Very important editor’s note: This story was written before the discovery of Jimothy. Check out our latest coverage of the internet’s favorite raccoon.
Despite the decentralized nature of our internet-driven culture, there are still moments that can make millions of netizens focus on the same thing at the same time.
In 2026, that included a rocket launch that reminded us that humans can still do genuinely awe-inspiring things, as well as a baby macaque and his IKEA stuffed animal that broke a million hearts simultaneously, and high-tech anti-ICE protests that flooded many feeds.
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The internet this year has been a remarkable delivery system for memes, trends, and extremely good posts, all running in parallel with what can charitably be described as a lot going on in the world.
The thing is, even when everything feels like it’s collapsing, social media has this stubborn ability to find the joke, find the moment, find the thing that makes a billion strangers feel briefly like they’re all watching the same show together. That’s what this list is — not a comprehensive account of 2026, but a record of the moments that we feel defined internet culture in the first half of the year.
The ‘moon joy’ of Artemis II
No other event this year has captured the attention of the U.S. quite like NASA’s historic Artemis II launch in April.
On April Fool’s Day, a 32-story rocket lifted off from Kennedy Space Center and reminded everyone that we still do things that make your jaw drop. For the first time in over 50 years, humans were headed toward the moon. Additionally, Christina Koch became the first woman, and Victor Glover the first Black astronaut, to travel into deep space.
The mission’s 10-day loop around the moon — which carried humans further from Earth than ever before — gave the timeline something it rarely gets these days: a collective sense of awe and wonder. NASA even managed to make a meme out of it: Moon joy.
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Alysa Liu and the Blade Angels
Credit: Tang Xinyu/VCG via Getty Images
The Winter Olympics in Milan had no shortage of viral moments to offer. But easily the greatest came from American figure skater Alysa Liu, the 20-year-old gold medalist whose life story had layers that deeply resonated with the internet. What made this Olympic moment refreshing was how much of it felt like a repudiation of what elite figure skating usually looks like.
Liu had been the youngest U.S. national champion ever at 13. She spent years crying through practices under the weight of expectations she hadn’t chosen for herself, retired after Beijing at 16, enrolled at UCLA, hiked Everest, and only came back to skating when she decided she wanted to, on her own terms, for her own reasons.
In Milan, Liu was visibly, infectiously happy on the ice — radical stuff in a sport not known for that kind of genuineness. That in itself was catnip to the internet. Liu’s halo hair and outspoken pro-immigration and pro-Palestinian stances also endeared her to many, but ultimately her internet support had more to do with how she managed to make her gold medal performance look effortless on the biggest stage in the world.
Liu wasn’t the only member of Team USA’s figure skating roster to break through. Blade Angels teammates Amber Glenn and Isabeau Levito both found viral territory of their own. Glenn in particular has become one of the more prominent LGBTQ voices in sports; she has also into her platform more so than Liu, who has largely stepped back from social media since returning from Milan.
Glenn also made our Mash 101 list earlier this month, as one of the creators who most made a mark on culture in the past year.
AI slop and Fruit Love Island
On the opposite end of the cultural spectrum, the internet also spent a significant chunk of 2026 watching AI-generated anthropomorphic fruit cheat on each other. Because this is where we are.
Fruit Love Island is a TikTok series of AI-generated fruit characters recreating reality TV dating drama Love Island USA. The series account amassed 3 million followers in nine days. The account behind it, Ai Cinema, is likely running scripts through a custom GPT called Object Talk, which feeds directly into AI video generators.
It’s a slop pipeline, and somehow it blew up.
The formula of the videos is odd, as with the Elsagate YouTube videos. Still, at least Fruit Love Island is a coherent show, even if it is lifting plotlines and given them to unimaginative characters (a Cherry named Cherrita; an Orange named Orangelo. Whether that counts as a step up is debatable.)
As an alternative to doomscrolling, Fruit Love Island is not all that bad. But as with all AI slop, will we even remember it a year from now?
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Becoming Chinese
Among Gen Z westerners, “Becoming Chinese” or “China-maxxing” was a popular trend in the early part of 2026.
This was driven by several factors. The first was a growing disillusionment with the American experiment as Elon Musk’s DOGE tore through USAID and the Trump administration waged a one-sided tariff war with the entire world. The second was the highly publicized trip to China by streamer iShowSpeed, which offered a neutral view of what China was like to millions of his viewers who only knew China through Western media.
