my dog
❤How wholesome This one is for the cat lovers
😊Soooo satisfying Slime ASMR
🍝What you should make for dinner tonight S A quick Greek chicken bowl

We get it. Creating content that does numbers is harder than it looks. But doing those big numbers is the fastest way to grow your brand. So if you’re tired of throwing sh*t at the wall and seeing what sticks, you’re in luck. Because making our clients go viral is kinda what we do every single day.