This Is For Everyone
Tim Berners-Lee
With
Having read it
★★★☆☆
Despite his achievements, work ethic, decent ideals and ideas, this memoir – that does have some interesting parts, like his early years – comes across as a little bit self-righteous in places and just ended up being a bit of a skipped and skimmed read in the end.
Still, apart from history no doubt being different if the author had been able to meet Steve Jobs at a NeXT developers’ conference in Paris in 1992, as explained:
As he approached my table, I was giddy with anticipation – but before he could reach me, an aide approached and whispered in his ear. Jobs, called away on business, turned and left, never to return.
I was crushed. I’m still disappointed, actually! The World Wide Web succeeded, of course, and so did Steve Jobs, but I never got to meet him. As I grow older, I’ve come to see this as a kind of ‘sliding doors’ moment – not just for me, but for the internet as a whole. Maybe I flatter myself, but I believe that if Jobs had just taken a few more steps down the table to see that 1992 World Wide Web product demo, the world might be a completely different place.
. . . it was a geeky kind of cool to find out that the beginnings of the World Wide Web were originally put together on a NeXTcube!
A good passage
Whether it’s because of their role in enforcing regulation or in managing data itselt, governments are important to Solid [(Social Linked Data protocol)]. Part of the frustration with democracy in the twenty-first century, I believe, is that governments have been too slow to meet the demands of digital citizens. Solid offers an effective way to do so. I get excited talking about lucid, intelligible, highly responsive government systems. And, once you have a system that works that way, you’ve built a layer of trust that can extend into medical, legal, academic, and commercial and ultimately personal data-generation systems.
I also believe that sharing this information in a smart way would liberate it. Why is your smartwatch writing your biological data to one invisible silo in one format? Why is your credit card writing your financial data to a second silo in a different format? Why are your YouTube comments, Reddit posts, Facebook updates and tweets all stored in different places? Why is the default expectation that you aren’t supposed to be able to look at any of this stuff? You generate all this data – your actions, your choices, your body, your preferences, your decisions.
[Capitalism – particularly its late-stage and neoliberal forms – eh?!]
If you could gather all this data in one location, you would actually be able to understand better who you really were. Plus, you would be able to make new connections – link your heart rate log to your medical records, link your location data to your spending habits, link your meal plan to your grocery bill. Your life could improve, and you would regain control of your digital footprint. You would be a sovereign citizen of the universe of information. The immense potential of this will only grow as a new wave of technology approaches – one whose power will exceed all those that have come before.