The Meta

What is the Meta? Please, what isn't the Meta?

The Meta is all around us. It's the information surrounding us. Penetrating us. Binding us together. It's information overload, man!

Seriously though, the Meta is a complex concept:

• It describes the data brought to you by Augmented Reality: digital information on demand relevant to everything you see, hear, and experience in meatspace.
• It describes the infinite back-channels and sidetracks of communication. Nothing is straight-up anymore. Everything is the center node of an infinitely complex regressive tree of information exchange.
• I guess if I had to talk down to a luddite from the Stupid Ages, I'd say: imagine that every time you look at anything--a chair, your mom, some talking head on TV--you instantly know everything there is to know on the public Internet (lol, Internet) about that subject, you instantly have access to every forum thread, every blog post, every tweet, every little snippet of information relevant to it. Of course, you can follow those threads wherever it is they go.
  • But it's deeper than that. The Meta is its own thing. It's the organic spread of ideas, a constantly-iterating super-meme that does what it wants, and leads us all to a place we can't imagine. It's the world's first artificial intelligence, Man's greatest creation, borne of accident, made of the simplest, stupidest stuff we could think up.
  • What am I saying, you have no idea what I'm talking about, gramps. Have fun poking your brick; hope your meathooks don't get too tired pounding out caveman talk on your celly-phone. Oh my, I just got a text! Operator, can you connect me to Klondike-359, and tell them "O.M.W."? Lulz.

Beyond even that, the Meta is a meta-channel of information about the setting itself.

• Each article has comments from various personalities, to add context, insight, or just good old plain fun.
• This represents, to we primitive screwheads, the essence of the Meta, so we can feebly approximate its ubiquitous, transformative nature.