The Glittering, Future-Nostalgia of Y2K Accounts
Sometimes in middle school, I’d hang out in the bedroom of a girl I’ve known since we were babies, while our parents sat out on the patio. We didn’t have much in common, but our parents were longtime friends. We had wildly different personalities, but we were two outliers—her in a rebellious way, me much more quietly. She had two ferrets named Fiona Apple and Kurt Cobain, they lived in a cage castle in her closet. Those ferrets, in that shabby-chic-meets-Avril-Lavigne room, made the nineties feel like a concept a middle-school girl had invented.
That feeling of bedroom reinvention would come back to me throughout the years in the form of Tumblrs that looked like Chanel Starbucks Cigarette fairy tales. Now, its current incarnations are the Y2K Instagram accounts with ferocious, soft glitter-weed-smoke energy. The queens of these pages—and of making reality look so much brighter and grainier and pinker—are, as you might expect, 19-year-olds from Arizona suburbs and towns in Chile. If the new millennium—and its inflatable bubble designs and shiny, synthetic materials—was the future, these accounts 20 years later are the natural end result of that optimism.
At first, these pages look like regurgitations of other Clueless-heavy nostalgia accounts out there. They have “soft girl” and “Y2K” and “pink” aesthetics—all subsects of social media culture that ultimately have the same vibe. Anthropologists of a time not too long ago, right before a life lived online. When the internet was still a wild-west place, and people were wondering what might happen, and colors (metallics) and textures (lenticular) and music (Eiffel 65) reflected that.
These Instagram mood boards are Y2K+20, the ultimate in current and possibly future thoughts. The anatomy of a post starts with a handle like @y2k.slut or @chanelwhoreee. There’s a photo with a glittering Vaseline filter over it, and either a diary-esque caption or a conversation-starting question. An image of Bratz “Girls Nite Out!” packaged fashion cards on @y2k.slut’s page is accompanied by this caption: “the way i can so easily cut off friends but not a toxic ex….plzz literally trash😭”.
The first two comments under the image expressed both moods and both decades. “damn I feel attacked” one person commented, and the next said, “this photo unlocked memories i didn’t realize i had.” “Attacked” and “memories” feel like the operative, timely words here.
“‘Remember when’ is the lowest form of conversation,” Tony Soprano said, but really I overheard this at a rich-feeling loft apartment. Writing about nostalgia feels like an exercise in being lame, but I’m too fascinated by what it means not to go in. So, I wonder what these accounts mean? What are they trying to tell us about what we’re lacking right now? It’s not that deep, maybe. There’s an argument for that, especially when I see a photo of a rabbit in a miniature pink bedroom with the caption “Do you like bunnies?”
But even that deceptively simple question deserves more questions. Why is someone asking this? In this case, it would appear to drive engagement, then visits to their Y2K-themed shop. How does everyone on social media have a business and the means to produce? (I think this has probably been discussed a lot, but I still haven’t learned the answer.)
These hyper-pink accounts initially felt like the sort of Paris Hilton shrines that have been part of our digital nostalgic iconography for a few years now. But I began to see something more surreal, intimate, and futuristic than empty nostalgia. They cherry-pick some of the wide-eyed, pink bubble-bag aesthetics from twenty years ago and make them feel a little nihilistic but oddly hopeful. We are the products of Y2K fear and optimism, and boy is it not what we thought—but also how could we have known.
These accounts are some of the only things that make sense to me right now. We all became Bratz dolls living in a “Fuck the police” world. It’s a pink, dark place—some of the photos so heavily edited and reposted that it’s hard to imagine their subjects ever physically existed. These accounts also do something young women do naturally well: make reality look better. I’m inspired by how they create comfort and escapism for themselves. These accounts see the world as a pink-filtered paradise of no one’s making but their own—and the other anonymous Hello Kitty Playboy sushi lovers out there. Stark suburban homes and strip malls and white-carpet bedrooms as seen through the eyes of someone thinking ahead.
A favorite page of mine, 24kprincesa, posted a glamorous photo of Malibu rum bottles on a liquor-store shelf and talked about how much she enjoyed drinking with her boyfriend. Her other recent posts include a reminder to “please eat” and lots of Hello Kitty-themed weed photos.
“Do you bite your nails?” reads the caption of a pink-and-purple digital sunset on another page. 2020, baby! Y2K was an imagined tech halcyon—and not long after, pop culture possibly died. Obviously, it didn’t, but a certain kind of wildness did. Now we’re biting our nails looking at each other’s sparkly-filtered bedrooms and backyards. It does look really pretty though! Like a Starbucks patio on a teenaged evening, it makes me feel like something exciting could happen, and that feeling was sometimes enough.
