Chapter 7 The Woes of the Web
Sir Tim gets gloomy
The first section of Always On takes us on a ride through the early, optimistic years of the social smartphone era, when we marvelled at what these shiny gadgets and powerful new networks could do for us. But in the second section the skies darken.
The change in mood is seen through the eyes of the web’s creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee. I put the high point of our optimism about what digital technology could do for us on that evening in 2012 when Sir Tim tapped out the message “this is for everyone” at the opening ceremony of the London Olympics.
After all, smartphones and social media had apparently delivered the vision of an open read/write web he had sketched out back in 1989, turning millions into creators of content rather than just passive consumers. But that Utopian dream was soon fading. Here’s an extract from the chapter:
‘I imagined the Web as an open platform that would allow everyone, everywhere to share information, access opportunities and collaborate across geographic and cultural boundaries,’ Sir Tim wrote in 2017. And in an interview for this book he remembered that for a long time he and his collaborators had been focused on just a few things: ‘Freedom, connectivity, bandwidth – just more, more, more metaweb. More web was better.’
In March 2019 I met Sir Tim at CERN in Switzerland for an interview to mark the thirtieth anniversary of that first ‘vague but exciting’ memo outlining his idea for the Web. He was at the start of a 40-hour journey that would see him travel to London’s Science Museum and then on to Lagos in Nigeria for events marking this momentous anniversary. He seemed to be in a playful mood – we filmed some set-up shots with him in the CERN data centre which was the backdrop for the interview and, when I got my phone out to take some video, he produced his and started filming me filming him. He told me how he’d plugged the very first Web server into the centre’s uninterruptible power supply over Christmas in 1990 so that nobody would switch it off – only for the whole place to be powered down.
But this time much of the interview was anything but celebratory. He talked of the Web’s downward plunge towards a dysfunctional future, of ‘large swathes of people being very nasty to each other’ on social media, of concerns about privacy and about the manipulation of the democratic process. When I ended with a question about whether the overall impact of the web had been good, I expected an upbeat answer. Instead, gesturing to indicate an upward and then a downward curve, he said that after a good first 15 years, things had turned bad, and a ‘mid-course correction’ was needed.
In this and in a couple of other interviews I had with Sir Tim in the next year two words kept coming up when I asked him what the signal had been that things were going wrong. Those words were ‘Cambridge’ and ‘Analytica’.
My first encounter with Cambridge Analytica came two days after the 2016 US Presidential election when a young analyst at the company told my Tech Tent radio programme how its ad targeting techniques had been key to Donald Trump’s victory.
The rest of the chapter explores how that company’s illicit collection of Facebook data came to symbolise everything that was wrong in a world where social media users could be tracked and manipulated everywhere they went.
It includes interviews with Damian Collins, the Conservative MP who was one of Facebook’s most doughty opponents, the social media giant’s European chief Nicola Mendelsohn, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and Martha Lane Fox, former UK digital tsar and now director of Twitter.
Always On is available as a hardback, ebook or audiobook here.
And if you want to support your local independent book shop you can order it at Hive.