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In short, meta became shorthand for knowingness. It went beyond beyond. And it used to be fun. Meta could be used to mean something you knew wasn’t true but you believed in anyway. Or it could mean you weren’t quite sure if something was or wasn’t true — an ambiguity that was as playful as it was, well, metaphysical. Meta also raised profound artistic and philosophical questions about truth, reality and identity. But those meatier and rompier ventures into metahood (via Borges, Philip K. Dick, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith and others) have been superseded by the endless depth and breadth of the Internet (meta on steroids) and the triumphal pervasiveness of social media.

We got to the point where we were so in on the joke that we already knew the punch line. Or rather, we knew, or thought we knew, every (possible) punch line. And it’s this knowingness, a knowingness not based in or on knowledge or experience but simply in the recognition of the artifice at hand, that has arguably numbed us to ourselves, to each other, to love, to freedom, to activism and agitation and protest, to the very act of creating something unironic or nonmeta. Paradoxically, the metadata that our government and our communications giants have been gathering is something this very cynicism of ours helped create.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazine/when-meta-met-data.html?pagewanted=1&ref=todayspaper