Metacrap or Meta-utopia?

Cory Doctorow's essay Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia is nearly 14 years old now.  How old is that in Internet Years?  45?  140?  How's the old girl holding up?

First, in all fairness, predicting the future is hard.  The Internet is awash in embarrassing quotes from people who made unfortunate assumptions and had the misfortune to be famous enough for someone to notice.  However, saying that something is never going to happen is a particularly dangerous game because it takes only a single instance to knock down your whole proposition.  Doctorow cheats a bit by conjuring up a utopia, an ideal world which almost by definition cannot be achieved in the real world; of course it's a "pipe-dream"--that's the nature of utopias.

But let's consider what he's really talking about here.  His arguments seem to divide metadata into two classes:  human-created and machine-created.  Interestingly, he seems to dismiss all human-created metadata as rife with lies, errors, and hidden agendas, while he accepts the kind of metadata used by Google as "far more reliable."

I feel that this was unfair in 2001 and is still unfair in 2015.  First, even the observational metadata he prefers is still mapped to a human-created schema.  Second, the systems that use human-created metadata are often robust enough to counter the error factor.  Sure, you can still find a "Cusinart Whish" listed for sale on eBay, but you'll find it correctly placed in the Food Processor category. Third, Doctorow's meta-utopia appears to be a world in which the user would need to have no skill or digital literacy at all.  In the real world, people always have and always will need to exercise personal judgement.

In conclusion, can I find all the downloadable music?  No, but "all" isn't measurable or attainable.  Can I find enough music to listen to?  Sure.  Can a manufacturer discover suppliers?  Probably, and probably by using the same contacts they always did.  Can I easily choose a hotel room?  Sweet fancy Moses, yes!  And that is meta-utopia enough for me.