The Nostalgia Cycle Has Finally Come For Hipster Williamsburg

Millennials on X are having a bit of a crisis right now about Gen Z TikTok users getting nostalgic about “Millennial optimism” and “hipster Brooklyn.” There are a few of these TikToks flying around at the moment, but this post from TikTok user @christina_anne escaped containment and has racked up 15 million horrified views on X this week.

The devastation of time arrives for all of us, of course. But seeing young people romanticize a period of time and specific place I lived in is fascinating. Even more interesting is watching it all get flattened — incorrectly — into a single TikTok aesthetic. But before we start quibbling, let’s see what the kids are saying!

The aforementioned @christina_anne captioned her video, “I wanted that New York apartment with brick walls so bad.” And the top comment on that video right now reads, “How did millennials go from this to beige moms?” The next comment down reads, “I was so ready for my BuzzFeed career.” (lol)

On another “Millennial Optimism” video, I found a whole bunch of other comments from beleaguered zoomers, like one user who wrote, “As an older Gen Z it feels weird. I got to watch millennials have all this freedom and feel like things were on the up and up only for Trump to get elected and it all go downhill from there.” And another who wrote, “You were either hipster, swag, or scene.” Which is true. It was the law back then.

TikTok aesthetics are strange things. Fashion, music, architecture, food, and the specific type of camera needed to appropriately capture them all, jammed together into a single aspirational unit of “style.” Marketing firm Slack rooms across the country may be treating these things with the utmost seriousness, but they’re largely just vibe maps. The digital equivalent of what a teenager would have physically hung up on their bedroom wall back when teenagers still looked at physical media. And now the peak millennial era is being digested by that great decentralized bedroom wall in the cloud.

We can get this out of the way pretty quickly. Yes, things were better. Even if millennials were all experiencing the same agonies that every 20-something goes through. As cartoonist Mattie Lubchansky wrote on Bluesky, “Seeing all the Gen Z nostalgia about hipster Brooklyn and let me tell you: I was at the Les Savy Fav ‘Inches’ release show in a Brooklyn warehouse with Q And Not U and El Guapo in 2004. It was sponsored for some reason by Sparks. And I hated being alive more than anything.” RIP Sparks, the proto-Four Loko that tasted like lemon-flavored motor oil and turned your tongue green.

But Lubchansky’s post hints at the funny problem with all of these TikToks. They’re reminiscing about the wrong time period! As Heatmap News’ Matthew Zeitlin wrote on X, “What's funny about these engagement bait TikToks about being a millennial in Williamsburg or Greenpoint in 2012 is that as a G/L train millennial from 2012-15 we all knew that the actual cool time to live there was 2005 or whatever.”

And I can confirm this, I started interning at VICE Magazine in Brooklyn in 2010 and it was all anyone wanted to talk about. Williamsburg was already “dead,” Bushwick was ascendant. Though, the second wave of Williamsburg not-quite-hipsters arriving along with me at the time would make the same declaration six years later when the neighborhood got its first Apple Store. This, of course, isn’t totally unheard of. Baby boomers love to take credit for the hippy movement, when it was pioneered by disaffected Silent Generation beatniks.

For those of us who lived through peak “Millennial Optimism,” though, the era of the MGMT’s “Time To Pretend” and the era of Grumpy Cat were very, very different. And I think Gen Z’s somewhat confused confluence of the two is actually based on a very real cultural shift that’s happened in the last 15 years. Young people genuinely don’t seem to realize that mass media used to be on a delay. Before internet video allowed young people to immediately document the world around them, we used to have to wait for TV studios to hear about something we were doing and water it down for mass consumption, before we ever saw it reflected back at us. Gen Z, however, is treating these fuzzy reflections as real. A big chunk of the TikTokers sharing millennial hopecore edits say they’ve been binging the 2012 HBO show Girls and seem to think it actually reflected the time period. But I distinctly remember recoiling in embarrassed horror at its depiction of what was meant to be my life in Greenpoint when I sat down with friends to watch the pilot. “How dare Lena Dunham walk past Enid’s,” I yelled at the screen. “That’s where I do drugs in the bathroom and get free tater tots for checking in on Foursquare!!”

As culture was speeding up at the beginning of the 2010s, thanks to the internet, this cycle — of Hollywood studios and corporate media distilling youth culture for the masses — was already feeling strained. And it basically broke down when President Donald Trump entered office in 2017 and started ruling by tweet. Which makes me wonder exactly how the young people of the internet will reminisce about the next time period that catches their eye. If the timeline holds, in about four years young zoomers and old Gen Alpha who grew up in the first Trump years will be coming of age. The years American monoculture ended and, possibly, the end of a very specific kind of nostalgia.

