Washington Post: “Of late, I have found myself gravitating toward science fiction franchises that imagine not advanced technology or seamlessly integrated AI, but something even more improbable and futuristic: a world free from the distractions and degradations of the internet. It may seem perverse to seek solace in “Dune” and “Battlestar Galactica,” fictions about societies that have been ravaged by war and genocide, but characters in both stories are treated to a significant silver lining: After catastrophic brushes with sentient computers, they have sworn off connectivity altogether. However vicious their political infighting and however tyrannical their leaders, they are still spared Andrew Tate videos and QAnon posts. At its worst, the web is a putrid miasma of neo-Nazi trolls, misinformation and AI-generated slop; at its best, it shreds our attention into little scraps. The question is not whether online life is wretched — it is — but whether it was always so depraved, and whether its depravity is a fait accompli.
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, doesn’t think so. In his new memoir-cum-history, “This Is For Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web,” he proposes that his creation has become a cesspool of cruelty and conspiratorial paranoia for reasons that it is within our power to rectify. “Unfortunately, in recent years, along with all the creativity, empowerment, and collaboration that I love on the web, a small, but significant part of it — the addictive forms of social media — have multiplied into something misleading, toxic and habit-forming,” he writes. Worse, this small but significant part is actively exploitative. “Large platforms … harvest your private data and share it with commercial brokers or even repressive governments,” Berners-Lee writes. “Authoritarian governments … spread disinformation and surveil their own citizens, and that’s as far from my vision as can be.” But it doesn’t have to be this way, he insists. The web was once a tolerant, welcoming and slightly anarchic place, and Berners-Lee assures us that it can be salvaged yet. He is such an affable, avuncular narrator that I am almost tempted to believe him…”
