this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2025
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Technology

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The ‘Great Meme Reset’ Is Coming: From Jack Dorsey to Gen Alpha, everyone seemingly wants to go back to the internet of a decade ago. But is it possible to reverse AI slop and brain rot? (www.wired.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago by alyaza@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org
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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.

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[–] irotsoma@piefed.blahaj.zone 9 points 2 weeks ago

Yep. Government/taxpayer funded access to the internet including funding fiber to the home just like we did with phone lines many decades ago, and putting back laws to enforce net neutrality. That way it's cheap to run a server again. Right now most residential access has poor upload speeds so you have to pay for expensive, business priced plans to run a local server to compete with big corporations.