Timor-Leste, Southeast Asia’s smallest economy, is now ASEAN’s newest member.
On Oct 26, the regional body voted in the island nation as its eleventh member at the ASEAN Summit in Kuala Lumpur. Timor-Leste first applied for membership in 2011, just under a decade after it won formal independence from Indonesia, its much larger neighbor. Timor-Leste, also known as East Timor, is ASEAN’s first new member since 1999, when the bloc welcomed Cambodia into the group.
“Timor-Leste has struggled with securing investments, due to the country’s instability and associated risks,” says Norashiqin Toh, a post-doctoral fellow at Tsinghua University’s Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences.
“Becoming a member of ASEAN will likely send a credible signal to international investors of the country’s political stability, and also attract further investments from businesses in other ASEAN member states.”
ASEAN, or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, is a regional grouping which seeks to promote economic and security cooperation among its members. Founded in 1967, ASEAN began with five member nations: Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. It has since expanded to include other regional countries, namely Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Brunei and Myanmar.
A turbulent past
Timor-Leste is Asia’s youngest nation, gaining independence on May 20, 2002. The eastern half of the island of Timor was colonized by the Portuguese in the 16th century. The territory remained under Portuguese rule, apart from a brief Japanese occupation during the Second World War, until 1975, when a left-wing Portuguese government pledged to withdraw from all its colonies.
Indonesia invaded Timor-Leste just a week after Portugal withdrew, leading to almost a quarter-century of occupation marked by severe human rights abuses.
In 1999, Timor-Leste’s population voted overwhelmingly for independence in a United Nations-sponsored referendum. The vote was organised at the request of then-Indonesian president B. J. Habibie, allowing its people to choose between independence or greater autonomy within Indonesia. A few years later, in 2002, Timor-Leste became the first new sovereign state of the 21st century.
In the 23 years since its independence, Timor-Leste has made significant progress in nation building, expanding critical infrastructure like roads, airports, and internet access. The country has also eradicated once-rampant tropical diseases like malaria.
Yet much of Timor-Leste’s development can be credited to its reliance on oil and gas revenue, which at times made up over 90% of the country’s GDP. As of 2024, the country’s GDP stood at approximately $2 billion,making it ASEAN’s smallest economy. (The next smallest economy, Laos, has a GDP of around $16.5 billion).
Timor-Leste’s oil and gas wells are already running dry, with oil production at the Bayu-Undan field in the Timor Sea—the country’s only producing field—ceasing production in June 2025.
The Singapore strategy
There are also geopolitical benefits to ASEAN membership. Timor-Leste now has access to ASEAN-led security and economic mechanisms, and the country can now leverage the coalition to engage with external partners such as China, the U.S., and Australia.
“This is similar to Singapore’s strategy of a small country utilizing the bloc to increase its influence,” says Pasha L. Hsieh, a law professor from the Singapore Management University.
Being a member of ASEAN also gives Timor-Leste a seat at the table with world leaders it might not be able to access on its own, Toh, from Tsinghua, adds. “Many formal and informal bilateral meetings occur on the sidelines of summits such as the ASEAN summit, so Timor-Leste can use the opportunity to develop its political ties,” she says.
Economically, the country will also benefit from near-zero tariffs in the ASEAN market, which can help diversify its industry.
Additionally, Timor-Leste will likely become part of the Initiative for ASEAN Integration (IAI), says Joanne Lin, a senior fellow and coordinator from the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, a research center based in Singapore.
The initiative provides targeted capacity-building support for newer and less developed ASEAN members—namely Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia—to strengthen institutions, infrastructure and human capital.
“This will help Dili better align with ASEAN’s economic and technical standards,” Lin says.
And importantly, Timor-Leste’s ASEAN membership is an affirmation of its sovereignty, putting it in equal standing with its former occupier, Indonesia, within the regional bloc.
Timor-Leste’s ASEAN admission “reflects the strength of its democracy, built through regular elections, peaceful political transitions and a vibrant civil society that continues to hold institutions accountable,” Lin says.
Gen Z’s “2016 vibes” fixation is less about pastel Instagram filters and more about an economic and cultural shift: they are coming of age in a world where cheap Ubers, underpriced delivery, and a looser-feeling internet simply no longer exist. What looks like a lighthearted nostalgia trend is something more structural: a reaction to coming of age against the backdrop of a fully mature internet economy.
