Nowadays, the term is widely used in a positive way to describe 'creative minorities who bring real progress'.
It is confusing to use the old opposing definition of the word 'meritocracy' when everybody else around you is adhering to the original meaning of 'merit'.
Of course, whether or not we're able to accurately evaluate 'merit' is a decent question, but it is better to ask the question using metrics, than to try to answer using personal bias and satire.
The point of the satire, and the point of TFA, is that measuring 'merit' is difficult, if not impossible, and a focus on 'meritocracy' will lead to promoting those that perform best at the measurable proxies to merit, not actual merit.
It seemed worth pointing out that people are using a word conceived satirically to advocate for the very system that satire warned against. And it's an interesting bit of history.
Every good system need to strive to be a meritocracy, anyone arguing anything else is just talking nonsense. If it is impossible to determine who has more merit then every system is doomed to fail.
Best at 'measurable proxies of merit' is exactly what I think people should speak plainly about and fight for.
But, instead we have people that think that because merit cannot be perfectly measured we should stop attempting to find meritocracy and instead to select randomly.
Random selection must be worse than a measurable proxy.
I gain nothing personally from this system, because I didn't travel through a top college. But I do not think it's in my interests to completely destroy societies way of selecting people into important positions based on some idea of 'merit'.
It is confusing to use the old opposing definition of the word 'meritocracy' when everybody else around you is adhering to the original meaning of 'merit'.
Of course, whether or not we're able to accurately evaluate 'merit' is a decent question, but it is better to ask the question using metrics, than to try to answer using personal bias and satire.