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I've been thinking about what's next for internet culture for quite a while now, and it got me thinking. 5 years from now, Internet culture will probably be drastically different from what it is now. If you compare now to 5 years ago or 10 years ago, major differences are notable.

What I'm wondering is what will be that big catalyst that sets everything in motion. Will there be a big meme that really sticks out and gets people to rethink memes? Will it be the possible fall of social media? Will it be something else?

Discuss.

Historically speaking, memes adapt to match their format, and meme formats adapt to match whatever losers have at their disposal. Think of the rise of short, Vine-like video content (which is why r/YoutubeHaiku and TikTok always has useable content). Right now memes are mostly template-based exploitables that are easy to mix and match; this explains why r/MemeEconomy has much of its discussion centred around new templates or formats – especially those that are remixable (BongoCat and Expanding Brain are good examples).

Granted, memes don't have to fit under these categories. Bowsette was a pretty vanilla art trend that happened to kick off because of a popular Tweet. The Storm Area 51 meme was similar, albiet real-world. These kinds of things usually start off strong and slowly fade – remember planking ? They're popular and noteworthy, but rarely change the "meme landscape", as you're calling it.

So to answer your question, the biggest change to memes pretty much has to be a change in popular meme formats. Imagine if any of the following were to happen:

• Twitter/Facebook suddenly decline, or are taken down (no more repostable image memes/reply chains/social media banter)
• 4chan disppears (no more greentext/vapid internal circlejerking)
• Reddit makes a dumb decision about meme subreddits/policy (not hard to imagine)
• Some new social media platform suddenly gets popular
• Copyright law changes lmao