Review of This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee

We joke about being “chronically online,” but for me it was kind of true. I always date my debut online to March 2004. My younger brother was allowed to create an MSN/Hotmail account so he could chat with all his friends through MSN Messenger. Envious, I demanded equality—and then pushed the boundaries further by asking if I could make a website. Having duly received permission from my parents, I learned HTML in seven days thanks to the aptly named HTML Goodies dot com. The rest is history. I never looked back, and it is a wonder I didn’t fall down some rabbit hole of radicalization! With the predictable patina of nostalgia that gradually settles over everything from thirty-five onwards, I look back at the halcyon days of 2004–2014 as “the golden age” of the web—though I am sure Tim Berners-Lee would say it was merely the silver age, golden having come and gone a decade prior.

This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web is both a history of the web and a memoir of the man who invented it. Berners-Lee provides an account of the events leading up to the web’s creation and launch in a way that literally no one else could. From there, he chronicles how the web spread beyond a few academic institutions to become one of the defining technologies of the information age. Then, he discusses the current challenges of keeping the web open and interoperable in the face of algorithmic social media, data mining, and AI.

There are a few ways to look at this book. It’s a history, a memoir, and a manifesto. Let’s pull on each thread before examining all three in concert.

I was most excited for the history aspects of This Is for Everyone. I’m not one for hero worship or Great Man theory or whatnot; I am grateful to Berners-Lee for his contributions but don’t care to idolize him. Nevertheless, if anyone can write a unique history of the web, it would be him! I have known the broad strokes for a long time, and as the book gets closer and closer to the present day, I was increasingly familiar with everything, of course. Yet the first couple of chapters in particular are utterly fascinating. I knew, for example, that the web began as literally a single PC with a post-it note warning people not to turn it off. This is only the tip of the iceberg, however, and Berners-Lee shares all the stories, from his bosses at CERN going to bat for his crazy shenanigans to a missed-connection moment with Steve Jobs that could have changed everything.

Along the way, Berners-Lee himself does his best to counter the Great Man theory by doling out credit where credit is due. He carefully disambiguates “the web” from “the internet,” even though we tend to use these terms interchangeably in common parlance. He gives a lot of credit to Vint Cerf, rightly, for his involvement in the base technology of the internet, which Berners-Lee later selected as the underlying technology for HTTP. He invokes Rivest-Shamir-Adleman and Jobs and Bill Atkinson and Marc Andreessen (that last one … oof, wow). This Is for Everyone makes it very clear that while Berners-Lee got the web off the ground, he did so standing on the shoulders of giants and eventually working with collaborators who elevated his creation from a working concept to something that could span the globe and transform our lives.

This is where we shade into memoir, for Berners-Lee definitely positions himself as the champion of the open web. He politely yet firmly condemns people like Andreessen who saw the web as a potential profit source. Meanwhile, he celebrates his wins at keeping the web open, from ensuring CERN relinquished any intellectual property rights to establishing the W3C. I’m not trying to diminish Berners-Lee’s impact here: if he were a different person, the web would not be what it is today. He could have tried to profit off it to be sure (more on this in a moment). So I do believe we owe Berners-Lee a debt for that.

Indeed, This Is for Everyone excels at poking that “what if” part of the brain. I couldn’t help myself from dreaming up counterfactuals, from the one proposed by Berners-Lee himself when Jobs just misses seeing his demo to a myriad other possibilities. What if Berners-Lee’s managers hadn’t championed this side project and CERN had shut him down? What if he had never got his hands on a NeXT? A technology like the world wide web was likely inevitable given our trajectory. However, as Berners-Lee’s storytelling explains here, there were plenty of forks in the road where our timeline might have diverged to result in—for better or worse—something very different from today’s web.

To return for a moment to the man and the memoir, though: Berners-Lee comes off as very charismatic and humble herein, yet he seems ultimately unable (or unwilling) to grapple with the power structures at work that positioned him to invent the web. Berners-Lee benefitted along so many axes: class, race, gender, even nationality helped him open doors and be taken seriously in a way that a marginalized inventor of the web might not have been. I say this not to take away from the magnitude of Berners-Lee’s achievements. Also, it’s important to note that he himself acknowledges the brilliance of many women involved in the internet and web’s development, alongside women like his mother, a formidable mathematician in her own right. Nevertheless, from his string of marriages to the way he gradually turns into his jet-setting philanthropist by the end of the book … I picked up this really uncomfortable undercurrent of “look at Tim Berners-Lee: he gave away the web for free; he’s not like other rich white men!” And look, maybe Berners-Lee has done the work and the readings and gone to the marches and is secretly funding a bunch of revolutionary leftist organizations, I don’t know … all I can judge is this book, and the book is—unsurprisingly—very charitable to him.

I have similar mixed feelings about Berners-Lee’s views on the values enshrined in the web and how to preserve them. The last chapters of the book are mostly manifesto. He discusses the threats faced by the open web and what to do about them. For many, including myself, these issues are already well known. What is striking, however, was probably how early Berners-Lee recognized the potential for the web to go horribly wrong:

With the web, we were at the outset of something major, and we had to design it with the human being first in mind. We had to build a system that gave humans the ability to make links around the world, but one that avoided ensnaring them in a dead-end, anti-human materialism, or systems of surveillance, coercion, and control.

Oops! That’s from Chapter 3, “Ignition,” and all I can say is … oof, pretty much all of that has come to pass, despite Berners-Lee’s best efforts. In this sense, I agree with his politics!

So far, however, it seems like Berners-Lee will not be the one to shepherd the second coming of the web. He spends a far amount of pages championing his Solid project, a new type of protocol designed for the storage and communication of personal data. I had never had of Solid before despite it being around for nearly ten years and receiving a great deal of corporate investment. It feels DOA, at least without a great deal of regulatory changes, and Berners-Lee comes across in these chapters are out of touch.

Likewise, I’m very disappointed in how uncritically he embraces LLMs. I had this moment where he starts talking about how great they are and how he uses them to help him write his Design Issues blog, and I literally went, “Oh, TimBL, noooooooooo.” It’s like watching someone you respect shovelling a massive handful of mud into their mouth and then happily chewing and swallowing it; what are you doing, my guy? The oceans are boiling and your toys are running rampant across your web, threatening the stability and durability of the entire project, and you think they’re cool??

I want to say, “Make it make sense,” but the dismissive part of me simply wants to spread her hands and shrug: so-called “smart” rich white guys really are vulnerable to “cool technology” vibes.

But I digress. These criticisms in mind, I still recommend This Is for Everyone. Stephen Witt (author of How Music Got Free) did a good job ghostwriting. Maybe this is just nostalgia-bait for my addled millennial mind, but this book got me thinking. Thinking about possibilities, about progress, about politics. If you can sweep aside the memoir and manifesto parts, the history part is illuminating indeed. I love the web, and for that I owe much to Tim Berners-Lee. He or CERN could have sold it. They made it for everyone, and as much as I criticize him, I believe Berners-Lee truly believes in his mission to keep the web open. For that, I am grateful.