On TikTok and Instagram, “2016 vibes” has become a full-blown aesthetic, with POV clips, soundtracks of mid‑2010s hits, and filters that soften the present into a memory. Searches for “2016” on TikTok jumped more than 450% in the first week of January, and more than 1.6 million videos celebrating the year’s look and feel have been uploaded, according to creator‑economy newsletter After School by Casey Lewis. Lewis noted that only a few months ago, “millennial cringe” was rebranded as “millennial optimism,” with Gen Zers longing to experience a more carefree era. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, although it debuted in 2015, arguably has a 2016 vibe, for instance. Some millennial optimism is downright bewildering to Gen Z, such as what it calls the “stomp, clap, hey” genre of neo-folk pop music, recalling millennials’ own rediscovery (and new naming) of “yacht rock.”
Meanwhile, Google Trends reports that the search hit an all-time high in mid-January, with the top five trending “why is everyone…” searches all being related to 2016. The top two were “… posting 2016 pics” and “... talking about 2016.”
Creators caption posts “2026 is the new 2016” and stitch side‑by‑side footage of house parties, festivals, and mall hangs, inviting viewers to imagine a version of young adulthood that feels more spontaneous and frictionless. At the risk of being too self-referential, the difference can be tracked in Fortune covers, from the stampeding of the unicorns, the billion-dollar startup that defined the supposedly carefree days of 2016, to the bust a decade later and the dawn of the “unicorpse” era.
And while the comparison may feel ridiculous to anyone who actually lived through 2016 as an adult and can remember the stresses and anxieties of that particular time, there is something going on here, with economics at its core. In short, millennials were able to enjoy the peak of a particular Silicon Valley moment in 2016, but 10 years later, Gen Z is late to the party, finding the price of admission is just too high for them to get in the door.
Everyone used to love Silicon Valley
For millennials, 2016 marked a time when technology expanded opportunity rather than eliminating it. Venture capital was cheap, platforms were underpriced, and software functioned to your personal advantage, with aforementioned unicorns flush with cash and willing to offer millennials a crazy deal. The early iterations of the gig-economy ecosystem—Uber, Airbnb, TaskRabbit—were at their peak affordability, lowering the cost of living and making urban life feel frictionless. And at work, new digital tools helped young employees do more, faster, standing out from the pack.
For older millennials, 2016 evokes a very specific consumer reality: Ubers that were often cheaper than cabs and takeout that arrived in minutes for a few dollars in fees. Both were the product of what The New York Times‘ Kevin Roose labeled the “millennial lifestyle subsidy” in 2021, looking back on the era “from roughly 2012 through early 2020, when many of the daily activities of big-city 20- and 30-somethings were being quietly underwritten by Silicon Valley venture capitalists.” Because Uber and Seamless were not really turning a profit all those years while they gained market share, as on a grander scale Amazon and Netflix were underpriced for years before cornering the market on ecommerce and streaming, these subsidies “allowed us to live Balenciaga lifestyles on Banana Republic budgets,” as Roose put it.
Gen Z never really knew what it felt like to take a practically free late-night ride across town, or feast on $50 worth of Chinese takeout while paying half that. And they certainly never knew what it felt like to see unlimited movies in theaters each month, for the flat rate allowed by one MoviePass app. For the generation seeking the 2016 vibe, $40 surge‑priced trips and double‑digit delivery fees are standard, not a shocking new inconvenience, and the frictionless urban lifestyle of the millennial heyday, before they entered their 40s, had (a declining number of) kids, and fought their way into the suburban housing market amid the pandemic housing boom, reads more like historical fiction than a realistic blueprint.
Tech and digital culture was also just fun. Gen-Z remembers the heyday of Pokemon Go, the only app that somehow forced the youth outside and interacting with each other. Viral trends felt collective rather than segmented by algorithmic feeds. Back then, Vine jokes, Harambe memes, and Snapchat filters could sweep through timelines in a way that made the internet feel weirdly communal, even as politics darkened the horizon.
That helps explain why TheNew York Times‘ Madison Malone Kircher recently framed the new 2016 nostalgia as part of a broader reexamination of millennial optimism on social media. Celebrities like Kylie Jenner, Selena Gomez, and Karlie Kloss have joined in, uploading 2016 throwbacks that signal a desire to rewind to an era when influencer culture felt less high‑stakes and more experimental.
The moment tech stopped being fun
Then, something shifted. The attitude towards tech companies as nerdy but general do-gooders who “move fast and break things” for the sake of the world faded into a “techlash.” The Cambridge Analytica scandal rocked what was then called Meta and fueled panic around data privacy. Former tech insiders like Tristan Harris started popularizing the idea that the algorithms were addictive.
