ICYMI - The Great Meme Reset of 2026
Slate Culture Feed
Slate Podcasts
4.2 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 7 January 2026
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On today’s episode, host Kate Lindsay is joined by meme historian Aidan Walker to discuss “the great meme reset.” Internet users, exhausted by social media brain rot, declared January 1, 2026 as an official “reset.” They want a clean slate, and most importantly, to return to the meme style of the 2010s—back when memes had “substance.” But can we really go back? Or is it time to imagine what a post-brain rot world can look like?
This podcast is produced by Daisy Rosario, Vic Whitley-Berry, and Kate Lindsay with help from Kevin Bendis.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Why do growing businesses love working in Slack? |
| 0:02.8 | Let's ask Christia Ari Bikes. |
| 0:04.6 | Running things in Slack saves me so much time. |
| 0:07.3 | AI summaries save 97 minutes per week. |
| 0:10.4 | What say you? |
| 0:11.4 | Rocks from Gosney. |
| 0:12.4 | Slack helps us build community. |
| 0:13.9 | It helps us build connection. |
| 0:15.2 | Your partners, vendors and customers all in one place. |
| 0:18.3 | Take us on home, Ashley from Carraway. |
| 0:20.3 | If we did have Slack tomorrow, I would explode. |
| 0:23.4 | Well, let's not let that happen. |
| 0:25.1 | Visit Slack.com slash podcast to get 50% of Slack Business Plus. Hey, I'm Kate Lindsay, and you're listening to I-C-Y-M-I, or in case you missed it, |
| 0:48.9 | Slate's podcast about internet culture. |
| 0:51.5 | And today on the show, we are joined once again by Aiden Walker, an internet |
| 0:55.9 | culture researcher and meme historian. Welcome back to the show, Aiden. Super happy to be on the show |
| 1:02.5 | and to start 2026 off on a good foot with you. Yeah, I know. This is a good, the good vibes |
| 1:07.6 | episode for us to start because, you know, we record, this is the first episode we're |
| 1:11.1 | recording in 2026. How was your new year? How was your holiday? I got the flu in that like |
| 1:17.7 | middle period between Christmas and New Year, so I'm still recovering, but. I guess that's the |
| 1:22.4 | best time to get it. If you had to pick a time, that's the time when nothing's going on. Yeah, the |
| 1:27.3 | womenal period of the year. |
... |
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