It was a few hundred years before the common era, and people didn’t have a great idea how the world actually worked. While that dearth of knowledge had its downsides, it was quite the heyday for big thinkers; whereas today a researcher might spend their entire life learning about just one slice of a topic of a subset of an area of a field, back then a philosopher—one who loves knowledge, from roots philo meaning loving and sophia meaning knowledge—might discover or posit information and ideas about the whole of existence.
And that’s pretty much what Aristotle did. His life writings included work on science, logic, ethics, aesthetics, rhetoric, politics, and a laundry list of other things. With that kind of prolificity, it’s no wonder his successors had trouble wrapping their heads around it all. So they did what most determined learners would probably do: Put things in a nice, tidy order. Most of the work fit well into clear chapters: Biology, Virtue, Weather, and the like. But there was an odd bunch of writings that dealt with the fundamental principles and causes of existence itself, and there wasn’t a great title for the category. So they put the chapter after its apparent closest cousin—physics—and chose the name by that perennial nomenclature cop-out for when we don’t know how to meaningfully identify something: Just call it a sequel (see: postmodern, post-rock, PostgreSQL).
And so the stuff that was sort of physics, but not really physics, and was inserted right after physics, became metaphysics—based on the Greek meta meaning after. Over time, the simple physical arrangement of the books buckled under the epistemological weight of the headier, implicit conceptual relationship, which took on its own kind of gravity: If physics explained how the world worked, then metaphysics explained physics itself—almost as if metaphysics were the physics of physics. And so the prefix meta picked up a much different relational connotation than one thing being after another, more akin to one thing folding back into itself. It was looping, self-referential, abstracted, recursive. And it was far more interesting that way.
The idea found its way into many aspects and staples of modern life: Metadata is data about data, such as the type of camera you use to take a picture (which is itself the data). Meta-analysis is when a researcher analyzes the analyses of other researchers together. Metacritic is a website with reviews that are themselves composed of other reviews. And this relationship pops up all over the place, even when we didn’t choose the meta tag for the names: A tow truck is a truck that drives other trucks—A metatruck, if you will.
Though the idea can be found everywhere, the greatest triumph of the meta has most certainly been in digital computing, that boundless space with ones and zeros stretching forever into the distant sunset. If you take paper folders and start putting them inside each other, you will eventually run out of room, due to the pesky constraints of substantiality. But if you take digital folders and start putting them inside each other…
…It just keeps going. File system folders can be placed within folders, within folders, within folders. Software program functions can call themselves, in turn calling themselves, in turn calling themselves. Data objects can be defined in terms of themselves, which are defined in terms of themselves, which… You get the idea.
There’s extreme power in this roundness. Computers assume much of their flexibility and strength by more or less walking in circles; freed from plebian material constraints, the digital can endlessly loop in on itself, like looking into parallel mirrors. It can take the tiniest of the tiny—the bit—and build up layer by layer, abstraction by abstraction, meta by meta, to create the infinitely grand cyberstructures that define and rule our modern world.
So, the prefix conceived as a quick and dirty title for reflections on existence now forms the foundation of… well, pretty much our existence.