Against Metadata

I dislike metadata because it’s really just ideology and interpretation masquerading as neutral. It compels lines of inquiry and ways of thinking that precondition outcomes. It’s very similar to WordPress itself in that it offers you a lot of choices that are based on accepting a bunch of serious constraints.

But also language itself is metadata. If you accept the definition of metadata as “data about data” that’s what language itself is. There’s data about the world and there is language to describe it. All text documents are already encoded with metadata.

if we take this example (lincoln letter) pretty much all the metadata is written into the document itself. The author/creator/date; the format; nearly all the metadat is in the document itself and reveals itself because language itself IS metadata

Adding a layer of data about data about data is like being in Ed school, where you are always talking about how you will do the thing and never actually doing it.