This Is for Everyone
The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
A Sunday Times Bestseller
The inventor of the World Wide Web explores his vision’s promise—and how it can be redeemed for the future.
Since its invention in 1989, the World Wide Web has changed everything—transforming humanity into the first digital species. Through the web, we live, work, dream, quarrel, and connect. It has launched a new era of creativity and collaboration while unleashing powerful forces that imperil truth and privacy and polarize public debate. As artificial intelligence supercharges the online experience, the stakes of understanding the web’s origins and evolution, and guiding its future, have never been greater.
In This Is for Everyone, the web’s inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, recounts the story of his iconic creation and offers a vital perspective on today’s most urgent technological questions. With his trademark humor and candor, he recounts how he arrived at CERN, the European Council for Nuclear Research, as a young engineer. At a time when the internet’s use was primarily academic, he foresaw its potential as a tool to connect people, information, and ideas. By inventing the World Wide Web, he realized this vision.
Born in the same year as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, Tim Berners-Lee would become a different kind of technologist, famously distributing his innovation for no commercial reward. As the web rapidly gained users around the world, he oversaw its global governance and developed HTML, HTTP, and other fundamental protocols. His goal was to unleash a wave of creativity and collaboration for the benefit of all—a goal he has pursued to this day.
Peppered with rich anecdotes and amusing reflections, This Is for Everyone is a gripping, in-the-room account of the invention of the web, the foundation of our digital world. As the rapid development of artificial intelligence brings new risks and possibilities, Berners-Lee also offers a crucial guide to the decisions ahead—and proposes a new approach to the web that enables users to control their data and put it to rewarding new uses. In so doing, he shows how our digital lives can be reengineered for the sake of human flourishing rather than for profit or power.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The man who invented the World Wide Web recaps its spectacular growth and ponders its uncertain future in this knotty memoir-cum-manifesto. Berners-Lee (Weaving the Web) begins by revisiting his achievement while a programmer in Switzerland in 1990 of conceiving and writing the software—URL addresses, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http) and Hypertext Markup Language (html)—that lets users access websites, files, and images from other computers on their own. He continues on to his stint as director of the World Wide Web Consortium, where he warded off attempts to turn the web into a patchwork of proprietary networks and fought for "net neutrality," the principle that service providers should allow equal access to all web content. When the account wanders into Berners-Lee's techno-optimism, however, it's not always consistent or convincing. He pushes at great length a scheme called "Solid" to enable individuals to control their own data by placing it in digital "pods" in ways that sound fuzzy and dull. He's bullish on AI, but fails to support his assertion that it can analyze a person's data to help them "understand better who really ." As an account of the web's conception, this captivates, but as a forecast of what's to come, it underwhelms. Photos.
