For once, the hype was justified. The world wide web really did transform the world in a way that can be compared to the impact of the printing press, or the mass media of the 20th century. The internet existed before the web, of course, but it was hardly used. The genius of Tim Berners-Lee was to glimpse, 30 years ago this week, how it might be brought to life by a simple scheme to allow every part to find, and talk with, every other part, using words, sounds, pictures or anything else that can be digitised.
This was useful enough. Two further developments made it indispensable. The first was the development of graphical browsers, allowing the web to be navigated through pictures with a mouse; the second was its indexing and organisation by search engines.
A world in which anyone can publish anything to anyone else falls rapidly into overwhelming chaos. A corresponding demand for order soon appears. This was answered within 10 years, when the babel of the early web was mapped and by this mapping shaped by the first search engines, and eventually by the latecomer Google. Google’s original advantage was that it understood and worked with the central innovation of the web, which was the link. There had been multimedia forms of computing before the web, and for some years they provided a much better experience, too. But Sir Tim’s invention disrupted not merely the business of multimedia but the substance of it, too. Once anything on the web could be linked to anything else, what was displayed on screen could consist of little fragments brought together from computers all over the world.
This discovery was later the foundation of the modern advertising economy; and the web has nourished the growth of digital advertising until it will be larger in the US than all other forms put together this year. It has also made possible the sizeable malware industry. The linking at the heart of the web has fundamentally changed the way that we understand the construction of knowledge. It has of course also made possible the construction of counterknowledge, but as Sir Tim points out in his letter to mark the 30th anniversary of his idea, the use of propaganda by hostile states or even malicious individuals was not invented with the internet. Leni Riefenstahl made her films before Donald Trump was even born.
What seems to Sir Tim to subvert the whole intention of the web has been its capture by the attention economy, in which the interest of the public becomes the only measure of success, however much damage this may do to the public interest. The underlying protocols of the web, and its ability to link content of every kind from everywhere into an apparently seamless whole, emerged from a largely benevolent academic atmosphere. They seemed to its early users to be animated by the values of the communities that built them. In the last 30 years we have learned that they were not. The same protocols allow this page to be read and the surveillance cameras of Xinjiang to maintain the police state there. But it would be wrong to say the technology is entirely neutral. By shortening the loop between urge and action, the web has had a particularly infantilising effect on its users. This is reflected in the extraordinary degree of polarisation, and indeed cruelty, seen online. It is an impulse uncontroller. It has brought enormous benefits to society and will continue to do so. But it has also done harm. Society, and all of us, must also discover a degree of maturity if these great powers are not to work against us.
