The Last Normal Year

Summary

The video argues that 2026 is not literally destined to be “the last normal year”—there has never been a truly normal year. However, 2016 may have marked a major turning point, as society began entering a new media environment shaped by algorithmic feeds.

Several changes converged in 2016:

• Digital advertising overtook television advertising in the United States.
• Mobile internet use surpassed desktop use worldwide.
• Twitter and Instagram adopted algorithmic feeds.
• YouTube began using deep neural networks to make recommendations.
• More older Americans joined Facebook.

During the 2016 U.S. election, highly engaging false stories on Facebook overtook major news stories in views and interactions near the end of the campaign.

The speaker’s central point is that recommendation systems reward content that holds attention—not necessarily content users like or content that is accurate. Fear and moral outrage can spread especially well, potentially worsening decisions and weakening trust in institutions and one another. The pandemic was not caused by algorithms, the speaker notes, but the pandemic and the changing media landscape together made trust harder to sustain.

In the speaker’s view, the result is both a world that may be worse and a world that feels worse because people are repeatedly shown alarming content. Feeds do not merely reflect users’ interests; they also shape users and, in turn, the world they help create. The claim that 2026 will be the “last normal year” may itself be an effective attention-grabbing frame.

People Mentioned

• Presenter: Hank Green
• Contributor: John Green, who does not appear in the video