Does Meta Mean Objective? The End of the Individual.

One trend that's problematic to me is the idea that anything anonymous is automatically objective and without bias, that a collective of the uninformed is somehow more enlightened than any individual who has dedicated their life to a particular form of knowledge, that sources are obsolete, that crowds cannot be swayed and that popular opinion cannot possibly be biased. Snobbishness is indeed a vice but going to the other extreme of mob rule is hardly an improvement, rather it's just chaos for the sake of chaos in an attempt to stick it to the man.

Populism isn't a bad ideal, except it's a bad model for filtering information. There's a reason why focus groups often kill films and rob them of their message, it's that things derived from consensus are soulless. Instead of relying on the merits of individual opinions, Metacritic has now become the most trusted review source on the net, with the sum invalidating its constituent parts and Wikipedia is now trusted as a completely objective and factual source when by its nature its not.

The internet is not a consciousness any more than it is several consciousnesses made one. The idea of the internet being a meta consciousness speaks simultaneously to an ideology of both majority privilege and the empowerment of the radical fringe, hence why right-wing reactionaries have such a large presence online. The most vocal supporters of an ideology simply make the most noise and drown out all reasonable debate and yet those ideologies are overrepresented within a meta framework as they are far more passionate than the general public.

Ultimately the need for individual achievement in society is being repressed by a desire for anonymous collaboration. This is ultimately futile as a meta novel would become nothing more than a deeply impersonal collaboration that would have no sense of characterization, plot progression or genre, rather it would be a loose collection of ideas decided by consensus that would be re-edited over a short period of time into something unrecognizable yet trendy. While democracy in institutions is a great goal to work towards, democratic art is an oxymoron and to attempt it would be an abomination that would ruin the entire world's conception of art for years to come. The fact is that art has often been decided by both individuals and cabals for a thousands of years. Meta art would only serve to create a purely commercial product that would please executives and those with no concept of taste but no one else.

While Wikipedia is great for general knowledge, it's both incredibly easy to post misinformation on and nowhere near as informative as an actual book on any subject. Metacritic is also not objective since the viewer may end up having a differing opinion than the majority of critics, or that a minority might have a more well thought out opinion. Also, a divisve film will naturally revieve average ratings. The push to make all information meta or the belief that meta is inherently good is a fallacy that promotes an inhuman agenda. In short, consensus is not always right and the current belief that it is is harming both the internet and humanity as a whole.