When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1989, his vision was clear: it would used by everyone, filled with everything and, crucially, it would be free.
Today, the British computer scientist’s creation is regularly used by 5.5 billion people – and bears little resemblance to the democratic force for humanity he intended.
In Australia to promote his book, This is for Everyone, Berners-Lee is reflecting on what his invention has become – and how he and a community of collaborators can put the power of the web back into the hands of its users.
Berners-Lee describes his excitement in the earliest years of the web as “uncontainable”. Approaching 40 years on, a rebellion is brewing among himself and a community of like-minded activists and developers.
“We can fix the internet … It’s not too late,” he writes, describing his mission as a “battle for the soul of the web”.
Berners-Lee traces the first corruption of the web to the commercialisation of the domain name system, which he believes would have served web users better had it been managed by a nonprofit in the public interest. Instead, he says, in the 1990s the .com space was pounced on by “charlatans”.
It doesn’t matter how noble your intent when inventing or researching, once business has control of something, it is used to gain power and control over people. All you scientists and engineers and researchers need to starts accepting your own contribution to this monster, held accountable for the technologies you help businesses unleash on all of us.
We do not blame Prometheus for what the arsonist did.
If Prometheus saw a dude twitching his fingers, eager to burn shit down and then handed him fire, he damn well should be blamed.
Zeus did…
I think your coming on a little heavy, if you are trying to say that inventors should build systems that are resilient to misuse, I whole heartadly agree. But how your post seems it would imply that no one should be inventing anything that could possibly be corrupted or face the consequences, which is quite a huge pendulum swing that wouldn’t cause the outcome I think you are looking for.
They should consider to not build at all if it’s clear the result is business returning us to slavery.
I agree with the first part, but scientists and engineers are not that much more complicit than literally everyone with a job. Those businesses couldn’t have done that without marketing, hr, janitors, tradespeople, lawyers etc etc etc either. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism and there is no ethical job.
Their complicity is more impactful. They Empower those businesses with new technological capabilities that the public, the state and the population in general is in no position to effectively keep up with a defense against. Employees also have their own responsibility, but the empowerment engineers and scientists are giving businesses by building fucking AI is very different than what an office bureaucrat contributes by managing the logistics. Logistics can only manage what exists, science and engineers are bringing new shit into existence and handing it to psychopaths. I rarely ever hear anything about the responsibility scientists and engineers have by empowering these corporations and other ambitious people even though their contributions make it possible at all.
All these LLM engineers building the spy tools and data collection and analysis systems that will be used on us need to be brought into the conversation when we discuss whose responsible for MAGA and Trump and the technofascist that were watching be built right now. They can’t do it without those inventions and discoveries, so maybe stop fucking helping them?