Lady Train Stunts

Piers Morgan Vs. The Groypers

Big week for the fractured online right. England’s most radical centrist, Piers Morgan, had far-right groyper Nick Fuentes on his show. The “debate” was fantastic waste of time for everyone involved. Morgan tried to get Fuentes to say a single genuine thing about his political beliefs, which Fuentes is smart enough to know not to do, but did get Fuentes to admit he’s a virgin. Again, take that with a grain of salt. Fuentes is also canny enough to know that that was the right answer for his vast digital army of incels.

And that incel army of groypers is now going after Morgan. They’re attacking all of his social accounts and even targeting Morgan’s wife. Hope the views were worth it, Piers, you giant fucking wanker.

Oh btw, according to a study published earlier this week by the Network Contagion Research Institute, Fuentes’ groyper network is basically a foreign bot operation.

Tim Pool, it seems, has lost his foreign support. He admitted that he’s in debt and may have to go on an extended hiatus. But he told his viewers this week that he might have to shut down for good if they can’t figure something out. Do you know how bad you have to be at business to be hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt from producing a daily livestream? Insert dril candles tweet here, etc.

Neo-Nazis Swarmed The Latest Taylor Swift Album

Online intelligence firm GUDEA published findings this week that prove that Taylor Swift was the target of a far-right influence campaign. The point was to make The Life of a Showgirl synonymous with Neo-Nazi ideology by using sock puppet accounts to accuse her of including far-right symbols and terms in the album. A bit meta, but not dissimilar from how MAGA World embraced Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle ad this summer. A right-wing narrative Sweeney finally addressed last week.

Here’s the fascinating kicker to the Swift stuff, though. GUDEA’s team couldn’t identify exactly what user started the “Taylor Swift is a Nazi” narrative or where, but did see a ton of overlap between the accounts pushing that narrative and accounts that were used to go after Blake Lively earlier this year. Possibly pointing to this having at least some connection to shadowy entertainment corporate espionage.

The moral of the story here is that bad actors, both extremists and, apparently, publicists, have learned how to hijack user-generated content platforms to build false consensus and, basically, if you’re seeing something negative online about a famous woman, it’s likely someone paid to seed it there.

An AI-Generated Song Was A Big Spotify Hit In Brazil This Year

MC Jhey’s “Predador de Perereca,” or, uh, “Pussy Predator,” was one of the biggest hits of the year in Brazil. And it’s a really interesting AI music case study. It’s a real song that was written and performed and produced by human beings, but the version that went super viral in 2025 is not that version. Instead, people are obsessed with the “1982” version, which was generated by AI.

So here’s the original, which was released in 2016 and is a much more typical Brazilian funk song.

And here’s the AI-generated “1982 version” that MC Jhey’s label made that is going super viral right now.

There’s obviously the comedic effect of taking an extremely raunchy funk song — the chorus is “The crew has arrived, we're the pussy predators, Spank that pussy, spread those legs, You're gonna sit down hard for the boys from the favela,” — and turning it into an 80s ballad. But the AI also spit out a pretty decent-sounding song!

Curious to see if other artists start experimenting with officially sanctioned AI versions of their songs.

Let’s Talk About bbno$

Canadian rapper bbno$ put out a statement this week saying that he will “stop making music for the foreseeable future.” It is almost certainly a joke, seeing as how he has a whole tour scheduled for next year. But it is his way of trying to get in front of some very odd backlash spreading across the web right now.

The most charitable summary of why the internet is mad at him right now is that he’s corny. Which he is, but he’s also never claimed to not be. (There are also some unconfirmed allegations flying around TikTok right now that he was racist in high school.) He’s a guy named Alexander Leon Gumuchian from Canada who goes by the stage name “Baby No Money” and makes Macklemore-level party rap. But, over the last year or so, he’s also made what I would argue is a pretty big misstep, leaning a bit too heavily on Tumblr-adjacent fandom spaces. He’s showed up to comic conventions, done cosplay, made music videos with popular streamers, and been very vocally anti-AI, but, like, in a twee fan art kind of way, if you know what mean.

And as figures like John Green, Misha Collins, and Cole Sprouse could tell you, that amorphous blob of fandom kiddies are very, very supportive of you until they decide to ruin your life lol.

What If Magic The Gathering Was A Retro Point-And-Click Adventure Game?

Some Stray Links

P.S. here’s a very good menu.

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