hen I first heard the term ‘metadata,’ back when I was a young journalist, I thought it referred to something embedded in the deepest underpinnings
THE FIRST METADATA MATRIX
WHAT ME SAW
SIZE
COLOUR
DANGER
TASTE
Tiger
Big
Orange
Very high
Unknown
of modern technology, a kind of mysterious set of magic incantations that allowed content wizards to transform lead (or iron oxide – this was pre-digital) into gold. It wasn’t just data. It was ‘meta’-data. Like ‘supernatural’-data. Then, I married a librarian, and my illusions were slowly stripped away. I came to understand that metadata – this long series of magical columns supporting the temple of content – is basically just a bunch of digital Post-it notes people have stuck up to keep track of what’s what. Metadata is, in fact, very ordinary. It’s your name tag at a networking event. It’s your driving licence number. It’s your Covid-19 vaccination status. It’s everything about the thing, but never the thing itself. Metadata is dull. Dull, dull, dull. Metadata, n. – ‘a set of data that describes and gives information about other data’ – specifically, data that is less exciting than other data. Dull. Yet, absolutely essential. We are awash with data. And it’s only going to get worse – ahem, I mean better. Metadata is the stuff that gives meaning to all the data. Without it, you’ve just got a bunch of ones and zeroes on a drive looking for a purpose. Or hundreds of hours of footage, seeking an editor insane enough to try and make sense out of it. Humans are metadata-creating machines – apart from the rare enlightened guru, for whom everything is only and exactly what it is at any given second. From the time humans first saw their reflections in a pond, and in every moment
Fire
Medium
Orange
High
Ouchy
Reindeer
Big
Brown
Low
Mmmh
Wolf
Medium
Grey
TBD
“Doggy”
of our waking lives, our brains are actively creating metadata. “This is a bird; that is a cave bear. This thing is on fire; that thing has fallen into a pit. This date of my child’s birth is worth remembering; this number representing my wealth is very, very small.” It’s as if humans have a mental spreadsheet that lists every single phenomenon we have ever encountered – and we note that phenomenon’s time, date, duration, size, colour, direction, flavour, smell, sound, perceived value, toxicity level, viability for an Instagram post and romantic potential. Some of these values are assigned by the deepest parts of our brain, according to parameters we wouldn’t even be able to verbalise. “This is a diaphragm. Its job is to move in and out. Its duration field should be set to ‘continuous.’” This process goes on all the time – there’s constant labelling, constant categorising and constant tagging. Whole sectors have been built around elaborating this metadata process. Science is basically just a system for coming up with a universal schema, with an open API that is fully interoperable with all our personal metadata sets. As a personal aside, I’m discovering that a feature of middle age is the gradual corruption of my own metadata structure. Those fields that used to contain the names of actors from the nineties, and
DROOLING
ENERGY
INTELLIGENCE
FLUFFINESS
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