Slashdot Mirror
Tim Berners-Lee Says World Wide Web Must Emerge From 'Adolescence' (venturebeat.com)
The fraying World Wide Web needs to rediscover its strengths and grow into maturity, its designer Tim Berners-Lee said on Monday, marking the 30th anniversary of the collaborative software project his supervisor initially dubbed "vague but exciting." From a report: Speaking to reporters at CERN, the physics research center outside Geneva where he invented the web, Berners-Lee said users of the web had found it "not so pretty" recently. "They are all stepping back, suddenly horrified after the Trump and Brexit elections, realizing that this web thing that they thought was that cool is actually not necessarily serving humanity very well," he said. "It seems we don't finish reeling from one privacy disaster before moving onto the next one," he added, citing concerns about whether social networks were supporting democracy. People who had grown up taking the internet's neutrality for granted now found that the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump had "rolled that back."
needs to do it first....
If there's something particularly chilling, technologists thinking their task is to "solve" politics is pretty high on the list. (Among politicians and politically motivated public commentators the parallel approach is to claim their political stance is pure scientific truth without a whiff of political stance.) My personal take on such approaches is that the cure may be more dangerous than the problem that has been framed to be the problem.
Politics is politics. There are no solutions that turn it into something else. Or at least solutions that would really fix it, but there are plenty of "solutions" which break things that actually work as a side effect, while mostly replacing the problem with another, trendier problem...
voted for the politics they wanted and for the UK to exit the EU.
Humanity enjoys the freedom to vote.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Tim Berners-Lee: World Wide Web, you must emerge from adolescence ...
WWW: I didn't ask to be born!
Tim Berners-Lee:
WWW: You're not my real parent anyways!
Power brokers and the "learned scholars" seem to always think the system is broken when normal people get more information and then don't bend to their will. Maybe the solution you envision from your ivory tower surrounded by your walled gardens isn't the world we want to live in.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Berners-Lee is so fully disconnected from reality now that he's no longer credible. He talks about the Web "saving humanity", yet he has personally participated in crafting standards for it that serve corporate interests rather than the rest of us. Under his "guidance", the Web has transitioned from a network where people participated in its development and had control over how they consumed it to one where they no longer participate, have no control, and have become passive consumers. Corporate Web developers now view their target "useless eater" audiences with the same disregard as eugenicists of the last century.
He's lamenting his own utter failure to guide his own creation in the way that he claims he really wanted it to progress, while doing the precise opposite? What a bloody hypocrite.
TBL is not the old man yelling at the cloud. He's a highly intelligent person who cannot believe, with all this internet-provided freedom of information, people still make such ignorant decisions. Common failure of the reasonably well educated.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Democracy needs an informed population to work.
That is correct, and in why only in recent years has it really started to work.
People trying to subvert democracy often attack it by misinforming the population
Indeed that has been happening for a few decades now by a central core of media that withhold and shape information.
in the last few years by convincing people that everything is fake and a lie
And how did they do that? By in fact showing people directly, what were fakes and lies.
simply choosing their own preferred truth is a valid choice.
That's the thing though. Now anyone can really get the whole picture. They can see the actual video of what people did, and judge them on that instead of what the media claims they said or did.
People complain that Trump voters ignore the "Truth" that Trump is whatever - racist, homophobic, etc. The reason Trump never has much impact from those claims, is because for the first time you can really see the falseness of them - you can see how Trump behaves now and in the past around women, around people of color, even around supporting gay marriage.
Trump is unique compared to a lot of current politicians in that there is a lot of prior video of him and so people already had a sense of him before the media started trying to craft an alternative image.
But going forward, more and more politicians will have the same thing apply - people will judge them based on what they have actually said and done instead of what the media claims about them. You can even see that with newer politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - she gets a lot of flak from the right, but you can watch a lot of video from her that is fairly reasonable, so the calls that she is crazy do not really stick.
She has some ideas about socialism that I and others find wrong, but you can actually go see what she says and judger her based on that instead of by what others sat about her. So how is any of that a "lie"? People can be better informed now that at any point in history - the real problem is that the professional political class by and large suck giant donkey balls, and now that is easy for anyone to see. In the end that is not a "problem" at all, that is a solution and the world is undergoing a correction based on this new fact...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley