Memes are getting a reboot. Not like a Marvel-is-trying-to-make-Fantastic Four-happen-again reboot. More like a rewind. The Great Meme Reset of 2026, as it’s being called on TikTok, demands that on January 1 all memes revert to their 2010s glory days. Bland “brain rot” and AI-looking memes are out; Big Chungus is in.
As with anything on the internet, the origin of the Great Meme Reset is hard to place. Most sources point to a March post from TikTok user @joebro909 that called for a whole new generation of memes to save the platform from the “drought” that had engulfed it in the spring. The post said nothing of a January 1 launch date, or a return to the memes of the last decade, but the idea was planted. Now hundreds of posts are discussing the reboot—and a return to the internet’s “dank” era.
Which implies, of course, that memes lack dankness these days. If anything, Gen Z– and Gen Alpha–fueled internet culture has prided itself on somewhat meaningless content like “6 7” and absurdist, seemingly AI-generated “Italian brain rots,” but after nearly a year of memes with little humanity or depth, a backlash has begun.
Why not revert to the Internet of the 1990s, before it was commercialized and before Internet became synonymous with Web Services?
Of course, the truth is, even back then, there were a lot of dark memes on Usenet.
I think in part because 90s Internet was before the majority of millennials were really heavily online. I’m an '88 millennial, and my childhood Internet was still early 2000s, mostly.
Stuff like IRCRizon and Limewire and Geocities and even Gaia Online over DSL, rather than BBSes over probably AOL dialup (I had that as a kid, but only as a very young kid, i.e. literal preteen.
Nyan cat and motivational poster memes are my golden age, not Usenet.
Ahhh, yeah. Usenet. nostalgic sigh
YA RLY
Even if you’re in the camp that understands memes like “6 7” have more significance than they’re given credit for,
I think 6-7 is a shibboleth. It doesn’t say much on its own, except which group you belong to.
Substance, as ever, remains a relative notion. Nyan Cat perhaps didn’t have the substance of an Andy Warhol image
I’d argue the Nyan cat is more substantial than what Andy Warhol came up with.
If you want a great reset you’ll need a new internet that is outright hostile to corporate interests. No corposlop being produced there, no derailing old memes to sell you junk.
TikTok
I think you’re always going to have problems with a lack of authenticity on platforms where opaque algorithms do all the work of deciding what gets popular and what gets shown to who.
Meh, not gonna happen and we all know that
As if older memes were all meaningful. There’s nothing wrong with 6 7 itself. What’s 9 + 10?
910 is a pro CS2 player from Mongolian team The MongolZ /s
