This is for Everyone
The inventor of the World Wide Web gives an account of his early years, the development of his breakthrough invention, and his vision for what the future of the Web should look like.
In This is for Everyone, Sir Tim Berners-Lee traces the origins of the web from his early fascination with electronics while growing up in a household of computer scientists, to his time at CERN, where he encountered the problem of siloed information across departments and machines. It is here that the book is at its strongest, clearly articulating his central insight, which is that the links between pieces of information are more powerful than the information itself.
The dictionary defines words only in terms of other words. What matters is not the words themselves which are a collection of mostly arbitrary sounds, but the relationships between one word to the next. It is a common view, in computer science, to define the world in terms of information, but a single piece of information is meaningless. . . . In an extreme view, the world can be seen only as connections between information. This resembles the neurons in the brain, but the brain has no knowledge until connections are made between the neurons.
However, while these sections effectively explain the ideas behind the web’s creation, they offer relatively little in the way of personal reflection, hinting early on that the book is more focused on principles than the author’s personality.
Having invented the first version of the World Wide Web, Tim set about founding the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a non-profit which sets out standards and specifications for how data should be exchanged on the web. We learn about the web’s exponential growth in its early years, and how the W3C, headed by Berners-Lee, was embroiled in a series of battles with commercial interests as it became clear to the world that fortunes would be made online. One chapter in particular highlighted how Microsoft tried to define their own set of proprietary web standards, so that content designed for Internet Explorer, then the world’s most popular web browser (on account of it being pre-installed with the Windows operating system) would not display properly in other browsers. I really enjoyed this section of the book. It explains how the idealistic principles the web was founded on were tested in the real world as corporate interests threatened to corrupt them.
The second half of the book focusses more on the W3C’s latest project, named Solid, which can be described as a digital wallet for all of your data. The idea is that instead of companies owning subsets of your data, it is stored in a single wallet that you own, and you can grant or deny access to parts of that data based on what you want to do with it. Berners-Lee also talks at length about how we need to democratise the web and regulate large platforms to prevent them from abusing their power. Many of the ideas here around data sovereignty and interoperability between tools were previously discussed in my review of Cory Doctorow’s book Enshittification, which you can find here. While I found myself agreeing with the author on how a Solid system would be powerful, the book presents it as a vision more than a fully realised solution. The practical challenges of adoption are only lightly addressed. Doctorow, to his credit, gives a more immediate critique, and presents more alternative solutions.
As you can probably tell, I am a big proponent of data sovereignty, which is why I decided to host this blog myself. However, I do feel that Berners-Lee’s writing can be at times unfocused: he himself claims that when speaking publicly, he can often go from one idea to another without finishing his thoughts, and I believe this carries through to his writing. Even with a background in computer science, I found myself occasionally filling in gaps. For a lay reader, the lack of consistent definitions could make some sections difficult to follow.
The end result is less a memoir and more a manifesto of the web’s development, and the ongoing fight to preserve its openness and adapt it for the technologies of the future. The ideas are strong, but if we are judging it as a memoir it misses the mark, lacking the personal insight I was hoping for from this book. I come away from This is for Everyone feeling like I understand how we got the web, but not quite understanding the private life of the man who introduced us to it.