This Is For Everyone
Macmillan hardback £25
***** (5 stars) review by Tony Lee
Not my usual choice of SF reading but, certainly, a genre-adjacent book, Tim Berners-Lee’s excellent memoir is most effective as a modern-history of how and why, the W.W.W. (world wide web, I’ll call it Web here) developed. From the 1980s’ home-computer boom, before the Internet (as we know it, today) arrived in the 1990s, an obvious-in-retrospect inspiration for ideas about the Web’s interconnectedness and vitally, interoperability, was Berners-Lee’s job at CERN, in Geneva. There, nationalism seemed to be absent if not pointless, and the multi-cultural concerns of that establishment’s scientific melting-pot, overcame language-barriers and scaled economic walls, in pursuit of a great prospect, that was, very simply - ‘for everyone’, as Tim claims, repeatedly. I would certainly agree that he’s done far more with technology, for humanity, than his famous contemporaries, multi-billionaire Bill Gates, and gadget-maker Steve Jobs, also born in 1955.
You don’t need to have (like me), used a desktop PC for 25 years, published stuff, owned website domains, etc. because Tim fully explains his inventions, each, and every, step of the way, and if you already know basic stuff, about the Web, this book reads like a helpful refresher-course (I completely forgot ‘Yahoo’ was a backronym). How the Web grew, from its first ‘hobby’ server, to attracting over 5.5 billion users online in only three dozen years is such a fascinating autobiographical story, of truly International success, that THIS IS FOR EVERYONE is, undeniably, an important book. If you only buy one non-fiction text, this year, pick this one. It’s genuinely essential reading.
The book often mentions web ‘evangelists’, while comments from (or about) A.I. optimists versus dystopian-cult pessimism might prompt quasi-religious thinking, on right and wrong/good versus evil, whether (or not) any form of super-intelligence is likely or impossible... as tech ‘god’ or ‘devil’. It does all look, increasingly, as if we have a stark Wellsian choice of, only comic-book style, futures ahead (depressingly apocalyptic... or positively utopian?). But Tim argues against such polarised thinking. Global negotiations are still on-going, with many compromises to be expected.
This inventor is not done yet. Sir Tim (aka: TimBL) also promotes an ‘intention’ economy, for the Web, over the current ‘attention economy’, that rules most toxic social-media platforms. His campaigns in favour of online-privacy have now resulted in practical stuff like a 'data wallet', offering ‘personal data sovereignty’ that has every individual “empowered by their own digital footprint”, with total control of details and strict sharing-limitations, like access for shopping, banking transactions. It sounds far better than the Labour government’s ‘free’, and yet ‘compulsory’, digital ID (to be called ‘Brit-card’?), that was immediately criticised by civil-liberty groups.
