On March 12, 1989, a quiet British physicist at CERN named Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal to his supervisor. The title was "Information Management: A Proposal." His supervisor wrote one word in the margin: "Vague but exciting."
That vague proposal became the World Wide Web — and it changed the human species more profoundly than almost any invention in recorded history.
The internet and the web are often conflated, but they're distinct. The internet — a global network of computers — had existed since the 1960s, emerging from the US military's ARPANET project. It could move data between computers, but navigating it required technical expertise.
What Berners-Lee invented was a layer on top of the internet: a system of hyperlinks, URLs, and HTML that made information accessible to anyone with a browser.
The first website went live on August 6, 1991. It explained what the World Wide Web was. It is still online today.
What happened next was unprecedented. Within a decade, the web had spawned an entirely new economy, new forms of communication, new industries, and new modes of human relationship.
By 1995, Amazon was selling books. By 1998, Google was organizing the web's contents. By 2004, social networking was beginning to reshape how humans present themselves to one another.
The web didn't just change what we do. It changed what we think is possible.
Berners-Lee himself has become one of the web's most vocal critics. In 2018, on the web's 29th birthday, he wrote an open letter expressing concern about its concentration of power, misinformation, and loss of privacy.
He has spent recent years working on a project called Solid — an attempt to rebuild the web's architecture around individual data ownership.
The inventor trying to fix his invention. Some stories don't have clean endings.
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