Semantic Web - a tech fix for a human problem?

I tweeted about the Semantic Web today:

A Semantic Web pursued by techies is futile. How about a Semantic World for starters?

In a then following Twitter conversation with Peter Evans Greenwood, it became clear that we could "dance around" the definition of semantic itself - so how could we ever achieve a Semantic Web?

The real question is: should we even?

I have been working in IT for over a dozen years now, and of all the awkward things I've seen, the -what I call- IT will fix it-approach baffles me most

This approach is common throughout all businesses and industries, levels of organisation, and alike among customers, suppliers and vendors. One could also call it The Law of Self-deceit, or Leverage of Change by Misplacing Responsibility

In simple terms, it means that business and orgsanisational problems that arise to utterly complicated issues, are simply solved by throwing tech at it

• We have integration issues - let's buy an ESB
• We have too much legacy - oh we must just SOA it all
• Our processes are too complex to manage - hmm we need BPM
• Our business is getting too dynamic and real-time - ah we must have CEP
• Our users never get out of their application so it's tough monetizing them - let's just level the surrounding walls then and bring the mountain to Moses
• We don't understand eachother - let's build a Semantic Web

Does that ever work? No, hardly ever. Where we prudent IT guys used to start off with a small pilot before engaging in enterprise-wide battles, nowadays there are "orders from Headquarters" and off we go, like lemmings into the sea; resistance is futile.
However, as a Leverage of Change by Misplacing Responsibility it does function by having people without much subjectivity or personal interests regarding the case in particular (IT people), disrupt the status quo (business and organisational structures) by at least introducing "competition" or a mild threat in the form of another (possible) solution. As such, it always leads to something (usually, revenue for the vendor or system integrator)

However, there is a very bad side-effect: according to my Law of Association, minor or major failures or disasters regarding technologies will hardly ever be (permanently) associated with the circumstances at hand such as people and politics, but only with the technologies themselves. Hence, one should be very careful to abuse technology: your organisation might be very much against it by the time you do need it, and are actually ready for it

If it's too complicated for humans, machines can't do it for you. If it's too simple, boring and massive for humans, machines should (and can) do the job. In between is a gray area of complexity where machines can assist humans

Quoting Peter:

objective semantics are an unreachable goal. the best we can hope for is for dialog to bring us closer

Exactly my point

So, Tim Berners-Lee and others: stop talking and broadcasting about the Semantic Web, just start a pilot and prove its feasibility. Then we'll talk (back)