Have memes become so powerful that they started making memes about themselves?

At some point, internet culture became so advanced that memes stopped being about everyday life and started being about memes themselves. Like a digital snake eating its own tail, meme culture evolved into a self-referential universe where understanding one joke often requires knowledge of five older jokes and at least three extinct meme formats. 

These meta memes celebrate the strange ecosystem that keeps the internet running, from reaction images and niche references to absurd trends that somehow unite millions of people. If you have ever laughed at a meme about meme templates, congratulations: you are officially several layers deep in the online rabbit hole.