Thus, when Silicon Valley entered another boom cycle after the release of ChatGPT in 2022—producing a new generation of young, ambitious entrepreneurs and icons like Sam Altman and Elon Musk with a new breed of unicorns to go along with them—the moment was met with skepticism from Gen Z. Where millennials once found a quite literal free lunch, Gen Z increasingly sees threat.
The entry-level work that once functioned as a professional apprenticeship—research, synthesis, junior coding, coordination—is now being handled by autonomous systems. Companies are no longer hiring large cohorts of juniors to train up, often citing AI as the reason. Economists describe this as a “jobless expansion,” with data showing that the share of early-career employees at major tech firms has nearly halved since 2023. The result is a generation of so-called “digital natives” left to wonder whether the very skills they were told would future-proof them have instead been commoditized out of their reach.
Instead of innovation making technology feel communal and fun, as it did in 2016, generative AI has flooded platforms with low-quality content—what users now call “slop”—while raising alarms about addictive chatbots dispensing confident but dangerous advice to children. The promise of technology hasn’t vanished, but its emotional valence has flipped from something people used to get ahead to something they increasingly feel subjected to.
Gen Z’s view from the present
Commentators stress that this is largely a millennial‑led nostalgia wave—but Gen Z is the audience making it go massively viral. Many were children or young teens in 2016, old enough to remember the music and memes but too young to fully participate in the nightlife and freedom the year now symbolizes. For those now juggling college debt, precarious work, and a cost‑of‑living crisis, the grainy clips of suburban parking lots, festival wristbands, and crowded Ubers feel like evidence of a slightly easier universe that just slipped out of reach.
In that sense, “2016 vibes” is a way for Gen Z to process a basic unfairness: they inherited the platforms without the perks. Casey Lewis argues that, even if Gen Z may be driving this trend’s surge to prominence, even a new kind of monocultural moment, it’s by definition a “uniquely millennial trend,” part of an ongoing reexamination of what is emerging with time as a culture created by the millennial generation. Lewis argues that 2016 has an “economic” hold on the cultural imagination, representing “a version of modern life with many of today’s technological advancements but greater financial accessibility.”
Chris DeVille, managing editor of the (surviving millennial-era) music blog Stereogum, tracked a similar trajectory in his introspective cultural history of indie rock, released in August 2025. He documented, at times with lacerating self-criticism, how the underground musical genre grew out of Gen X’s alternative music scene of the 1990s and turned into something that openly embraced synthesizers, arena sing-alongs and countless sellouts to nationally broadcast car commercials.
And that may be what the “2016 vibes” trend represents more than anything: an acknowledgement that the internet is fully professionalized and corporatized now, and the search for something organic, indie, and authentic will have to take place somewhere else.
Imagine it is 1996. You log on to your desktop computer (which took several minutes to start up), listening to the rhythmic screech and hiss of the modem connecting you to the World Wide Web. You navigate to a clunky message board—like AOL or Prodigy—to discuss your favorite hobbies, from Beanie Babies to the newest mixtapes.
At the time, a little-known law called Section 230 of the Communications Safety Act had just been passed. The law—then just a 26-word document—created the modern internet. It was intended to protect “good samaritans” who moderate websites from regulation, placing the responsibility for content on individual users rather than the host company.
Today, the law remains largely the same despite evolutionary leaps in internet technology and pushback from critics, now among them Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.
In a conversation at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday, titled “Where Can New Growth Come From?” Benioff railed against Section 230, saying the law prevents tech giants from being held accountable for the dangers AI and social media pose.
“Things like Section 230 in the United States need to be reshaped because these tech companies will not be held responsible for the damage that they are basically doing to our families,” Benioff said in the panel conversation which also included Axa CEO Thomas Buberl, Alphabet President Ruth Porat, Emirati government official Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak, and Bloomberg journalist Francine Lacqua.
As a growing number of children in the U.S. log onto AI and social media platforms, Benioff said the legislation threatens the safety of kids and families. The billionaire asked, “What’s more important to us, growth or our kids? What’s more important to us, growth or our families? Or, what’s more important, growth or the fundamental values of our society?”
Section 230 as a shield for tech firms
Tech companies have invoked Section 230 as a legal defense when dealing with issues of user harm, including in the 2019 case Force v. Facebook, where the court ruled the platform wasn’t liable for algorithms that connected members of Hamas after the terrorist organization used the platform to encourage murder in Israel. The law could shield tech companies from liability for harm AI platforms pose, including the production of deepfakes and AI-Generated sexual abuse material.
