Welcome back to 2015!

Athleisure. Wearable tech that makes you look like a massive creep. Extremism in the Middle East — certainly not our fault, of course! Caitlyn Jenner's in the news, for some reason. White sneakers with everything! Celebrity after celebrity is caught with heinous sexual assault allegations. Google's wasting money on a pet project (again!)

2015 called...before showing up and moving the fuck in.

An orange man used to wreak havok on the American airwaves — now he's terrorizing global airspace! In other news, Nicki Minaj is a Trump supporter, Kanye West wants to apologize for larping as a Nazi, and Taco Bell is more health-conscious than the CDC.

I wouldn't call this a conspiracy theory. I'm just an autistic girl, tending to my garden of weird patterns we probably shouldn't ignore.

And let me tell you...everyone ignored a little book called Project 2025 when it came out. I'd really super love it if we didn't let that happen again. Get me?

Incel culture has evolved into an "epidemic"

The "involuntary celibates" of the early- to mid-2010s seem to have found their forever homes in the fatherly arms of manosphere bros, who happily purchase yachts and mansions with their tears. These men largely point fingers at women as the cause of their loneliness, while the men building labyrinthian systems of extraction all around them fan the flames.

The concept of an "epidemic of loneliness and isolation" among men was first coined by U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy in 2023. But this epidemic was but a glimmer in the doctor's eye when Melanie Hamlett published Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden in Harper's Bazaar in May 2019.

It argues that toxic masculinity and the idea that emotional openness is a "female thing" have left many men without close friendships, leaving women to fill that emotional-support role instead.

Nothing has changed. If anything, women are moving through the world with even greater fear, due in part to...

Meta Glasses doing everything we hated Google Glass for back in the day

I lived in San Francisco when the original Google Glass came out. It was chaos. Tech bros were getting drinks (and sometimes fists) thrown at their faces after declining to remove their Dragon Ball Z scouters. Back then, you see, we were critical thinkers who were concerned about our privacy.

Today, that's a thing of the past. Now that Meta has teamed up with Ray-Ban to make them look less dorky, glasses that record your every move are cool now, but only among a very specific demographic...

Surprise! It's the manosphere again!

The only people buying the new Meta Glasses — the only people who've decided that the right to privacy should be negotiable in certain instances — are guys attempting to make their living on the same PUA content we were dealing with in the mid-2010s.

Men are having such a delightful time recording (often drunk) women without their consent and posting them online for validation that it's managing to tank Meta's reputation even further — and that's saying something, considering Meta was already Boomerland by 2015. With their customer base almost exclusively made up of predators, Zuck and friends have opted to work with fashionista Kylie Jenner to hopefully extract revenue from the women the product's been preying on. Bold move, Cotton.

But wait — what are those specific instances I spoke of? Well, women's right to privacy, of course!

With a female presidential candidate running against a literal rapist, 2015 was a hotbed of contention. Today, we've let governments sign contracts with private companies that have allowed illegal surveillance to flourish. One cop ran his partner's license plate over 100 times — and he is one of dozens.

Some good samaritans are going door-to-door on Flock cameras, knocking them down in the dead of night to prevent random citizens from being surveilled all over the city. So that's nice, I guess.

Trans people got the "Pet to Threat" treatment

A decade ago, Glamour Magazine named Caitlyn Jenner Woman of the Year for her advocacy and raising public awareness for the transgender community. In a country rapidly collapsing into fascism during Trump's endless second term, she's now calling herself a "hypocrite" for advocating for trans people's right to play and win sports.

And her right-wing base still hates her.

Honorable mention: Ironically, Nicki Minaj was at the height of her Pinkprint era in 2015. She's now...well...

In conclusion, we've Frankensteined the hell out of 2015, grafting it firmly onto the face of what should have been a fresh and fun 2026. Nobody brought back balayage, but we did roll full steam ahead into fascism and rampant misogyny. The parallels are so uncanny, I just had to share.

Anyway, please enjoy this valid and relevant crashout.