Vanity Fair: “Tim Berners-Lee, the Man Who Created the World Wide Web, Has Some Regrets (and His Work to Re-Decentralize the WWW)

From a Vanity Fair Profile:

[Sir Tim] Berners-Lee, who never directly profited off his invention, has also spent most of his life trying to guard it. While Silicon Valley started ride-share apps and social-media networks without profoundly considering the consequences, Berners-Lee has spent the past three decades thinking about little else. From the beginning, in fact, Berners-Lee understood how the epic power of the Web would radically transform governments, businesses, societies. He also envisioned that his invention could, in the wrong hands, become a destroyer of worlds, as Robert Oppenheimer once infamously observed of his own creation. His prophecy came to life, most recently, when revelations emerged that Russian hackers interfered with the 2016 presidential election, or when Facebook admitted it exposed data on more than 80 million users to a political research firm, Cambridge Analytica, which worked for Donald Trump’s campaign. This episode was the latest in an increasingly chilling narrative. In 2012, Facebook conducted secret psychological experiments on nearly 700,000 users. Both Google and Amazon have filed patent applications for devices designed to listen for mood shifts and emotions in the human voice.

This agony, however, has had a profound effect on Berners-Lee. He is now embarking on a third act—determined to fight back through both his celebrity status and, notably, his skill as a coder. In particular, Berners-Lee has, for some time, been working on a new software, Solid, to reclaim the Web from corporations and return it to its democratic roots.

[Clip]

For now, the Solid technology is still new and not ready for the masses. But the vision, if it works, could radically change the existing power dynamics of the Web. The system aims to give users a platform by which they can control access to the data and content they generate on the Web. This way, users can choose how that data gets used rather than, say, Facebook and Google doing with it as they please. Solid’s code and technology is open to all—anyone with access to the Internet can come into its chat room and start coding.

Read the Complete Article (approx. 3000 words)

See Also: Direct to Solid (Web Site) ||| @SolidMIT

See Also: VIDEO: Tim Berners-Lee Keynote at 2016 Decentralized Web Summit: “Re-decentralizing the Web – Some Strategic Questions” ||| Video: More Talks/Presentations from 2016 Summit ||| Summit Highlights/Links (via Internet Archive)

See Also: Info About the Upcoming Decentralized Web Summit 2018 (July 31-August 2)

Filed under: Data Files, News, Patrons and Users