The inventor of the Internet remains convinced he made the world a better place

Imagine what it must have been like to invent the wheel, and then still be around to watch some fool in a BMW driving at 110mph down the fast lane of the motorway while lighting a cigarette with one hand and squeezing a blackhead with the other. Said inventor would likely be ruing the day they ever convinced themselves that creating something smooth and circular to aid the process of getting from A to B would make life easier for all. They'd hold their head in their hands, and wail.

Such is the fantastically curious case of Tim Berners-Lee, not merely one of the cleverest people of the digital age, but perhaps the cleverest of all. And here he is, at 70, witnessing the enormous impact his invention has wrought upon modern life. "I was 34 years old when I first presented the idea for the World Wide Web," he says in his memoir This Is For Everyone.

At the time, in 1988, Berners-Lee was writing code at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, based in Switzerland[1]. Here, he set himself the task of finding a more efficient way for everyone to communicate with one another via their PCs. "I needed a powerful information system which would broach those different types of computer systems, those teams, those people, and those ideas," he writes.

Berners-Lee was born in 1955 in south-west London to mathematician parents (Photo: Karjean Levine/Getty Images)

Berners-Lee did tend to get rather carried away with such lightbulb moments. "I will admit that when I get enthusiastic about something, my mind begins to race and I can't talk fast enough to put my thoughts into actions. I have a tendency to explain things at the maximum level of abstraction." By the time you finish reading his memoir, you will most definitely agree with him on this point. Struck with the idea of "combining two pre-existing technologies into a single platform", he alighted upon what he called the "Internet", capital I, a protocol for connecting computers.

He then developed "hypertext", which would take "an ordinary document and bring it to life by adding 'links'". From such small acorns do vast oak trees grow. But then came, in rapid succession, more oak trees, and then great forests of them, through which over 70 per cent of the planet's population duly ran amok, a significant proportion of whom were desperate for the world to hear their braying, all caps opinions on matters consequential and otherwise.

In this way was human discourse changed forever. Consequently, one might come to Berners-Lee's memoir expecting a mea culpa, the apologetic screed of an inventor distraught by just how much we have corrupted his beautiful gift to society. But no.

Instead, here is a man whose glass is not merely half-full but positively overflowing. He remains (rightly) convinced that the internet[2] has changed the world for the better, but also that it is still not too late to rein it - and us - back in line with his original vision: to connect us all harmoniously and helpfully. He did not mean to unleash a monster, he stresses.

Really, he didn't.

The book cover of Berners-Lee's This Is for Everyone published by Pan Macmillan

Berners-Lee was born in 1955 - the same year, intriguingly, as Steve Jobs (Apple) and Bill Gates (Microsoft) - in south-west London to mathematician parents. He graduated from Oxford[3], invented the internet, and was adamant to give it away for free, convinced that this was something that would benefit every single human. "Just as I'd hoped," he writes, "it has enabled a flourishing of creativity and self-expression." Self-expression, however, was part of the problem, as he notes. "Along with all the empowerment and collaboration that I love, a small but significant part of it has multiplied into something misleading, toxic and habit-forming." This Is For Everyone is as much a technical manual as it is a memoir, Berners-Lee insistent on explaining precisely how the internet's myriad nuts and bolts function.

So if you ever wondered why website addresses ran, for example, www.inews.co.uk[4] rather than co.uk.inews.www, then you will learn it here - in detail. So heavy with jargon does it occasionally become that you rather pity Stephen Fry[5] - who is recording the audio version - for having to hack his way through paragraphs like this: "The first step was to allow a link to include a file name, so it could take you anywhere on the computer. Instead of just 'Section1', the destination might read: /users/alice/book/chapter3#section1.

See the hash sign, and the computer file name (i.e. /users/alice/book/chapter3) before it? To the right are identifiers for objects in the world of hypertext, like link destinations, and parts of a document (i.e. section1). To the left are the bits about networking." A warning for Mr Fry: this is all a long way from wizards and Hogwarts.

At times you can feel Berners-Lee's ghostwriter, the American science author Stephen Witt, encouraging him to intermittently reveal a little more of the man behind the intellect. To this end, he confesses that, upon completing his degree at Oxford, he and his friends wanted to let their hair down. "We broke onto the roof of the college, sneaked across to the clock tower, and inscribed it with Euler's formula (ei? + 1 = 0), in an attempt to deflect suspicion onto the Mathematics Department."

Berners-Lee has worked with world leaders and governments to ensure better access to the web in remote places (Photo: Catrina Genovese)

Elsewhere, a wife, Jane, briefly appears early on, only to be seamlessly replaced a few chapters later by another one, Nancy, with whom he would have two children. Eventually, there will be a third wife, Rosemary, "my soulmate".

Mostly, Berners-Lee wants to stay on point. And who can blame him? It's a fascinating story.

Since inventing the internet, he has worked tirelessly alongside world leaders and their governments to ensure better access to the web, and more effective ways to use it. In Burkina Faso, for example, he helped facilitate online access in some of its more remote villages. This allowed farmers to share crop knowledge, which resulted in better harvests for all.

Elsewhere, he expresses frustration that such freedom of information is censored in those countries with stricter regimes. Nevertheless, his overriding optimism remains robust. True, social media has propagated a global mental health crisis, and the web has decimated industries like journalism and music - where content is now expected to be free - but he insists that there are ways to better manage this, and for us to use the technology more wisely.

But herein lies the fundamental problem. What, precisely, is "wisely", and who gets to wield this wisdom? Towards the end of the book, he offers a manifesto for future use: respect online privacy and data rights; respect civil discourse; employ AI for good rather than for ill.

If all this positivity is infectious, it can also seem quaint in its wishful thinking. For his long-term vision to come good, we will all need to sing from the same hymn sheet - and how likely is that? The horse has bolted.

But then perhaps this is merely another unhelpfully cynical view, and therefore part of the problem, not the solution? Berners-Lee is all about solution. What is clear from reading his book is that, were we all to follow this remarkable man's lead, the world - both online and IRL - would be a better, safer, happier place.

It's a nice thought.

Tim Berners-Lee's 'This Is for Everyone' (Pan Macmillan) is out now

References

1. ^ Switzerland (inews.co.uk)
2. ^ internet (inews.co.uk)
3. ^ Oxford (inews.co.uk)
4. ^ www.inews.co.uk (www.inews.co.uk)
5. ^ Stephen Fry (inews.co.uk)