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‘It’s not too late to fix it’: internet inventor Tim Berners-Lee says he is in a ‘battle for the soul of the web’ (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 4 weeks ago by HellsBelle@sh.itjust.works to c/world@lemmy.world

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When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1989, his vision was clear: it would used by everyone, filled with everything and, crucially, it would be free.

Today, the British computer scientist’s creation is regularly used by 5.5 billion people – and bears little resemblance to the democratic force for humanity he intended.

In Australia to promote his book, This is for Everyone, Berners-Lee is reflecting on what his invention has become – and how he and a community of collaborators can put the power of the web back into the hands of its users.

Berners-Lee describes his excitement in the earliest years of the web as “uncontainable”. Approaching 40 years on, a rebellion is brewing among himself and a community of like-minded activists and developers.

“We can fix the internet … It’s not too late,” he writes, describing his mission as a “battle for the soul of the web”.

Berners-Lee traces the first corruption of the web to the commercialisation of the domain name system, which he believes would have served web users better had it been managed by a nonprofit in the public interest. Instead, he says, in the 1990s the .com space was pounced on by “charlatans”.

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[–] porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml 8 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

I agree with the first part, but scientists and engineers are not that much more complicit than literally everyone with a job. Those businesses couldn't have done that without marketing, hr, janitors, tradespeople, lawyers etc etc etc either. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism and there is no ethical job.

[–] minorkeys@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Their complicity is more impactful. They Empower those businesses with new technological capabilities that the public, the state and the population in general is in no position to effectively keep up with and defense against. Employees also have their own responsibility, but the empowerment engineers and scientists are giving businesses by building fucking AI is very different than what an office bureaucrat contributes by managing the logistics. Logistics can only manage what exists, science and engineers are bringing new shit into existence and handing it to psychopaths. I rarely ever hear anything about the responsibility scientists and engineers have by empowering these corporations and other ambitious people even though their contributions make it possible at all.

All these LLM engineers building the spy tools and data collection and analysis systems that will be used on us need to be brought into the conversation when we discuss whose responsible for MAGA and Trump and the technofascism that were watching be built right now. They can't do it without those inventions and discoveries, so maybe stop fucking helping them? We're responsible for what we do, not what others are doing. That goes for scientists and engineers as much as anyone else, yet are rarely mentioned.

[–] porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

That's a good point, and I feel that way about things like weapons manufacture or intelligence, and yeah, probably working for Google or Palantir. There is a limit to the abrogation of our responsibility because we need to make a living. But I still somewhat disagree with some of your point, on practical grounds, which is basically that "AI" doesn't really work.

[–] minorkeys@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago

AI is just an example of technology that empowers, pick any technology or any scientific discovery from TNT to CRISPR. The point is that new powers are being created and handed to psychopaths who are hurting all of us. At what point are these people held to account for handing billionaires the tools they use to herd us off a cliff?