Page:Aaron Swartz s A Programmable Web An Unfinished Work.pdf/14

2 1. INTRODUCTION: A PROGRAMMABLE WEB common until, one day, your computer is as tethered to the Web as you yourself are now.

It is sometimes suggested that such a future is impossible, that making a Web that other computers could use is the fantasy of some (rather unimaginative, I would think) sci-ﬁ novelist. That it would only happen in a world of lumbering robots and artiﬁcial intelligence and machines that follow you around, barking orders while intermittently unsuccessfully attempting to persuade you to purchase a new pair of shoes.

So it is perhaps unsurprising that one of the critics who has expressed something like this view, Cory Doctorow, is in fact a rather imaginative sci-ﬁ novelist (amongst much else). Doctorow’s complaint is expressed in his essay “Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia.” It is also reprinted in his book of essays Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future (2008, Tachyon Publications) which is likewise available online at http://craphound.com/content/download/.

Doctorow argues that any system collect accurate “metadata”—the kind of machine-processable data that will be needed to make this dream of computers-using-the-Web come true—will run into seven inescapable problems: people lie, people are lazy, people are stupid, people don’t know themselves, schemas aren’t neutral, metrics inﬂuence results, and there’s more than one way to describe something. Instead, Doctorow proposes that instead of trying to get people to provide data, we should instead look at the data they produce incidentally while doing other things (like how Google looks at the links people make when they write web pages) and use that instead.

Doctorow is, of course, attacking a strawman. Utopian fantasies of honest, complete, unbiased data about everything are obviously impossible. But who was trying for that anyway? The Web is rarely perfectly honest, complete, and unbiased—but it’s still pretty damn useful. There’s no reason making a Web for computers to use can’t be the same way.

I have to say, however, the idea’s proponents do not escape culpability for these utopian perceptions. Many of them have gone around talking about the “Semantic Web” in which our computers would ﬁnally be capable of “machine understanding.” Such a framing (among other factors) has attracted refugees from the struggling