A Picardía-themed mural seen under an overpass; location unknown.

n today's internet memescape, we seem to be living in the golden age of ironic humor, where absurd Facebook pages, circlejerk subreddits and meta jokes dominate the highly volatile meme economy.

When given a moment's thought, it actually makes a lot of sense. As memes have become more and more mainstream, we’ve had to find new ways of demonstrating our meme literacy to separate ourselves from the awful "normies." To show the true depth of your understanding of internet memes, you must be able to shitpost them into infinity with ironic and meta humor that only real memers would be able to comprehend. And memes tend to dramatically drop in value as a cultural currency when they are accessible to too many people. Memes are no exception to inflationary market pressures.

Some of the prototypical ironic memes were founded on an appreciation for the so bad it's good genre of social media entertainment, including classics like Duane!, The Room, Garbage Day, the Power Glove and Troll 2, just to name a few. This niche was popularized by events like the Found Footage Festival and sites like Everything is Terrible, who relentlessly foraged through VHS tape collections to find the most bizarre videos to meet the growing demand for this sort of content.

To better understand how memes became what they are today, we took at look back at some of the key moments in internet history to build a rough timeline of how ironic memes spread far and wide across the web.

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2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

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Did we miss anything noteworthy? Just drop us a line in the comments to be considered for inclusion in the timeline!