the great meme reset of 2026
things right now 55—week of 11.17.25
Cultural Climate or the March 2025 Meme Drought
Post-Brain Rot or The Great Meme Reset of 2026
AI Simps or Grok on Elon
Authentic Social or Vine’s relaunch as diVine
Slop Tax or a Digital New Deal
In March 2025, TikTok user goof angel declared a great meme depression:
It’s been what nine days into March and we haven’t had a single original meme…
Debatable. But the phrase found traction, eventually swapping the economic metaphor for a climactic one: the March 2025 Meme Drought. The semantics are important here. The economy responds to policy choices. Climate is beyond our control.
Which metaphor is the correct one? Can a meme stimulus save the For You Page? Or are we helpless, as unable to end the meme drought as we are the one in California?
Last night, a friend messaged me: "I am starting to finally feel like the internet is uncomfortable and bad." To which I replied, "I’ve been there a while!" My techno-pessimism is nothing new, but he finally agreed: "The memes are not funny anymore."
My suspicion is that we are in a moment of cultural deja vu. Hollywood is addicted to reboots and reality is too. The big pictures this year are President Trump 2 and The Return of the Woke. Franchise fatigue has been building for years. And it applies to the pseudoreality we watch on small screens as much as the movies we watch on big ones.
The problem isn’t the cultural economy or the cultural climate, it’s cultural products. They simply aren’t very good. This is cause for both optimism and pessimism.
On the optimist front, the coordination to make a better product is orders of magnitude less complicated than the coordination necessary to fix a broken economy, let alone a climate crisis. But that still doesn’t mean it’s easy…
The Great Meme Reset of 2026, a loosely defined plan to hack TikTok’s algorithm via coordinated posting to return us the golden age of memes, which according Forbes was sometime circa 2016, a pivot point. Trump and woke became the dominant cultural meta-narratives and the social platforms Twitter and Instagram introduced the algorithmic feed.
the internet as secret
the internet as subculture
the internet as culture
the internet as slop
The internet began as a secret communications system for the U.S. government, a means to maintain continuity of government in the case of nuclear war. With the launch of the world wide web, it morphed into a techno-optimist subculture that staffed and founded the first generation of start-ups. Mass consumer adoption supercharged the internet’s influence and soon user generated content could credibly compete with the entertainment industry for the mantle of popular culture.
But the nineties ethos of democratization and the bottom-up design of web2.0 products are historical artifacts in 2025. 2016 was the turning point. Algorithmically-optimized creator content replaced friends and follows in the feed. Now AI-generated slop is crowding out the creators, along with your friends.
Facebook, X, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram aren’t "social media platforms" anymore. They’re channels. They have more in common with television than the internet culture of the 2010s. As I said in my Internet Cool report:
Rather than ABC, NBC, and CBS, we now have Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook; a young and progressive channel, a high-quality legacy brand, and a conservative, traditional option. In fourth place, we have the edgy and rebellious challenger, X, this metaphor’s corollary to FOX. Assuming MTV’s old role in setting the agenda for pop culture, we have TikTok.
But there’s one crucial difference, these cultural products are owned and managed by a small number of prominent billionaires, and their programming has been outsourced to algorithms. In a race between authentic human content and AI slop to optimize for these algorithms, I’m betting AI will come out on top.
Frustration with this new status quo is the backdrop of the Great Meme Reset. The freewheeling bottom-up collective endeavor of 2010s internet culture has been replaced by top-down slop. TikTok is a cultural product like Star Wars is a cultural product.
This is my pessimistic take. You’re as likely to change the TikTok algorithm by posting as you are to change the plot line of the next Star Wars movie by mailing a letter to Kathleen Kennedy.
We can feel the participatory nature of the internet slipping away.
Only Elon can force Grok to make declarations like this:
Only Elon controls the algorithm of X.
The Great Meme Reset will be a test of hyperstition.
Can a declaration of intentions instantiate an outcome?
The fake it until you make it dyanmics of a personally branded internet may have made us more optimistic than we should be about our agency online, our ability to enact change. Social media does have playbooks. You can Cluely your way to attention and use that attention to transact in the real world.
An individual or a business can leverage the pre-existing dynamics of a platform for personal gain. All is not totally lost.
But, the Great Meme Reset is a collective attack on this pre-existing order. Can the memes be reset if Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t want them to be? Will this operation reveal that the deck is truly stacked, that you can only operate with, not against the algorithm?
In aggregate, this general state of affairs feels like the primary cause of social media platform usage peaking, as reported by the Financial Times last month. Panera recently admitted that reducing portion sizes and using lower quality materials undercut their bottom line. Cultural products are not so different from food.
If it tastes like shit, people will spit it out.
This is the opening Jack Dorsey sees and is the primary motivation behind preemptively banning AI-generated content from soon-to-be relaunched Vine—yet another casualty of 2016. Technically, this 'new' platform will be called diVine.
A more adversarial proposal is that we tax slop itself. Art critic Mike Pepi laid out his vision for such a slop tax yesterday.
TikTokkers, activist billionaires, and tech leftist all share a common concern. But ultimately, true power lies in consumers hands.
The slop stops when we close our eyes.
