The following is a section from:
The New York Review
December 4, 2025
For Tim Berners-Lee, computing was the family business. His parents were mathematicians at the center of the budding British computer industry in the 1950s: “Mum wrote binary code with a tape punch,” he writes; that is, she punched holes in long rolls of paper to represent ones and zeros. Computing was a small world. They got to know the mathematician and code breaker Alan Turing when he was trying to program their company’s first product—a five-ton mainframe computer with four thousand vacuum tubes—to play chess.
With coding in his veins, Berners-Lee attended Oxford University. Computer science was not a recognized subject, so he studied physics instead. In 1980 he took a job at European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the great complex of buildings and underground particle accelerators on the border between Switzerland and France. The tunnel that now houses the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest, seventeen miles in circumference, was under construction. The staff numbered more than three thousand and hailed from more than twenty countries. By then computers had appeared all through the complex, controlling machinery and storing data: “mini-computers” the size of refrigerators occupied the machine room; others were connected in local networks. A typical terminal displayed twenty-four lines of eighty characters and saved programs to eight-inch floppy disks. Berners-Lee’s division was called Data and Documents, and CERN had digital data and documents in a miscellany of formats and languages, shared among an ever-shifting arrangement of groups and networks. He saw this sprawl as a problem needing new ideas.
Computer scientists, like bureaucrats, tend to think in terms of hierarchical structure: directory trees and organization charts; documents in containers; files stored in folders. This offended Berners-Lee’s intuition about information: that what matters is not objects but relationships. For him the interconnections—links both ways— were paramount. “I was proposing… to free those documents—essentially to dump the files from their folders onto the floor,” he writes. “What you wanted, instead, was to encourage new and unexpected relationships between pieces of information to flourish. And, to do that, you had to let the users make those connections, in any way they saw fit.”
The diagram in his first project pro¬posal, dated March 1989, was labeled “Mesh” He decided he needed a better name and settled on World Wide Web, because he liked the abbreviation. Then he began proselytizing. Beyond the walls of his organization the global network of networks was taking shape, and it, too, had data and documents. “CERN is a model in miniature of the rest of the world in a few years’ time,” Berners-Lee wrote. “CERN meets now some problems which the rest of the world will have to face soon.” His memo fascinated some of his colleagues and amused others, but the World Wide Web project fit nowhere into Berners-Lee’s actual responsibilities, nor into the mission of a European taxpayer-funded particle physics lab.
Nonetheless his supervisors seem to have tolerated him—an excitable fast-talker, “full of fizz,” with an offbeat passion project. He set about making a system that would have practical utility for his colleagues at their far-flung workstations. He programmed what we now call a web server and a web browser; he created a language for hyperlinks and addresses, URLs, like https://www.nybooks.com. He confronted a chicken-and-egg problem: no one had any reason to share informa¬tion in the form of webpages, because no one had a web browser; and no one had any reason to use a web browser until there were webpages to visit. The catalyst for mass adoption at CERN — the “killer app”—turned out to be the phone book. The up-to-date laboratory directory resided on a mainframe com¬puter; logging into it was a nuisance. So instead, by 1991 a thousand CERN researchers were using his crude web browser to look up phone numbers. Berners-Lee hosted the world’s first webpage on a PC in his office. It was titled “The World Wide Web project,” and it featured a series of links, includ¬ing one called Frequently Asked Ques¬tions. The computer itself featured a warning notice in red marker: “This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!”
He started logging “hits” on his server; as word spread, some of these came across the Internet from outside CERN. By the end of the year he counted a hundred a day. It was a thousand a day before the end of 1992 and ten thousand in 1993, and other people set up web servers of their own; everyone started advertising www.this and www.that, and now more than half the people on earth are users of the World Wide Web.
