Memes are getting a reboot. Not like a Marvel-is-trying-to-make-Improbable 4-happen-again reboot. Extra like a rewind. The Nice Meme Reset of 2026, because it’s being known as on TikTok, calls for that on January 1 all memes revert to their 2010s glory days. Bland “mind rot” and AI-looking memes are out; Large Chungus is in.
As with something on the web, the origin of the Nice Meme Reset is difficult to put. Most sources level to a March put up from TikTok consumer @joebro909 that known as for an entire new era of memes to save lots of the platform from the “drought” that had engulfed it within the spring. The put up stated nothing of a January 1 launch date, or a return to the memes of the final decade, however the concept was planted. Now lots of of posts are discussing the reboot—and a return to the web’s “dank” period.
Which suggests, after all, that memes lack dankness nowadays. If something, Gen Z– and Gen Alpha–fueled web tradition has prided itself on considerably meaningless content material like “6 7” and absurdist, seemingly AI-generated “Italian mind rots,” however after almost a 12 months of memes with little humanity or depth, a backlash has begun.
“Due to simply how unrecognizable memes have grow to be,” TikTok creator Noah Glenn Carter (@noahglenncarter) stated in a latest video, “everybody has come to an settlement that on January 1, 2026, we’re going to utterly reset all memes and return to the originals.”
Once I attain Carter through e-mail, the creator appears fairly satisfied the reset concept may take off, and he plans to make extra movies selling it. “The memes now we have now are known as ‘mind rot’ for a motive,” Carter says. “Those 10+ [years older], more often than not, had a narrative behind them. Or they at the least made sense. Now it simply looks as if the extra random and incoherent one thing is the extra doubtless it’s to grow to be a meme.”
Even if you happen to’re within the camp that understands memes like “6 7” have extra significance than they’re given credit score for, there’s nonetheless a way amongst the Nice Reset crowd that right this moment’s memes are “oversaturated and unfunny,” says Know Your Meme editor-in-chief Don Caldwell. “On this context, mind rot memes are low-effort and nonsensical,” Caldwell provides, “and there is a need to return to the memes of the previous that had a bit extra substance.”
Substance, as ever, stays a relative notion. Nyan Cat maybe didn’t have the substance of an Andy Warhol picture, however each sought to touch upon cultural moments—and each received folks speaking in a means 2025’s deluge of AI slop may by no means. Taken at face worth, a name for a large meme reset can also be a name for natural web tradition, irrespective of how seemingly foolish.