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The Last Normal Year

2026-10-30 · letter vlog · Hank · 9:14 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Internet & YouTube · mode: Personal essay · tags: self promotion

Answering video essays that call 2026 the last normal year, Hank argues that 2016 was: that year online ads passed TV, mobile passed desktop and feeds went algorithmic, and since then machine learning that sells our attention to fear and outrage has eroded trust; the For You page is building us.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — 2026 as 'the last normal year'; no year is normal; 1996, teenage nostalgia, and the case for 2016

  • ★★ Hank says he has seen several video essays, tweets and YouTube thumbnails saying 2026 will be the last normal year, which does not surprise him, but he does not think it is true. — 00:00:00 · YouTube
  • ★★ Hank does not think there have ever been any normal years: every time is an unprecedented time. — 00:00:00
  • ★ In Hank's mind the most normal year was around 1996, when he was 16, which he says is no surprise. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Hank says people can feel their teenage year was the most normal while recognizing that everybody thinks their teenage years were the good and pure times before everything got complicated. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ Hank does not think that people who were teenagers in 2016 feel that their teenage years were the good and pure times. — 00:00:29

  • ★★★ Hank makes the case, expecting John to refute it, that 2016 was the last normal year, though it stopped being normal before the year was over. — 00:00:29

    “2016 was in fact the last normal year”

00:00:58 — John's eye-roll; back to 2016: Pizzagate, Trump's election, the dumpster fire shirt, celebrity deaths

  • ★ Hank pitched this video idea to John, who rolled his eyes; Hank expects John to say he is wrong and invites him to disagree. — 00:00:58 · John Green
  • ★★ Hank recalls Pizzagate, and Donald Trump being elected president just days after Hank's son was born, which he found weird. — 00:01:30 · Donald Trump, United States presidential election, Orin Green
  • ★★ Hank remembers DFTBA selling a shirt of a dumpster on fire with 2016 written on it, because 2016 was the dumpster fire year. — 00:01:30 · DFTBA Records
  • ★★ Hank notes that David Bowie, Prince, Alan Rickman, Muhammad Ali, Carrie Fisher and George Michael all died in 2016. — 00:01:30
  • ★★ Hank says "dumpster fire" was the American Dialect Society's 2016 word of the year. — 00:01:30
  • ★★★ Hank believes that 2016 felt like the worst year ever, and every later year even worse, because of a switch that flipped in 2016. — 00:01:30

00:01:59 — The switch that flipped in 2016: online ads, mobile internet, algorithmic feeds, older Facebook users, fake election stories

  • ★★ Hank says 2016 was the first year online advertising outpaced TV ads in the US. — 00:01:59 · online advertising
  • ★★ Hank says 2016 was the first year mobile internet use outpaced desktop internet use worldwide. — 00:01:59
  • ★★ Hank says Twitter and Instagram switched to algorithmic feeds in 2016. — 00:01:59 · Twitter, Instagram, recommender system
  • ★★ Hank says that in 2016 Google published a paper on YouTube recommendations now being made by deep neural networks. — 00:01:59 · Google, YouTube, recommender system
  • ★★ Hank says the share of Americans over 65 who were online and on Facebook rose from 48% in 2015 to 62% in 2016: the last demographic to join the internet was piling on and experiencing the feed. — 00:02:28 · Facebook
  • ★★ Hank says early in 2016 mainstream outlets' top election content far outperformed misinformation, but in the election's last three months top fake stories on Facebook got more views, shares and comments than major outlets' top stories. — 00:02:28 · Facebook, United States presidential election
  • ★★ Hank says the change was not only American: as people poured online worldwide and feeds became algorithmic, institutions lost attention, respect and trust, and upstarts, Hank included, competed for attention. — 00:02:58 · recommender system

00:03:27 — Fear, bad news and moral outrage in the competition for attention; lost trust; walking into AI with eyes open

  • ★★★ Hank says one of the best ways to gather and hold attention is to make people scared and show them the bad news. — 00:03:27 · attention economy
  • ★★ Hank thinks he keeps seeing claims that 2026 is the last normal year because the frame captures attention: it unsettles people into watching. — 00:03:27
  • ★★ Hank says the change since 2016 brought new systems that grant power to marginalized people and also to terrible inhuman ideas, but above all an explosion of innovation in ways to hold attention. — 00:03:56
  • ★★★ Hank sees two reasons things have gotten worse since 2016; the first is that the media environment is worse, which makes people make worse decisions. — 00:04:25
  • ★★ Hank says some things simply occurred: COVID was not caused by the algorithms, though perhaps made worse by them, and a pandemic together with a media revolution has hurt trust. (hedged) — 00:04:25 · COVID-19 pandemic
  • ★★★ Hank's second reason: people experience the world as worse because intense competition for attention rewards moral outrage and fear, so content that unsettles travels through the internet more easily. — 00:04:54 · attention economy
  • ★★ Hank says it seems likely that being confronted more and more with how terrible things and people are lowers trust in them, which makes things worse. (hedged) — 00:04:54
  • ★★ Hank says there is great data showing that when people lose trust in each other and in their government, things get worse. — 00:05:24
  • ★★ Hank thinks the last 10 years have been a bad decade for trust. — 00:05:24
  • ★★ Hank finds it interesting that people seem pretty aware of what is happening with artificial intelligence, walking into that revolution with their eyes open even without feeling much agency. — 00:05:24
  • ★★ Hank suggests people may be alert to AI partly because they walked into the last revolution thinking it would be all about bottle flips, Harambe and Pokémon Go. (hedged) — 00:05:53 · Bottle flipping
  • ★★★ Hank says turning machine learning algorithms on human attention seemed a little thing, but they show not always what you like, sometimes whatever you will watch, perhaps out of fear or anger. — 00:05:53 · recommender system

