“The Great Meme Reset” is coming

Memes happen Reboot. Not like Marvel is trying to make itFantastic Four-Reboot occurred again. More like rewind. The 2026 Great Meme Reset, as it’s being called on TikTok, requires all January 1st memes to return to their glory days in 2010. Cute “brain rot” and memes that look like AI are excluded; Big Chungus exists.

As with anything on the Internet, it’s difficult to pinpoint the origin of the Great Meme Reset. 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 gripped it in the spring. The post said nothing about a January 1st release date, or a throwback to memes of the past decade, but the idea was planted. Now hundreds of posts discuss the reboot, a return to the “wet” internet era.

Which of course means that memes lack moisture these days. If anything, the internet culture fueled by Generation Z and Generation Alpha prides itself on fairly meaningless content like “6 7” and absurdity, seemingly produced by “Italian brain rot” AI, but after nearly a year of memes with little humanity or depth, a backlash has begun.

“Because of how difficult it is to recognize memes, everyone has come to an agreement that on January 1, 2026, we will completely reset all memes and go back to the originals,” TikTok creator Noah Glenn Carter (@noahglenncarter) said in a recent video.

When I contact Carter via email, the creator seems pretty convinced that the Reset idea can work, and plans to make more videos to promote it. “The memes we have now are called ‘brain rot’ for a reason,” Carter says. “Who are 10+ [years older]Most of the time, they had a story behind them. Or at least it had meaning. Now it seems that the more random and incoherent something is, the more likely it is to become a meme.

Even if you’re in the camp that understands that memes like “6 7” have more significance than they’re given credit for, there’s still a feeling among the Great Reset audience that memes today are “oversaturated and unfunny,” says Don Caldwell, editor-in-chief of Know Your Meme. “In this context, brain-rotting memes are low effort and meaningless, and there is a desire to return to memes from the past that had more substance,” Caldwell adds.

Essence remains, as it always has been, a relative idea. Nyan Cat may not have had the essence of an Andy Warhol image, but both sought to comment on cultural moments — and both got people talking in a way that the AI ​​deluge of 2025 never could. If we take it seriously, the call for a widespread retcon of memes is also a call for organic internet culture, no matter how ridiculous it may seem.