For reasons that should be fairly easy to understand, elections that are too close to call can be traumatizing for millennials. So allow me to slap a trigger warning on this before I say that the Sweet 16 of the Millennial Canon Bracket was a dead heat.
And that was just one matchup: Quoting Anchorman versus T9 texting and the sound of the iPod wheel versus LimeWire also came down to the freakin’ wire. And all told, the largest margin of victory on Wednesday was in the Away Message Region, where 1-seed AOL Instant Messenger took down 5-seed emo with 75 percent of the vote.
Ultimately, the three closest matchups were decided in a variety of ways. Despite the Obama “Hope” poster and the 2008 financial crisis being separated by only 192 votes in our online poll, Obama curiously found much more success in our Instagram poll, taking in 62 percent of that vote for an overall victory of 55 percent to 45 percent. The Anchorman-T9 matchup was also a case of difference between our site and IG polls, and it provided a lesson in which one is more important to win. Both Anchorman and T9 pulled in 55 percent of the vote in one of the polls, but with more people voting on the website, Anchorman’s 55 percent was more valuable than T9’s. Altogether, the former advanced by a margin of 545 votes.
Results From Previous Rounds
There was also a tight discrepancy between the polls in the matchup of the iPod wheel and LimeWire (a classic face-off if there ever was one): LimeWire took in 52 percent on the site, while the iPod wheel took in 51 percent on Instagram. Once again, the site poll proved more valuable—the 7-seed LimeWire is off to the Elite Eight.
What we’re left with now is four seemingly dominant 1-seeds and four disruptors: Aside from the 1-seeds, the remaining competitors are, coincidentally, either 6-seeds or 7-seeds. What does that mean for the next round? Well, we’re about to find out …
Since we’re covering both the Elite Eight and Final Four today, the timing will be a little different. Voting on the Elite Eight is open now, and you can vote here or on Instagram until 1 p.m. ET. The Final Four will launch at 2 p.m. ET, and voting will be open until 6 p.m. ET.
I can’t wait any longer. Let’s see which millennial things will go all the way. —Andrew Gruttadaro
The Cringe Region
(1) Skinny jeans vs. (7) The Office
Skinny jeans
We didn’t have “outfit formulas,” but we did have skinny jeans, a side part, and a going-out top. The millennial dedication to showing just a bit of ankle rivals only that of the Victorian era, and whether it’s to show off the socks with strips of bacon on them that prove you’re so much funkier than your consulting job or the perfect inch of flesh above a heeled bootie, skin-tight denim was the way to do it before Big Jeans came along. —Nora Princiotti
The Office
“Wow,” I thought circa 2007, “we’re living through an era when people feel trapped in dead-end jobs, towns, and relationships; when we’re losing faith in the American dream but still clinging fiercely to our own individual dreams; when we’re realizing that all we have is one another, a situation that’s both incredibly annoying and profoundly beautiful.
“But surely,” I said to myself, “surely no single image will ever perfectly capture this new millennial zeitgeist!” Then Kevin dropped the chili. —Brian Phillips
The Away Message Region
(1) AOL Instant Messenger vs. (6) Quoting Anchorman
AOL Instant Messenger
When I die and arrive at the pearly gates, I know what sound I’ll hear: that squeaky opening door that announced one of your “buddies” logging onto AIM. There was no greater feeling of hope, anticipation, or opportunity to wow your crush—xXsoccer_guy_sk8rXx—with the new abbreviation you’d learned after seeing them at school but before logging onto AIM on the family desktop to start chatting. “Wuz up,” I’d write, and wait with bated breath for a sign that they also wanted to chat with me. Of course, if things go south for me in the afterlife—I also know what sound I’ll hear. —Jodi Walker
Quoting Anchorman
One might say the Anchorman hype escalated quickly. This aughts comedy had so many iconic lines that it became part of our vernacular. Overnight, it seemed like everybody could recite its script from memory. Do people still recognize Anchorman quotes in the wild today? Sixty percent of the time, it works every time. —Miles Surrey
More Artifacts From the Millennial Canon
The TRL Region
(1) “Mr. Brightside” by the Killers vs. (7) LimeWire
“Mr. Brightside” by the Killers
Gaudy and powdered and lush, a force of nature. A fake, kitschy sort of nature, built inside a casino, where the trees are huge and dramatic and beautiful, made of plastic and covered in sequins of various neons. A Hitchcock studio lot sort of nature, a forest floor made of gold metallic fringe, picnicking on the back of an afterfiring Eldorado. —Tyler Parker
LimeWire
Now. It is, of course, illegal, and reprehensible, and—did I mention—illegal to pirate music and other vaunted art forms using the World Wide Web. But there was a time—particularly if you were, say, 12 and short on babysitting gigs, much less credit cards—when it was strangely tricky to procure the entertainment your preteen lizard brain demanded. Enter a parade of shady peer-to-peer platforms, of which Kazaa and LimeWire were the most hallowed among the generation whose cultural awakening came at their hands. Also, though: Sometimes you got the film or show or song you wanted, and sometimes you got a virus, or something completely different and mislabeled, or something so preposterously wrong that it’s hard to imagine that its creation and P2P placement were not malicious. I can neither confirm nor deny that I unknowingly watched a copy of There Will Be Blood in which all the scenes were out of order. —Claire McNear
The Cronut Region
(1) The Obama “Hope” poster vs. (6) Mean Girls
The Obama “Hope” poster
The face that launched a thousand (million?) wannabe graphic designers. You see this poster and think it’s the last time you ever felt optimistic about anything. It was a time of innocence, a time of Facebook without your parents on it, early mixtape-era Drake, and Tom Brady being thwarted by the Giants. Ahhh, those were the days. —Aric Jenkins
Mean Girls
“That’s so fetch,” “You go, Glen Coco,” “On Wednesdays we wear pink.” Need I say more? Mean Girls is so, so quotable that you might even think its plethora of memorable lines are played out, but they’re played out for a reason! Tina Fey’s pen at the peak of its powers is what turned the Plastics and Co. into Clueless for the T9 generation. —Julianna Ress
