Mysterious videos featuring montages of aughts-era frat culture begin flooding a writer’s feed. As she searches for what—and who—is behind them, she finds herself pulled into their nostalgia-soaked world of Nantucket and Natty Light.
I started seeing the videos in November of last year. They started to pop up on my Instagram explore page: montages of images from early 2010s WASP-y (white-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant-y) manhood would flash before my eyes, tinged with a 2016-era filter, set to a slightly dated chart-topper. There were photos of New England beach vacations, clips of lacrosse goals, fraternity houses, and excessive amounts of beer. I found them amusing, and Instagram knew it. Each time I opened the app, I was met with a visual stream of Natty Light and Nantucket.
I began to read the captions and realized that these accounts didn’t function like the normal, mass-meme-sharing accounts that are often responsible for videos with tens or hundreds of thousands of views, nor were they individual content creators with blue checks or massive followings. The accounts functioned as characters, and they were telling stories.
Chip “Bagnet” Wentworth IV posted a video with rotating images of pastel button-ups, pool parties, and American flags, set to a Calvin Harris remix. “07/04/2010,” he wrote in the caption, “Had all the boys pop out to my crib on Nantucket for the fourth [American flag emoji]. Beach was nuts when my boy Chet #booted all over the St. Paul’s chicks jeep. Ran up dad’s Amex at Chicken Box and Cisco and he is #PISSED but it had to be done. Ripped so much sack that I got an insane nose-bleed and got blood all over the seats in the defender [snow emoji]. #America #4thofjuly #nantucket #ack #lax #sendy #ferda.” Chip’s account is one of the most successful of its kind—when I began following him last December, his videos only had 18,000 views. Now, his most popular video has over 800,000 views.
I found more Chip-like accounts, all with similarly styled names: Preston “P-dawg” Goldschmidt, Kyle “Ketamine” Bryler, and Peter “Pass the Bag” Bradley. Each of their bios contained a formula: boarding school, college, fraternity, drug reference, and where they “summered.” The videos invoked real places, but the ludicrous names and content told me the men were, well, made-up.
Though the names and bios attached to the accounts are personalized, the content itself feels anonymous. Each photo shows a new, but familiar, gaggle of bros. A few accounts had used AI imagery, with cartoonish portraiture of fratty men with eerie faces and noses dusted with white powder, but the vast majority of the images look completely real, as if I were viewing Instagram in the year 2016. The motifs are clear: heavy drinking, private equity or finance, summer destinations (Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, the Hamptons), women, WASP-y prep schools (Taft, Exeter, Deerfield), colleges (University of Pennsylvania, Connecticut College), drug use (primarily cocaine), and “TOUSE,” the top fraternity house on campus. Each account is its own ode to the supposed heyday of WASP and fraternity culture.
I could see that my mutual followers were liking the Reels. Was it a kind of amused hate-watch? Spoiled white boys being a convenient target for humor? Or did they catch glimpses of their own lives in them, recalling past summers on Martha’s Vineyard or boarding school lacrosse games?
Preppy life has also been aestheticized and satirized many times over, perhaps most famously in the 1980s, with The Official Preppy Handbook by Lisa Birnbach, which sold more than a million copies. Unlike the eighties handbook, though, these posts lacked authors. I could not find an account that dated back any earlier than November 2025. Their names listed above are doubtlessly fake. Many of them claim to have played collegiate lacrosse, but a quick cross-check of 2010s rosters shows none of their names (or, at least, the names in their Instagram handles).
Also dubious to me was how these accounts diverge from a signature trait of WASP culture: logo-less, stealth wealth that often minimizes flashy displays in favor of confident, silent status. The accounts are something else entirely, brash in their wealth and openly indulgent in illegal behavior.
The more attention I paid to the Reels, the less sense they made: many of the captions use language that is notably Gen Z, despite the supposed graduation years dating the individuals as older. For example, they frequently use the term “Ferda,” a popular word among young men that shortens the slang term “for the boys.” “Ferda culture is doing everything that has to do with frat culture,” said Nate, the former social chair of one of Yale’s most popular fraternities and a committed Instagram Reels user. He believes he first heard the word around a year ago.
But these are not current frat boys, immersed in a 2026 world of partying and wealth. The graduation years in the bios put them at about ten to 15 years out of college. All of the content is infused with a kind of longing not only for youth, but for the specific aesthetics of the 2010s. And this nostalgia is popping up all over social media: when 2026 began, Instagram users posted photos from ten years ago en masse, simply captioned “#2016.”
The nostalgia in the videos starts generic. There are #throwbacks, #missthe-boys, and #goodoldays. But the lengthy captions contextualize the longing, which starts by recalling the glory days of “rip-ping bag” and being “touse.” Some devolve into rants about adult life: “No emails. No suits. No meetings.” The captions from accounts that have bios that read “recently single” sometimes reference their “#whorewife” and having to pay alimony.
When I showed the videos to my friends, the Reels joined their algorithms too. They became hyperfixated, sending me the ones that popped up for them via Instagram DM. “I swear you’ve just discovered a crazy scheme, there are so many accounts,” one wrote to me. I was grasping for ways to pin down the origins of the content, and I expressed my frustration to another one of these friends, who asked me something so simple that I was surprised I hadn’t thought of it: “Have you tried Google reverse image search?”
