This is for everyone: the unfinished story of the World Wide Web

The current frontier is the battle for our rights online
Tim Berners-Lee (346)

The best way to understand the current challenges of the digital revolution is to follow how it was, and is, being built, and no one better to tell the story than Berners-Lee, who created the World-Wide-Web we presently all use. It is not about the past, it is a reconstruction of the process that enables us to see where we stand. The guiding principle is that we “advance the open web as a public good and a basic right”.(217) And the main challenge is that “we let social media companies manage data for us, surveilling us and turning us into bundled products for advertising.” This is the double horizon: it opens huge opportunities, and growing threats: “The web offered people a platform for their voices to be heard, reducing the cost of publishing and distributing information to effectively nothing. But, used improperly, it could also be turned into a tool of surveillance and control.”(178) 

Berners-Lee is a fighter and an optimist: “The web offered a new frontier – it was like giving everyone their own printing press, everyone their own radio transmitter, everyone their own television station, all with no oversight, all at once. To me, that had to be a good thing. I believed, and still believe, in the emancipatory power of the internet. But I also had read enough history to understand the potentially destabilizing effect this shift might have.”(179) Optimistic, but not naïve. The book is clear about how the web is extracting value in the form of personal data, as well as surveilling users, rather than liberating them.(234)

We are well aware of how major corporations in this area gather detailed information on every user. A Washington Post investigation showed that Facebook uses hundreds targeting options for advertisers, including private and intimate details. These are sold to advertisers, and the invasive messages we constantly receive seek to maximize ‘engagement’, fragmenting our attention and leading to sensory overload and anxiety, as shown in Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. “Users are the product, and the customer is an advertiser, who pays for access to that product”.(238) 

The costs of the information and of the messages are in turn included in the prices we pay for the products or services, generating the impressive the fortunes of the social media corporations. Facebook, for example, relies on advertising for 98% of its income, it is a cost we bear, in money, time lost and irritation. Tim presents a list of the detailed information they gather on us.(239) The attention industry thus seeks to guide our attention, from the top, instead of allowing us to follow our intention. The political use of the connectivity and the ease of invading our intimacy generated a huge manipulation industry, also with huge financial returns at the top. The technology is great, but it is in the wrong hands. 

I am insisting on the obvious, because it is so important and so little understood: when you buy a Johnson&Johnson product, for example, 27% of what you are paying it for the advertising. More generally, it is about 10%, a kind of private tax on most of the products, to fund messages repeated hundreds of time as if we were morons, on every media. When a beer company launches a marketing campaign to increase its market-share, the competition will launch a similar one to defend itself, and the result is a useless cacophony which we pay for, unproductive costs included in every can or bottle. The difference is that buying some space in a newspaper was limited, as compared with the present possibility of invading our every private space and interrupting us at any moment. How can they say they are “offering”, “sponsoring” the film they interrupt, when we pay for it? Well, this is my indignation here, Ladislau Dowbor. In the graph below you can see where Meta money (Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram) comes from: 

Berners-Lee presents the problem and the evidence in very strong terms, and clear: “What was intended to be a tool for creativity and collaboration had become divisive, polarizing and toxic.”(273) The system consists in monetizing our attention time, and making us pay for it. “Although we have HTML for documents and URLs for making links, we have never settled on a standard for the data layer of the web. Instead we let social media companies manage data for us, surveilling us and turning us into bundled products for advertising. This is what gives them the incentive to build these manipulative algorithms.”(298)

I think this is the main line of the book: showing the impressive opportunities of this technological revolution, as well as the idiocy of having it operated by a few corporations at the top, with the overall orientation not to the common good but to private profit maximization. We must “build social media technology in the public interest”.(283) In this sense the Contract for the Web was negotiated, with major stakeholders,  governments, companies and citizens. The Solid protocol (solidproject.org) is another initiative to address these issues. The attention industry seeks to guide our attention, from the top, instead of allowing us to follow our intention. 

“As I look towards the future, I see a new web taking shape. It will be decentralized, it will realize the ideal of data sovereignty, and it will put AI to good and not ill use.”(353) The idea of moving from “attention industry” to “intention” consists in organizing the so that when surfing the internet, it responds to your interests, instead of capturing your interest to flood you with marketing content. “Too much screen time was funneled through the hands of too few monopolistic players. The user had been reduced to a consumable product for the advertiser.”(359) 

The data sovereignty concept is essential. “The web has become an indispensable utility, as necessary as electricity. Navigating the modern world without it is almost impossible…Data sovereignty is a term most people associate with nations, but in my speech, I suggested what it really meant was that individuals should have control over their own data. And not only control: personal data sovereignty should allow individuals to be empowered by their own digital footprint.”(338) This is in the line with the open-source Solid protocol mentioned above. 

The overall message, though, is optimistic: “There is still time to build machines that serve the human, rather than the other way around. There’s still time to forge connections between  people and use technology to fight for our rights. There is still time to recapture our data sovereignty. There’s still time to build community.”(361)  

In this short review, I have tried to bring some key features of the book. But the most important may be that reading it gives us the understanding of how the whole process evolved, from Alan Turing to the present AI challenges. Witty, light reading, and hugely informative.