Plain human readable text is not an "artificial barrier". It the nature of our our world. Requiring that a restaurant publish menus in a metadata format is an artificial barrier. That the beauty of these new NLP tools. I don't need to have a restaurant owner learn JSON, or buy a software package that generates JSON. We can use data as it is. The cost of building useful tools goes to near zero. It will be imprecise, but that's what human language is.
Some forms of capitalism may have roots in the natural world - natural selection as both a destructive & wasteful competitive process certainly has a lot of parallels in idealised markets - but there's nothing inherent about your menu example when it comes to the modern human world, beyond restrictions placed upon us by capitalism.
> Requiring that a restaurant publish menus in a metadata format is an artificial barrier
This is oddly phrased as noone would need to require anyone to do anything - it's obviously beneficial to a restaurant to publish their menus in formats that are as broadly usable as they can. The only barrier to them doing that is access to tools.
The various hurdles you're describing ("buying" software, the "cost" of building tools) are not natural phenomena.
