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Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor the World Wide Web, criticized the state of the internet today for turning users into “consumable products” in a talk in Harvard Square on Wednesday evening about his recently released memoir.
Berners-Lee, who is credited with inventing the web in 1989 at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, called for the autonomy of users over their data and endorsed net neutrality during his talk at the Brattle Theatre. The event was a collaboration between the Harvard Book Store, Harvard University Division of Science, and Harvard Library to promote Berners-Lee’ memoir, “This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web.”
Calling for a return to a more decentralized web experience, Berners-Lee pushed the concept of a kind of “personal digital wallet,” which would allow the user to store their data in a single location and then decide when and for how long to hand over their information to different apps.
A version of such a digital wallet called Solid was released by Berners-Lee and the company Inrupt last year.
Discussing the existing data storage services on the web, Berners-Lee also criticized DropBox, iCloud, and Google Cloud for not being mutually compatible. He spent the most time, however, reiterating long-running concerns about the pitfalls of a growing “attention economy” online.
“The web is being hijacked from an ‘intention economy’ to an ‘attention economy,’” Berners-Lee said, adding that “the user has been reduced to a consumable product for the advertiser.”
The statements mirrored more explicit criticisms of major digital platforms like Facebook, Google, and Instagram for addictive algorithms and data exploitation.
“When you make an addictive algorithm you know what you’re doing,” he said, continuing that platforms should ideally make their users “constructive instead of angry.”
Since turning to open-internet advocacy in the early 1990s following the web’s release, Berners-Lee has served as a staunch advocate on hot-button internet governance issues such as net neutrality and data privacy.
He has since founded both the Open Data Institute and the World Wide Web Foundation, which advocates for returning the web to its founding ethos of neutral access for all, summarized by his now-famous 2012 statement “this is for everyone.”
He has been widely recognized for his accomplishments. He was knighted in 2004 and an appointment to the Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth II. In 2016, he was awarded the Turing Award, which is widely regarded as an equivalent of the Nobel Prize for Computing.
Throughout the talk, Berners-Lee also reminisced on the web’s earliest days, taking the audience behind the scenes of its creation.
The first Web server was labeled with a sticky note, on which Berners-Lee scrawled the now-iconic words: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!” At the time, Berners-Lee also created and numbered the error messages that are now commonplace when using the Web, the most famous being “404 Not Found.”
In turning back to the simplicity and open spirit of the web’s early moments, Berners-Lee emphasized that re-embracing such values was still possible.
“There’s still time to build machines that work for humans, and not the other way around,” he said.
