Before we realized it, the world became saturated with “META.” Finance, the internet, information, the economy—every structure in society has been elevated into increasingly abstract layers.
Take the internet as an example. There is a product, and a website to promote that product. Then a portal site that aggregates and compares such websites. Then a meta-search engine that cross-searches multiple such portals. The meta-search engine’s ads appear in search results, and when you click through, you land on a page that again displays the same meta-search ads. The structure folds in on itself, loops back, and begins to self-reference.
In this dense informational world, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell what is real and what is merely a reference. Unless we step back and observe with distance, we can no longer distinguish truth from echo, origin from surface.
The same phenomenon is happening in finance. The collapse of subprime mortgages was a symbolic example. Home loans became products, then were repackaged as financial instruments. These were bundled into CDOs, which in turn spawned more derivative products. Credit ratings were assigned, and in the end, everything became “an investment product.” People were trading abstracted assets, disconnected from the original substance—houses, borrowers, and local economies.
This meta-ization will only accelerate. In every field, structures that are distant from primary information will be mass-produced. Some will stack meta-layers on top of meta-layers and attempt to dominate from above. Competition will occur at these higher layers. GDP might appear to grow, but what does that “growth” even represent? We’ll gradually lose the means to measure whether it reflects actual value.
In such a world, what must be reexamined is the “lower layer.” The lowest layers may appear vulnerable, exploitable, powerless. But all meta-structures depend on them. The more meta we become, the more power returns to the foundation.
Those who control electricity. Those who physically store data. Those who own land and access to natural resources.
These “real assets” begin to function as the final gravity that anchors the meta elite. Running a meta-structure still requires real-world energy. And that energy resides in the lower layers.
This is why, in the future, true power won’t belong to those who control the surface. It will belong to those who control the base. At the end of meta, physics regains its force.