Benioff has been a vocal critic of Section 230 since 2019 and has repeatedly called for the legislation to be abolished.
In recent years, Section 230 has come under increasing public scrutiny as both Democrats and Republicans have grown skeptical of the legislation. In 2019 the Department of Justice under President Donald Trump pursued a broad review of Section 230. In May 2020, President Trump signed an Executive Order limiting tech platforms’ immunity after Twitter added fact-checks to his tweets. And in 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court heard Gonzalez v. Google, though, decided it on other grounds, leaving Section 230 intact.
In an interview with Fortune in December 2025, Dartmouth business school professor Scott Anthony voiced concern over the “guardrails” that were—and weren’t—happening with AI. When cars were first invented, he pointed out, it took time for speed limits and driver’s licenses to follow. Now with AI, “we’ve got the technology, we’re figuring out the norms, but the idea of, ‘Hey, let’s just keep our hands off,’ I think it’s just really bad.”
The decision to exempt platforms from liability, Anthony added, “I just think that it’s not been good for the world. And I think we are, unfortunately, making the mistake again with AI.”
For Benioff, the fight to repeal Section 230 is more than a push to regulate tech companies, but a reallocation of priorities toward safety and away from unfettered growth. “In the era of this incredible growth, we’re drunk on the growth,” Benioff said. “Let’s make sure that we use this moment also to remember that we’re also about values as well.”
Some economists and experts say that critical thinking and creativity will be more important than ever in the age of artificial intelligence (AI), when a robot can do much of the heavy lifting on coding or research. Take Benjamin Shiller, the Brandeis economics professor who recently told Fortune that a “weirdness premium” will be valued in the labor market of the future. Alex Karp, the Palantir founder and CEO, isn’t one of these voices.
“It will destroy humanities jobs,” Karp said when asked how AI will affect jobs in conversation with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. “You went to an elite school and you studied philosophy — I’ll use myself as an example — hopefully you have some other skill, that one is going to be hard to market.”
Karp attended Haverford College, a small, elite liberal arts college outside his hometown of Philadelphia. He earned a J.D. from Stanford Law School and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Goethe University in Germany. He spoke about his own experience getting his first job.
Karp told Fink that he remembered thinking about his own career, “I’m not sure who’s going to give me my first job.”
The answer echoed past comments Karp has made about certain types of elite college graduates who lack specialized skills.
“If you are the kind of person that would’ve gone to Yale, classically high IQ, and you have generalized knowledge but it’s not specific, you’re effed,” Karp said in an interview with Axios in November.
Not every CEO agrees with Karp’s assessment that humanities degrees are doomed. BlackRock COO Robert Goldstein toldFortune in 2024 that the company was recruiting graduates who studied “things that have nothing to do with finance or technology.”
McKinsey CEO Bob Sternfels recently said in an interview with Harvard Business Review that the company is “looking more at liberal arts majors, whom we had deprioritized, as potential sources of creativity,” to break out of AI’s linear problem-solving.
Karp has long been an advocate for vocational training over traditional college degrees. Last year, Palantir launched a Meritocracy Fellowship, offering high school students a paid internship with a chance to interview for a full-time position at the end of four months.
The company criticized American universities for “indoctrinating” students and having “opaque” admissions that “displaced meritocracy and excellence,” in their announcement of the fellowship.
“If you did not go to school, or you went to a school that’s not that great, or you went to Harvard or Princeton or Yale, once you come to Palantir, you’re a Palantirian—no one cares about the other stuff,” Karp said during a Q2 earnings call last year.
“I think we need different ways of testing aptitude,” Karp told Fink. He pointed to the former police officer who attended a junior college, who now manages the US Army’s MAVEN system, a Palantir-made AI tool that processes drone imagery and video.
“In the past, the way we tested for aptitude would not have fully exposed how irreplaceable that person’s talents are,” he said.
Karp also gave the example of technicians building batteries at a battery company, saying those workers are “very valuable if not irreplaceable because we can make them into something different than what they were very rapidly.”
He said what he does all day at Palantir is “figuring out what is someone’s outlier aptitude. Then, I’m putting them on that thing and trying to get them to stay on that thing and not on the five other things they think they’re great at.”
Karp’s comments come as more employers report a gap between the skills applicants are offering and what employers are looking for in a tough labor market. The unemployment rate for young workers ages 16 to 24 hit 10.4% in December and is growing among college graduates. Karp isn’t too worried.
“There will be more than enough jobs for the citizens of your nation, especially those with vocational training,” he said.
Politics8 years ago