There was a lovely trick that Gary Trudeau often used in his early Doonesbury cartoons. He would have the characters (Mike Doonesbury, BD, the Yale Admissions officer, et al) talk about themselves in third person, like a sports commentator talking about a ball player during a game, or the narrator in a movie.

Tom Wolfe remarked about something similar in The Elastic Kool-Aid Acid Test, about how everyone is living their own movie with an audience of one.

Which we are, of course. As we’re forever saying, everything significant about human existence becomes a story eventually.

A lot of thanks for all this “Metaspeak about Metaspeak” goes to the late French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, who in the 70s and 80s predicted information would one day get so complex, that the map would become more detailed than the actual outside world it was trying to capture. 

The map becomes the terrain, the terrain becomes that map.

However, the trouble with this begins when you start bringing all this third-party “Meta” directly into real life. 

After he had broken up with Madonna, Warren Beatty allegedly quipped about her, “The lady can’t go to the dentist without bringing a camera crew along.”

Fast forward to today, with the advent of the smartphone, it’s not just famous celebrities like Madonna that are doing it. Recently, a young woman live streamed herself being fired via Zoom by her employer. 

And the famous Art Institute of Chicago published a Facebook promo, not of a nice young couple looking at a famous painting, but a Facebook promo of a nice young couple taking a selfie of themselves in front of a famous painting.

Even the Art Institute said the quiet part out loud. It’s not really about the art. The thing is not actually the thing. 

But was it ever?