Anti-memes are not memes, but something stranger. Every art form has its avant-garde, the most sophisticated and rebellious fringe seeking to explore new aesthetic frontiers. For memes, you could make the case that anti-memes are that community. They are more than just literal ones or dry humor. Instead, they are memes where the joke is how they fail to be memes. These are memes about memes, a galaxy brain form of entertainment.

Or is it even entertainment? Are these memes actually doing something deeper? Could they be holding a mirror up to the internet itself, reflecting the dancing pixels and swirling forms of meme culture back onto the pages and platforms it flourishes on, questioning the very tools we have to represent ourselves and our ideas to one another?

Maybe.

On Reddit's /r/antimeme, connoisseurs of the anti-meme share their best examples. Here is some of their work from the past few weeks.