I'll post the short essay that accompanied the original version of this meme unmeme-edited because it is actually pretty good.

We first posted this image in July of 2015. The idea behind the mutually-assured-destruction dynamic between the two nerds in this image was that they are, themselves, part of a meme (i.e. the ‘memes are dead’ paranoia meme). The more they discuss it, the faster it will die.

The Ironic Meme Movement was a reaction against the mainstream co-option of the subcultural products of the underground; an attempt to create incorruptible inside jokes. The Ironics employed defensive strategies which paralleled that of the punks against the commercialization of their own subculture. Like the punks, they failed. For Ironic memes, as for mohawks and radio-unfriendly lyrics, it was only a matter of widespread familiarization (i.e. normalization) before the mainstream could safely absorb (i.e. normify) them. In response, the radicals of the movement took the logic of ironic memes to its extreme, pre-emptively subverting ironic memes before co-option could occur in order to outpace the process of normification.

This often automatized process intentionally destroyed meaning and cannibalized meme-formats with deliberate disregard for narrative. The race for ever-increasing obscurity resulted in complex creations such as animated meme-fractals, but every lineage of meta-ironic memes proved to be an evolutionary dead end as incomprehensibility prevented further reincorporation into subsequent generations. Soon it became clear that the self-defeating, scorched-earth strategy of meta-irony had failed, and the project was abandoned by the community. All that remain are technical gimmicks developed during this period of skepticism and experimentation.

The Post-ironic Meme Movement continued to grow in the same niche, now richly fertilized by these projects’ spectacular failure to create the simulacra-barren meme. Previous anti-cooption strategies operated under the assumption that the function of memes was to faithfully carry incorruptibly-encoded messages into other spaces, but post-ironic memes conceded this impossibility and instead became the locus around which makeshift spaces of sincere subcultural exchange could occur. Whether the memetic objects could be misused, co-opted or commercialized became a non-issue: the real value of the community was recognized as something that could not be stolen merely by copying.

At the time we created this meme, there had been isolated attempts at post-irony, but the meta-ironic avant-garde was just beginning to make radical progress both in theory and practice, and hence dominated the artistic conversation. We weren’t sure whether post-ironic memes would prevail—unsure, but hopeful enough to express it in a manifesto.

In the end our predictions proved self-fulfilling with the development of Gondola, a meme which prioritizes sincerity and beauty as a part of its ethos. The mere armless bear form of a Gondola is not the meme. Its true meaning hovers in the space between the image and the comment—the community’s interaction with it—and cannot be extricated or sold piecemeal. Gondola and its philosophy of wu wei made post-irony practicable and proved immune to deliberate attempts at normification that would have been death sentences to any other meme.

https://thephilosophersmeme.com/2017/03/10/post-irony-against-meta-irony/

Drama has resisted normification but has been oppressed by an outside force and cut off from material to negate. It's mockery targets reddit's norms rather than upholding them in the style of SRD. So the admins have taken action and instead of a merciful banning they have decided to watch us flail around like a vicious child that has ripped the legs off of some bug. Barring The Almighty heading over to San Francisco for some well deserved smiting, we're stuck with this. I suggest moving in the direction of post-drama in the style of the Lawlzpost. Rather pointing at some tardation and laughing, we must engage and mix are own subject tardation with the object tardation to create a new third tardation. This is the closest thing we'll ever get to pinging back.