All things just keep getting meta

If you’re a snarky online kid, a label that seems to apply to most kids these days, you may have read something that proves that there is money to be made on anything that catches fire on the Web: Cheezburger Network has bought knowyourmeme.com for a seven-figure sum.

With this latest acquisition, the young US company — it also has icanhazcheezburger.com, known colloquially as LOLCats; Failblog.org; Failbook; and Engrish.com in its portfolio — now owns the largest source for knowledge about memes on the Internet. (For those still living in the 00s, Know Your Meme is a site devoted to explaining Internet memes, or photos and gifs paired with oftentimes funny, referential captions; most of the entries, which number in the thousands, include Wikipedia-like descriptions and even details on exact origins.)

Aside from showing the rising profitability of the meme business, this move demonstrates that we are indeed living in the age of the meta, or more accurately, the mega-meta. As WebProNews puts it, “The meme now owns the database for which it is included as a meme.” Try wrapping your head around that.

From Meta To Mega-Meta

The Greek word meta is a prefix used to indicate a concept which is an abstraction from another concept, used to complete or add to the latter. For example, metadata are data about data: who produced it, when, in what format, and so on.

Totes a meme: The full logo reads “Jacobs by Marc Jacobs for Marc by Marc Jacobs in collaboration with Marc Jacobs for Marc by Marc Jacobs.” The designer’s minions must be LOLing now.

In pop culture, there are emerging subgenres in TV and film that illustrate this point nicely. NBC’s well-loved 30 Rock can be considered meta television because it’s a show about a woman making TV shows, created by Tina Fey, a woman who really makes TV shows.

 Then, of course, there are movies about movies. As SlashFilm’s Adam Quigley points out in his article “The Rise of Self-Awareness in Cinema,” releases like The Expendables, Piranha 3D and Vampires Suck are all self-reflective satires. 

“Meta films have started to operate free from their more overt context, beyond simply being ‘spoofs’,” he writes. “The need to pay tribute to what’s come before has, over time, embedded itself in the subtexts of our media, to the point that deliberate unoriginality has now become the latest progression of filmic storytelling. And more than that, it’s celebrated.”

Deliberate Unoriginality

Quigley even states that Scott Pilgrim vs. The World somewhat ridiculed “a culture that’s become heavily defined by its filmic influences, among other things,” while Inception “managed to be a meta film without most people even knowing.” So it’s not as simple as art imitating life anymore. It’s not even about us merely making fun of ourselves. These days, we love to make fun of the way we make fun of ourselves.    

Mindception: A redesigned box of Barilla-brand thin spaghetti informing consumers of an upcoming box redesign

This mockingly self-referential attitude has even found its way to the retail world. For its Meta Thing of the Day, The Daily What recently featured a redesigned box of Barilla-brand thin spaghetti that informed consumers of an upcoming box redesign. And a few seasons ago, Marc Jacobs came out with a tote bag emblazoned with “Jacobs by Marc Jacobs for Marc by Marc Jacobs,” a diffusion line of a diffusion. 

In an interview with MIT’s Technology Review in 2008, Ben Huh, founder and CEO of LOLCats, said he “envisions Internet language becoming entirely referential and ‘all meta’; it would look like a secret language to those on the outside.”

Like an eerie foreshadowing, what sounded far-fetched then is a reality today. Self-aware self-awareness has become a necessity. 

But what will happen to us when all viable options for originality have been expended, when we’ve repeated and reflected on everything that has come before? I don’t know how the pop culture landscape will look exactly, but I’m sure I can count on Know Your Meme to document it — and to document the documentation. 

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