I spotted that someone else had read this recently and I thought it sounded like a really interesting book - part memoir, part Tim Berners-Lee's vision for the future of the web. I am pretty fed up with the state of the web today, so I was keen to see what the inventor of the world wide web had to say about how to make things better. This was another library find, similar to Techno Feudalism and Careless People, so I just wanted to give the library yet another cheeky plug - if you haven't signed up yet, what are you waiting for?

About the author

Tim Berners-Lee should need no introduction, but just in case you've been living under a rock for the last fifty years, he was the man who invented the World Wide Web (not the internet, that already existed) while he was working at CERN in Switzerland. In the prologue, he describes how it was this wild idea of his to combine the internet with hypertext and that he would take every opportunity to bring this up, even when it wasn't really appropriate. I mean, CERN works on particle acceleration, not Computer Science stuff, so I'm not sure it was ever appropriate! In this book, Berners-Lee talks us through how he got there and beyond. With two mathematicians who became electrical engineers as parents, he was introduced to electronics very early in life and developed a passion for computers along the way, building his very own computer from bits of rubbish he gathered. Once the web was established, he didn't stop there - he founded the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) to set much needed standards and the Web Foundation to advocate for a free and open web. His latest venture is a startup called Inrupt, which aims to put data in users' own hands (rather than having it siloed behind corporate paywalls) by creating a digital data wallet - a concept he calls "Solid", abbreviated from Social Linked Data.

The TL;DR

NOTE: This section contains spoilers, so don’t read it if that bothers you!

So it turns out that Berners-Lee's idea for the world wide web came from the coffee station at CERN - folks would gather around not just to have coffee, but also to share information. CERN is very much a multi-lingual organisation and scientists would communicate in their own languages and have separate silos of information, so it wasn't always easy to find out what you needed. The coffee station centralised access and allowed you to find a person who knew about a thing, or at least a person who knew a person who knew about a thing. You can see how conceptually, this can be arranged as an interconnected "web" of information - very clever.

The whole thing took a while to get off the ground - Berners-Lee himself confesses that he isn't the best at communicating ideas and it sounds like his colleagues liked him well enough but were extremely confused every time they spoke to him about this "hypertext thing" he was trying to get going. I must admit that find this image of someone who is so excited and passionate about their own idea that they're getting in their own way kind of endearing. I am very nostalgic for the days of the early web, as I'm sure a lot of millenials are, so it was lovely to read about how it all came together through people's sheer will to make it happen and a sense that this was important.

It's interesting to hear about both the exponential growth of the world wide web and the struggles it's had to overcome in the early days. There's lots of little anecdotes shared by Berners-Lee that show how the web could have turned out very differently - he himself was envisioning it as an editable source of information, like Wikipedia, but that never took off. Selfishly, I'm sort of glad it didn't, because who knows what my career would have been like if folks could have just edited their own content from the beginning! I started off writing HTML for fun as a teenager and without that first step, I'm not sure I would have become a programmer. There's also the story of how the language of the web could have easily been Python rather than JavaScript if Guido van Rossum had gotten his way, which would have been interesting!

Berners-Lee's ethos (the eponymous "this is for everyone") comes through loud and clear in this book - I particularly love this quote: "the connectivity of the web accomplished something else I really hoped for - it allowed people to make connections across barriers of class, ethnicity and culture". He has advocated tirelessly to try and make sure this message does not get lost and has even devised a contract for the web that countries, companies and individuals can look to for guidance on how to treat this precious resource.

The book goes right up to the modern day (it was published in 2025) and charts Berners-Lee's career and private life in some detail - I have listed some highlights here but I encourage you to read the book yourself.

My thoughts

Although it took me a minute to get going on this one, once I got 20% or so in, I sailed through the rest of it on my train journey to and from work. The book is written in a conversational style and is aimed at the average reader rather than folks who are overly technical. Stories about the web and its development are interspersed with personal anecdotes - anything from Berners-Lee's running style being like that of a dog to the day he met the Queen for the first time - which makes for an engaging read.

It was also lovely to read a book about the modern web that was not just full of despair but also offered solutions (looking at you Enshittification - though I did very much enjoy that book too!). Somewhere along the way, the original open ethos of the web has gotten warped purely for the purpose of furthering capitalism and that has to change. I like the sound of the Solid concept - the idea is simple: all your data should belong to you. Any time you use an app or a website, if any data is created, it should be saved to your personal "pod" - kind of like a wallet that only you have access to and you can grant others access to it as you see fit. Having all that data together in one place would create interesting opportunities not just for planning life but also learning more about yourself and your habits.

Berners-Lee is an AI optimist and thinks it's not too late for us to stop AI from going rogue. I am not entirely sure I share his relentless optimism on this front, but I'd like to. Humanity is going down a dark path, but perhaps it is possible for us to bring ourselves back from the brink with the right laws and regulations.

Overall, I highly recommend you give this book a read.

My rating

★★★★★★★★☆☆

Reserve This is for Everyone from your local library like me, or you can buy it from bookshop.org or your local bookseller. It is also available digitally on Kobo and you can even listen to it read out by Stephen Fry and Tim Berners-Lee on libro.fm. I don’t use Amazon so will not post links to it here, though I’m sure they sell it too.