Subject: Re: "Metacrap" and the History of the Semantic Web From: Sinclair Target To: Cory Doctorow Date: Fri, 11 May 2018 07:58:46 -0400 Great! Thank you so much. I've only got three questions and your answers can be as long or short as you'd like. 1. What prompted you to write "Metacrap"? 2. Did the semantic web never come to fruition for exactly the reasons you listed in "Metacrap," or do you think there were other reasons in the end? 3. Even if we never got the semantic web we were promised, in your opinion, has the effort to create it yielded any useful technologies? Thanks again for your time! I really appreciate it. Subject: Re: "Metacrap" and the History of the Semantic Web To: Sinclair Target From: Cory Doctorow Date: Fri, 11 May 2018 13:54:10 -0700 > 1. What prompted you to write "Metacrap"? It was basically a transcription of a series of debates/arguments I'd have with semweb hucksters at tech conferences, who had a kind of cant they'd drop into whenever you challenged their views. I thought it would be useful to assemble what amounted to a "snappy questions to stupid answers" or "frequently mooted rhetorical questions" file. > 2. Did the semantic web never come to fruition for exactly the reasons > you listed in "Metacrap," or do you think there were other reasons in > the end? I'm sure failure of any vision is a complex phenomenon, but "impossibility" is usually dispositive. Given that several of my critiques were, "This is impossible," any one (assuming I was right) would be a career-ending injury for semweb practicioners. > 3. Even if we never got the semantic web we were promised, in your > opinion, has the effort to create it yielded any useful technologies? Oh, I'm sure! All that pension fund money that was siphoned off in the dotcom bubble to train humanities dropouts to create technical material had lots of upsides: it diversified the workforce so it wasn't just engineers, and it created a generational fluency in RDF and XML. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a traceable causal link between semweb overinvestement and the creation of a workforce capable of revamping Msft Office file formats to be XML based.