Tim Berners-Lee wanted his technological wonder to be used as a tool for good. Instead it
This Is For Everyone by Tim Berners-Lee (Macmillan £25, 400pp)
In 1989, a young unknown Englishman working at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research in Switzerland, came up with probably the most significant invention of the 20th century.
He had no track record as an inventor and had published only a couple of research papers. But his idea revolutionised the world.
Why not, he thought, combine two already existing computer technologies – the internet and hypertext links – to create a new way of organising information and knowledge?
Today this is known as the World Wide Web and it is everywhere. The Englishman was Tim Berners-Lee, right, author of this enlightening new book. The jacket blurb describes it as an ‘intimate memoir’. It isn’t really that.
Berners-Lee, clearly and reasonably a private individual, has little to say about his personal life.
Instead, it is, in his own words, the ‘story of how the web came to be’ and, in its later pages, a critical exploration of what it has become.
Berners-Lee was born in 1955 – the same year, he notes, as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. His parents were both mathematicians and friends of Alan Turing.
Had he been born in a later generation, it’s fair to say he would have been called a ‘nerd’ or ‘geek’. He was an enthusiastic reader of science fiction. While still at school, he began to build himself a home-made computer. Decades later, his ignorance of pop culture was profound. When he met his wife Rosemary, she could scarcely believe that he had no idea who Bruce Springsteen was.
Even his mild acts of misbehaviour while an Oxford undergraduate have a geeky feel to them. Climbing on to the college roof to decorate its clock tower with underwear, he and his partners in crime also inscribed a well-known mathematical formula on to the building.
Within 6 months of its invention, almost 1000 of Tim’s colleague’s at Cern were using the World Wide Web … to access the phone book
His original job at CERN was distinctly unglamorous.
The organisation’s Large Hadron Collider was in the process of being built. Berners-Lee, by then a brilliantly talented computer programmer, was put in charge of maintaining a database of concrete.
It’s perhaps little wonder that his mind began to drift towards more exciting subjects. His thoughts about what he was initially calling ‘Mesh’ began to take shape. (This name was eventually discarded because it sounded too much like ‘mess’.) ‘There was never one “eureka” moment,’ he writes, ‘just the slow and persistent crystallisation of an idea.’
He began to sound out colleagues. One of them remembers him drawing a diagram of the concept of the web on a Swiss mountain slope with a ski pole in the snow. At meetings, his habit of allowing his thoughts to gallop ahead of his words proved a problem. Several attendees held up signs reading, ‘Tim, slow down.’ Almost nobody, he recalls, got the idea.
Nevertheless, his superiors at CERN gave him the opportunity to develop it. By December 1990 he was hosting the world’s first web page on the computer in his office. ‘If you turned off this machine,’ he writes, ‘you would turn off the World Wide Web.’
By the middle of the following year, around a thousand people within the organisation were using the web, mostly to access a phone book that was on it.
‘This rather undersold the potential of the technology,’ Berners-Lee notes. (Throughout the book he reveals a pleasing gift for laconic understatement.)
The potential it has today has certainly been recognised. The web now has 5.5 billion users – nearly 70 per cent of the entire world population.
‘When an invention becomes truly ubiquitous,’ Berners-Lee points out, ‘it can seem invisible.’ Certainly, we now take the web for granted.
However, the social problems it has created are by no means invisible. As the ‘chief evangelist’ for his own invention, Berners-Lee is all too well aware of them. They arrived when ‘capitalism… discovered the web’ and they have multiplied in recent years.
‘What was intended to be a tool for creativity and collaboration’ has become ‘divisive, polarising and toxic’. The decentralised structure to the early web that Berners-Lee enjoyed has gone. In its place, ‘addictive algorithms’ lurk within it, often directing users towards poisonous content. Power is concentrated at a handful of major sites.
However, Berners-Lee remains an optimist. There are plenty of websites that continue to embody his original vision. ‘Wikipedia,’ he writes, ‘is probably the best single example of what I wanted the web to be.’ He is confident that ‘we can take the web back. It’s not too late.’
He has continued to champion his invention and innovative ways of using it. His Web Foundation, in existence from 2009 to 2024, aimed ‘to make web access a basic human right, similar to food, medicine and shelter’. His recent project, launched in 2016, is Solid (an abbreviation of ‘Social Linked Data’), which looks to return the web to something closer to its original decentralised structure. Data sovereignty – the belief that ‘individuals should have control over their own data’ – is a goal.
In 2004, Tim received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II for his work in technology
The book shares its title with the words Tim typed during the 2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony which were displayed in LED to the millions watching
Berners-Lee has come a long way from the days when he was often seen as an eccentric with impractical ideas. He was knighted in 2004. Along with such luminaries as David Attenborough, Tom Stoppard and Simon Rattle, he is a member of the Order of Merit, a 24-strong body of distinguished individuals in science and culture.
In 2012, Danny Boyle invited him to participate in the opening ceremony of the London Olympics. Perhaps characteristically, given his indifference to popular culture, Berners-Lee wasn’t entirely sure who Boyle was.
He thought he might have heard the name somewhere but had to Google it to discover that the film director was in charge of the ceremony and his invitation was genuine.
On the big day, Berners-Lee was called upon to sit at a computer and type out, in capitals, the words, ‘THIS IS FOR EVERYONE’. These were then sent speeding around the Olympic Stadium in giant LED lights. It was a message that he had applied to his invention from the beginning, and it is now the title of a remarkable book by a remarkable man.