Out-of-band metadata and business context outside hypermedia applications are by definition exterior to the contract, and thus aren’t amenable to any distributed computing architectural style that relies too heavily on static APIs. Therein lies the essential challenge of the API. To those analysts trumpeting the API Economy I say: the API Economy has nearly run its course. We’ve solved as many problems as we’re going to solve with contracted software interfaces. But the business stakeholders still aren’t happy. After all, it’s their context – the business context – that APIs (whether RESTful or not) are so woefully unable to deal with. It’s time for another approach.