<em>Meta</em> Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Does
You might be a hipster if you’re mistaking abstraction for transcendence.
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Perhaps no morpheme has been more crucial to understanding the current cultural moment than . I first remember hearing it in high school, an echo across the East River from Brooklyn during the Obama-era hipster boom. On a basic level, meant recursive or self-referential—like a or a . But in the 2010s, it also came to signify coolness. To be meta was to” and ). The word became ever more ingrained in the national consciousness until, in what felt like a culmination of its journey, the primary social-media company responsible for stirring up said shitstorm announced that it .