  • ★★★ Asking whether 2016 simply brought celebrity deaths experienced in a new way, Hank says it was a dumpster fire not because Prince died but because we entered a world where anything that would get watched would get made. — 00:05:53

    “anything that would get watched would get made”

  • ★★ Hank says most news consumption would in time become feed-based; that did not happen in 2016, but the switch had been flipped and nobody knew. — 00:05:53

00:06:40 — Our attention given to machine learning; AI controls what we see; the For You page is building us

  • ★★★ Hank says our attention is all we have: we gave a huge share of it to machine learning algorithms 10 years ago and live in an intensely different and, he thinks, worse world because of it. — 00:06:40 · attention economy

    “our attention is all we have”

  • ★★ Hank finds it wild that nobody knew how big a deal this would be, when saying it now sounds so obvious. — 00:06:40

  • ★★★ Hank says AI controls what we see: not LLMs, though they are increasingly part of it, but AI decides which YouTube thumbnails we see, what is in our Threads, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram feeds, and what comes next when swiping. — 00:07:09 · YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, recommender system

  • ★★★ Hank calls the idea that people build their For You page brick by brick an illusion: to some extent the For You page is building us, and we are made of and by the things we watch. — 00:07:38

    “the For You page is building us”

  • ★★ Hank says that, given the chance to let recommendation systems be in charge, as on short-form swipeable feeds, people seem to prefer it. (hedged) — 00:07:38 · recommender system

  • ★★★ Hank says the change has put us in a media revolution, never a comfortable place, and feels that somewhere in 2016 we entered the world where we let machine learning algorithms start to build us. — 00:07:38

00:08:07 — A world built by us and the algorithms; Focus Friend sale; the Awesome Socks Club 2026 window

  • ★★ Hank says we now live in a world constructed by us and also by the algorithms, and still have a lot to learn about how to live in it. — 00:08:07
  • ★★ Hank says the Focus Friend sale ends tomorrow or the day after (31 October or 1 November 2026). (hedged) — 00:08:07 · Focus Friend
  • ★★ Hank says Focus Friend can help you have a little more control over your relationship with your phone without paying anything. — 00:08:07 · Focus Friend
  • ★★ Hank says that, to keep things simple and make inventory make sense, the Awesome Socks Club is now open during just one or two windows a year. — 00:08:07 · Awesome Socks Club
  • ★★ Hank says the Awesome Socks Club's 2026 sign-up window opens on November 3 (3 November 2026). — 00:08:07 · Awesome Socks Club
  • ★★ Hank asks viewers who want socks in the mail or as a gift to mark their calendars for the Awesome Socks Club window, which helps fund the Maternal Center of Excellence, since all Good Store profit goes to charity. — 00:08:55 · Awesome Socks Club, Maternal Center of Excellence, Good Store
  • ★ Hank says the Awesome Socks Club has not raised prices since 2022, so technically the socks are getting cheaper. (playful) — 00:08:55 · Awesome Socks Club

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: attention economy · For You page · machine learning · moral outrage · recommender system

Also: People: Alan Rickman · Carrie Fisher · David Bowie · Donald Trump · George Michael · Muhammad Ali · Orin Green · Prince

Projects: Awesome Socks Club · DFTBA Records · Good Store

Works: Dumpster fire shirt · Focus Friend · Pokémon Go

Organizations: American Dialect Society · Facebook · Google · Instagram · Maternal Center of Excellence · Threads · TikTok · Twitter · YouTube

Concepts: artificial intelligence · large language model · misinformation · online advertising · Pizzagate conspiracy theory · rosy retrospection · trust

Events: COVID-19 pandemic · United States presidential election

Memes: Bottle flipping

animal: Harambe

Also centred on moral outrage: Addicted to Outrage · Feeling Thankful in Portland · Crime and Outrage · Ending the Age of Outrage (at least in ourselves, if not in the world) · I Keep Thinking About Taylor Swift · I'm Scared of 2024...So Here's 3 Optimistic Thoughts

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