Then there’s the phrase “you met me at a very Chinese time in my life” — a meme that can be traced back to an X user in April 2025. It’s a parody of the final line from the movie Fight Club: “you met me at a very strange time in my life.”
Mashable Trend Report
So began a wave of ironic, and sometimes completely sincere, public adoration for America’s number one rival. To “Chinamaxx” or “become Chinese” is to engage with Chinese culture in very tangible ways. These include smoking Chinese cigarettes, drinking Tsingtao beer, walking with your hands behind your back, eating congee, or drinking hot water.
The trend’s absurdist nature resonated with many internet users, and Chinese-American influencers began to offer tongue-in-cheek advice on how best to Chinamaxx.
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The trend reached a critical point when the Chinese government responded — officially welcoming global interest in the country beyond common Western stereotypes such as “pandas” and “the Great Wall.”
But it wasn’t all positive. Many cultural analysts and influencers found elements of this trend that were arguably fetishizing Chinese culture. The meme, almost by definition, reflected a temporary interest in Chinese-ness that felt insincere and disposable.
Punch the Monkey adopted by the world
Punch the monkey is a baby macaque at Ichikawa City Zoo near Tokyo who went viral in early 2026. He was filmed clinging to a stuffed IKEA orangutan after being abandoned by his mother.
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Part of the love for Punch is that he’s cute as hell; the other is that he reflects how plenty of us feel about the current state of the world. Here was this tiny monkey, alone and scared, holding a plushie for comfort in the absence of his mother. So overwhelming was the love for Punch that Jon Stewart made a joke about him on The Daily Show, and the crowd booed this man.
Eventually, the Ichikawa City Zoo began receiving so many international phone calls that it required staff only respond in Japanese.
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Good news, folks: Punch is now regularly playing with the other young macaques in his enclosure and learning to groom by carefully watching the older monkeys around him, all while still carrying his stuffed orangutan everywhere he goes.
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Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl
Bad Bunny performs onstage during the Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show at Levi’s Stadium
Credit: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Roc Nation
The Super Bowl halftime show is always meant to be a spectacle. In 2025, speculation around the event was focused on whether Kendrick Lamar would escalate his already won beef against Drake. But in 2026, Bad Bunny’s performance was focused on whether the Puerto Rican superstar would make comments against President Trump and ICE.
Like Lamar (even though he did play “Not Like Us”), Bad Bunny used his show to spread a message of unity. The focus was on what it means to be Latin and who is truly considered an “American.” While it wasn’t the direct call-out many fans wanted, it was still a powerful message. As the message on the football he points to the camera reads, “Together we are America.”
Sinners at the Oscars
While Sinners had its cultural moment in 2025, it got its Hollywood reckoning in 2026 — and that, too, became an internet moment. Not that successful Black films need validation from an industry that has historically looked the other way, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth saving.
Sinners became the first film ever to receive 16 Oscar nominations. The wins that followed also rewrote the record books. Autumn Durald Arkapaw took home Best Cinematography, becoming the first woman and first person of color to win the award in the nearly century-long history of the Oscars. Ryan Coogler became only the second Black person to win Best Original Screenplay. And Michael B. Jordan — Coogler’s longtime collaborator and on-screen anchor — won Best Actor, joining a list of just six Black men to have ever claimed the award for a leading role.
Sinners didn’t sweep everything; Best Director and Best Picture went elsewhere. But it didn’t need to. And then for a topper, Michael B. Jordan celebrated one of the most significant acting wins in Oscar history at an In-N-Out Burger. Iconic.
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John Kiriakou’s CIA stories
John Kiriakou seemed like he was in everyone’s FYP for a couple of weeks in early 2026 — and if he wasn’t in yours, you missed something genuinely fascinating.
For those who don’t know, Kiriakou is a 61-year-old former CIA officer who became a whistleblower after exposing the agency’s use of torture during the war on terror. He was then arrested in 2012 after pleading guilty to giving a covert operative’s name to journalists. He has spent the years since his 2013 release from prison doing interviews about his time in the intelligence community with a level of casual candor that feels almost surreal, given the subject matter — appearing on everything from the Joe Rogan Experience to the Diary of a CEO.
Because he’s done so many of these long-form interviews over the years, partly in an attempt to get a pardon from President Trump, there was a deep well of Kiriakou material for creators to pull from.
The clips that went viral are made in that very specific “brainrot” editing style — sped up to 1.5x, slowed down dramatically at the most unhinged parts, with somber music underneath.
