This Is for Everyone summary

Berners-Lee arrived in Geneva, Switzerland in 1980, to work at CERN, which at the time stood for European Council for Nuclear Research. He found himself stepping into a place that looked half science museum, half secret lair: concrete halls, underground rings, and machines that hurled particles around like tiny race cars. 

He was hired as part of a team that was tasked with updating the control system on the Proton Synchrotron Booster. It was a job that involved replacing massive banks of knobs and oscilloscopes with software and plain terminals. He enjoyed the challenge, even as the room’s glow dimmed into a quiet ring of consoles.

Berners-Lee was lucky to have supportive bosses at CERN who let him follow his muse in creating his dream network, one that went far beyond the connected computers at CERN. One of those bosses was Mike Sendall, who hooked him up with the one tool that really sped up the process: the NeXTcube. Developed by Steve Jobs during his wilderness years outside of Apple, the NeXTcube came with a brilliant Interface Builder that practically allowed him to drag and drop an app together, quickly and easily, one piece at a time.

In 1990, as he was putting on the finishing touches, he named the project the World Wide Web. It was all coming together. HTTP fetched resources swiftly. HTML marked them up with simple tags. The jewel was the URL: compact, open-ended, able to point to a paragraph in a file or to a server across the ocean. Networking lived to the left of the hash; hypertext lived to the right. That small character became the handshake where two worlds met. The first app, WorldWideWeb.app, read and wrote pages, a tidy tool that matched the spirit of the place that birthed it.

For the web to catch on, it was a matter of that “universal” nature figuring itself out. Berners-Lee still shepherded HTTP, HTML, and URLs, but text-only clients on rare NeXT boxes wouldn’t carry the day. He encouraged an open ecosystem, and developers raced ahead, but at the same time, standards mattered.

By 1992, it was already clear that the US was taking the internet seriously. By this time, Senator Al Gore had already drafted a bill that was passed by congress, approving a $600 million budget to pave the way for the “Information Superhighway.” So the author believed it wise to set up a second home in the US, and he landed on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The early web felt exuberant and hand-made. When America Online emerged and brought in a flood of newcomers, the event became known as the “Eternal September.” The web instantly became far less academic and, well, more fun. Early enthusiasts like Justin Hall stitched together personal sites that were unique and creative. Geocities handed out “homesteads”; Craigslist spread city to city with plain pages and real utility. 

By the mid-90s, Håkon Lie’s CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, arrived and gave designers a way to create pages that transformed sites from being blocky and dull to intentional and eye-popping. It was also what allowed the transition from laptops to mobile devices to be relatively seamless.

When smartphones arrived, it brought a flood of new users to the web. Global counts leapt from one to two billion overnight. Berners-Lee wanted those numbers to include the unconnected. 

In 2009, with his wife Rosemary Leith, he launched the Web Foundation to treat web access as a basic right and to do the patient, policy-heavy work that made access real. This included field visits to schools in Rwanda to set up satellite dishes, and witnessing the difference increased connectedness can make in Burkina Faso, where shared farming techniques rescued half a million hectares of land. This was the vision he always had in mind: connectedness amplifying ingenuity. Bringing together two people on opposite ends of the planet, each of whom has one half of the solution to a game-changing problem.

It was at a 25th-birthday party for the web that Tim Berners-Lee listened to Demis Hassabis describe the neural nets that were powering DeepMind’s artificial intelligence. Rather than programmed logic, this method allowed the AI to practice and learn. It was a big leap forward, one that would eventually earn Hassabis a Nobel prize for his work with AlphaFold’s and using AI to predict protein shapes with better-than-human accuracy. 

But while AI has led to the creation of some extremely helpful tools, it has also raised a lot of questions and concerns. From copyright issues to the ability to create increasingly realistic-looking deepfakes, a lot of these concerns are only serving to further erode trust and stoke divides.