"Still, his creation keeps growing, absorbing our reality in the process. If you're reading this online, Berners-Lee wrote the hypertext markup language (HTML) that your browser is interpreting. He's the necessary condition behind everything from Amazon to Wikipedia, and if A.I. brings about what Sam Altman recently called "the gentle singularity"-or else buries us in slop-that, too, will be an outgrowth of his global collective consciousness."
"Somehow, the man responsible for all of this is a mild-mannered British Unitarian who loves model trains and folk music, and recently celebrated his seventieth birthday with a picnic on a Welsh mountain. An emeritus professor at Oxford and M.I.T., he divides his time between the U.K., Canada, and Concord, Massachusetts, where he and his wife, Rosemary Leith, live in a stout greige house older than the Republic."
Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 and created HTML, which underpins modern internet services. His work enabled platforms from Amazon to Wikipedia and shapes future developments like AI. He worries about current web harms including misinformation, addictive algorithms, and extractive monopolies. He maintains a modest personal life as a British Unitarian and enjoys model trains and folk music. He divides his time between the U.K., Canada, and Concord, Massachusetts, and holds emeritus positions at Oxford and MIT. He believes the web can be reformed and intends to take action to address its contemporary problems.
Read at The New Yorker
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