The most viral story, captioned “what is the CIA bro,” came from Kiriakou’s Diary of a CEO appearance in January. That’s where he describes being asked by the agency to pretend to be gay in order to get information from a source.
Other clips covered Kiriakou’s multiple divorces — including the time he spent the night hiding in a dumpster waiting for a contact, and had to explain to his wife that he was not out cheating.
2026 is the new 2016
Credit: Ian Moore / Mashable Composite; TouTouke / Moment / BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / AFP / Spencer Platt / Getty Images News / EyeEm Mobile GmbH / iStock / Getty
For the new year, we wrote a retrospective on 2016 being considered the last good year. Then the 2016 nostalgia trend took over TikTok and Instagram in early 2026. There were “average day in 2016” videos, POVs about being a teenager with nowhere to be, songs from that era that somehow sounded better than they actually are, and considerably cringe fashion choices (graphic tees, skinny jeans, chokers, bomber jackets, ripped denim, nerd glasses, and that very specific eyeshadow).
The 2016 trend, arguably, is Gen Z collectively mourning the last period of their lives when being online still felt like a choice rather than a condition. And if that doesn’t make you shudder, consider how bad 2036 is going to have to get to spur a 2026 nostalgia movement.
Everyone is -maxxing
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If there was an award for suffix of the year, “-maxxing” would win handily. Looksmaxxing, solomaxxing, chinamaxxing, lifemaxxing — it’s now applied to basically any intentional behavior a person could engage in, which tells you something about our obsession with self-optimization.
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The “-maxx” suffix itself traces back to min-maxing, a tabletop RPG concept where you dump all your character points into a single stat and let everything else atrophy. For looksmaxxing, the goal is to optimize physical appearance with the same obsessive, systems-minded energy you’d bring to building a D&D character.
Looksmaxxing traces back to incel forums of the 2010s where men developed elaborate pseudoscientific frameworks for rating and improving their faces, including things like mewing (pressing your tongue to the roof of your mouth to supposedly reshape your jaw over time), double jaw surgery sought out purely for cosmetic reasons, and in the case of Kick streamer Clavicular — probably the most prominent looksmaxxer of 2026 — admitting to using crystal meth as an appetite suppressant and hitting his face with a hammer to try to chisel his bone structure.
Somehow, a term with such brutal meaning sat alongside the more palatable “-maxxing” trends on the same platforms. Gen Z is embracing solo-maxxing, friction-maxxing, and hope-maxxing. And we’re still waiting for the trend to max out.
‘Obsession’ and ‘Backrooms’ bring Gen Z horror
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Horror films are having a banner year in 2026, and the two biggest genre films come from filmmakers young enough that their careers began on YouTube.
The first is Obsession, written and directed by Curry Barker, a 26-year-old who got his start making sketch comedy online and somehow parlayed that into one of the most talked-about horror films in years.
Made for $750,000, Obsession premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, got picked up by Focus Features for roughly $15 million, and was widely distributed in May. The premise is deceptively simple — a music store employee uses a supernatural toy to wish his childhood friend into falling in love with him. But the execution landed hard enough that Obsession grossed $286 million worldwide, making it the highest-grossing horror film of 2026 so far and the 30th highest-grossing horror film of all time.
Part of what made Obsession connect so deeply with audiences was how its central anxiety felt to a generation that has grown up being aggressively quantified — by algorithms, by dating apps, and by hustle culture that frames human value entirely in terms of productivity and output. A story about someone who uses a supernatural shortcut to transform another person into an object of desire, stripping them of their own interiority in the process, lands differently when your life is mediated by platforms that are doing that to you constantly.
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While the movie is a simple monkey’s paw story, it’s also about the way desire curdles into possession and the way people get flattened into the roles others need them to play. That’s the kind of thing for which Gen Z has extremely specific and well-developed language.
The second movie is Backrooms, Kane Parsons’ adaptation of his own YouTube web series. Which is itself based on the 4chan creepypasta about an extra-dimensional maze of empty fluorescent-lit office space that you can only enter by accidentally clipping through the walls of reality. The liminal aesthetic had already been gaining traction through friendslop horror games on Steam and Roblox for years, so the audience was built in before a single trailer dropped.
Then A24’s decision to hand a $10 million production to a 20-year-old became its own marketing story. Backrooms didn’t get the critical embrace that Obsession did, but it didn’t need to. It’s now A24’s highest-grossing film ever, surpassing Everything Everywhere All at Once with $262 million in worldwide gross.