Berners-Lee gave the online world not just a technology but an atti¬tude. Call it a credo or, as Walsh does in her philosophical exploration (via Kant, Schopenhauer, and Lacan), an aesthetic. It’s in the slogan he uses as his title: This Is for Everyone. Along with other Internet pioneers, he believed that the essential tools—shared protocols and software—should be available to everyone free of charge. No company or government should control the web—that was his vision. In 1993 he persuaded CERN to release all his source code to the public, relinquishing intellectual property rights and ensuring that any user could enjoy it, share it, and modify it.
Walsh is one of those users—part of a generation that could say (as she did in a previous book, Girl Online), “All the good things in my life have come to me through screens.” She, too, cel¬ebrates an egalitarian ideal. We built Internet culture; it’s ours. “I don’t like books that use ‘we,’ that extend the particular to the general, erasing the subtleties of individual lives,” she writes, but that we is essential to her project. She speaks for a presumed cohort of like-minded people, of the right age and class to have a shared experience of the Internet, from then to now. “Online, what we make, and make of ourselves, is experienced not only by whoever’s in front of us, but by anyone we allow to see (and some we don’t),” she says. This is a nice observation. She adds, “Online isn’t an unfamiliar experience any more; it’s where we live.” She means the people who are sometimes called consumers but who, for Internet culture, are also the creators. Her amateurs were liable to use the word aesthetic with particular pleasure and self-consciousness. She celebrates the aesthetic they created, and mourns it, and celebrates it again.
She barely mentions Berners-Lee, but he anticipated her aesthetic of the creative amateur. He, too, liked chaos—“anarchic jumble.” He deplored the apparent rationality evidenced by urban planners like Le Corbusier: “‘rational’ cities, which segmented neigh-borhoods by function and stripped buildings of detail and ornamentation ” His design for the web was an antidesign, refusing to impose particular structures, leaving space for unanticipated uses and possibilities: “I explicitly conceived of the web to be fractal, thumbing my nose at this kind of false ‘rationality.’” It would evolve, making connections, opening portals, and encouraging creativity. Doctorow remembers it as “a wild and woolly in¬ternet, a space where people with disfavored views could find one another, offer mutual aid, and organize.”
Berners-Lee’s memoir serves as a genial potted history of the Internet. He seems to have been everywhere and met everyone. Making an early appearance is a college student at the Univer¬sity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign named Marc Andreessen. In 1993 he was an undergraduate learning to program—he earned $6.85 an hour writing Unix code at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, on the Illinois campus. With another NCSA programmer, Eric Bina, he wrote a web browser they called Mosaic, intended to be simple and user-friendly, with ver¬sions for Windows and Macintosh PCs.
That was exactly what the world needed in this moment, when hundreds of thousands of PC owners discovered all at once, modems squealing, that they could “dial in” to “Internet ser¬vice providers.” The NCSA, with funding from Al Gore’s program, backed the Mosaic browser with press promotion, and for a while it was so popular that people talked about being “on Mosaic” rather than on the Internet or the web. “Think of it as a map to the buried treasures of the Information Age,” The New York Times gushed. Hardly anyone remembers Mosaic now, the history of the Internet being a history of things that were incredibly hot for an incredibly short time.
Berners-Lee, who recalls a tense meeting with a truculent Andreessen in a campus basement, saw his free-for-all vision being co-opted. In short order, Andreessen graduated, de¬camped to Silicon Valley, and took the web browser private with his own Mo¬saic Communications Corporation. He settled an intellectual property lawsuit from the University of Illinois, changed the browser’s name to Netscape, and became one of the first Internet bil-lionaires. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1996 with bare feet and a lupine grin. Thirty years later, Andreessen is one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful venture capitalists, an enthusiastic backer of the current wave of AI and cryptocurrency. He is the quintessential technocrat, a proud captain of what he calls “the techno-capital machine.”
To its users, the web browser was a lovely tool. To its owners, it was a platform—a means of control, a sys¬tem that locked users in and monitored their behavior. Microsoft, late to the Internet, caught up and countered Netscape with a browser of its own, Internet Explorer. This period was known as the browser war. The browser acquired more and more features—for playing games, watching videos, signing forms, and most of all buying stuff, ideally with a single click. There was money to be extracted, data to be harvested.