When I loaded screenshots of the videos into Google, it spit the photos right back out at me with links to their appearances under “college throwback” tags on Pinterest, and in articles like “Why You Should Date a Frat Guy.” One image of a Loomis Chaffee lacrosse player came back with a real name: Jason Sands, who graduated from the boarding school in 2013. His real Instagram shows him smiling innocently on a beach with someone who seems to be his girlfriend, likely blissfully unaware that videos featuring his high school lacrosse photos are floating around with tens of thousands of views.
After hours of scrolling, I could not manage to figure out who was behind the accounts. So I decided to make one myself.
I crafted a persona based on what I had seen. Bradley “Bagger” Wentworth IV’s bio reads “GREENWICH/PM/ PENN LAX ’’12/ Taft Alum / Hamptons [wave emoji] / The boys [snow emoji].” I followed fifty of my now peer Instagram accounts. Within ten minutes, they started following me back. I direct messaged five of them, one of whom was pretending to be a Yale alum. Maximus “Nose Bleed” Jackson’s bio stated that he had attended Aphi formal three times and gave a convincing little “Fuck Harvard.”
I sent Nose Bleed a message that would resonate with any Yale bro: “Yo fuck Harvard shit’s bouse.” Bouse is a term for touse’s counterpart, bottom house.
“Harvard is so bouse #fuckthecrimson,” glowed on my screen five minutes later. I had to strategize. How could I squeeze more personal detail out of him without scaring him away? “Bro,” I typed, “what resco were you in my brother was ’10.”
He took longer to reply, but hit me back with a “Branford thru and thru.” The responses were human. I told him that my brother was in Branford too, and then asked him what fraternity he had been a part of. “OX,” he wrote.
OX, or Theta Chi, has never existed at Yale University. I asked him where the house was, and he left me on read.
Only one other account replied to my DM, someone named Chadwick Livingston. I prompted him to talk about lacrosse, and he told me that he used to play for men’s leagues but that “they don’t mess with the baggo now I just got a net in my back yard for my kiddo but I use it whenever I wanna rip a gt and get wired and rip shots.”
When I asked if he had played for the University of Connecticut, the college in his bio, he told me that his DUI made him give it up. I asked him why he had started posting. “Big snowstorm had me reminiscing about college and I was unsure if he was talking about a literal snowstorm or doing profuse amounts of coke. Either way, I felt sort of bad for him. His nostalgia seemed genuine. He generously invited me down to Nantucket so we could “rip cheddar and bag” together. The more accounts I followed, the darker the content got. Once my Instagram took note of my preference, it fed me accounts with similar imagery, but different languages. It started with an #RIPCharlieKirk or a #MAGA here and there, but then it became more explicit.
Hatcher Hanesberry was feeling nostalgic for back in the day when there were “no #queers to worry about or #minorities invading the sacred land. Simpler times.” Other accounts proudly stated their status as concealed carriers and touted themselves as “Hard Right MAGA Motherf*ckers.” In a comments section, Chadwick Winthrop told Brady McGee to “ask for forgiveness not consent.”
I found myself nostalgic for the silly, summer-filtered pictures of tan blonde boys wearing Vineyard Vines that I had seen just days before. What happened to just having a beer with boys on Nantucket? How had my feed devolved into something so terrifying, so fast?
I took a break. I began a new semester, and tried to enjoy the fraternity culture taking place on High Street and not on my cell phone. The accounts grew. More and more of my friends seemed to know about them, and when they came across my feed again, the like and view counts had spiked dramatically.
My curiosity shifted from identifying who was behind the accounts to wondering why they appealed so heavily to the people around me. For some, especially on elite university campuses where prep school alums are overrepresented, the draw is personal. I spoke to Ben, a Yale student who graduated from a boarding school that is frequently mentioned by the accounts. “Some of the scenes they put in are places I have been and have memories of,” he said, “I watch every single one to see if I’m in it.” But he recognized that his perspective was particular to him—the engagement with the videos could not possibly be driven solely by recent prep school alums.
Nate and his friends had recently discussed a shift in the frat rush process. In addition to higher rush attendance, “kids are coming in already speaking a certain way,” he told me. They just seem to know “what to do.” Were the Instagram accounts becoming the guiding figures, leaving the older brother demonstrations of maturity in the past?
Ben thought otherwise. Yale’s fraternity culture and the world of these Instagram reels “are separate things,” he said.
Like others, he pointed to the popularity of the music and the nostalgia factor of the videos. “There’s a term for that, for a fake nostalgia for something you’ve never experienced, where guys my age can look at this and be like, ‘it would be sick to be Martha’s Vineyard 2008 with my frat bros.’”
He couldn’t think of it then, but he’s correct—John Koenig coined the term “anemoia” in his 2012 project The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, which attempts to create new words for emotions that currently lack clear language.
I’m still unsettled by the rapid growth of the accounts. I still want to know who is behind them. When I see the compilations of pastel board shorts and lacrosse goals, I picture scary men posting from dark basements. Whoever they are, they’ve made an addictive, transporting product—I can’t pull away. When I look up in the library at my friends, who are procrastinating by scrolling on Instagram, I wonder whether these accounts are slithering into a permanent spot in their carefully crafted algorithms. There’s no way to find out, or even really measure, whether the mass effort poured into their growth can be sustained. It’s not clear how long the intoxicating, portal-like effect will last. Maybe I’ll ask Chadwick, while we rip a few this summer.
Tali Kantor Lieber is a sophomore in Pierson College.
Illustration by Maia Wilson.