Metacrap (Doctorow Essay)
Cory Doctorow's 2001 essay arguing that voluntary metadata schemes — including the Semantic Web — are undermined by seven recurring problems: people lie, are lazy, are bad self-observers, schemas embed bias, metrics distort behavior, and there is no single canonical description.
Metacrap is a short 2001 essay by science-fiction author and activist Cory Doctorow, subtitled "Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia." It argues that any plan that depends on humans accurately and honestly tagging their own content with rich metadata is doomed, and it lists seven obstacles: people lie (especially when metadata affects ranking or revenue), people are lazy, people are stupid, people cannot accurately observe themselves ("know thyself" is hard), schemas are not neutral (every classification embeds a worldview), metrics influence the things they measure, and there is more than one way to describe anything. The essay was written during the early hype around the Semantic Web and the Dublin Core metadata movement, and it became one of the most cited critiques of voluntary metadata regimes. Although Doctorow's targets were broader than RDF — he was equally skeptical of search-engine meta tags, file-format metadata, and library cataloging utopias — the piece is now read mostly as an early diagnosis of why machine-readable data ecosystems struggle whenever publishers have incentives to misrepresent, ignore, or game the schema. Later debates about schema.org spam, LLMs hallucinating provenance, and AI-generated meta descriptions can be read as fresh chapters in the same argument.