So I watched the Olympics opening ceremony on Friday, and honestly I didn't expect to get misty-eyed watching people run around a football field in London. But there I was, four days later, still thinking about it.
Danny Boyle put Tim Berners-Lee in the opening ceremony. Tim Berners-Lee. The guy who invented the web. Right there in the stadium, tweeting "This is for everyone" to the crowd while the whole thing was broadcast to two billion people. I'm not trying to be dramatic, but that's actually insane.
I had to watch it twice because I kept pausing it, which probably annoyed the people I was watching with. On my second watch, I kept thinking about how weird it must feel to be Tim Berners-Lee right now. You invent something in 1989 (literally just trying to help physicists share research papers) and twenty-three years later it's become the foundational technology of human civilization, and the British government is like "yeah, we're gonna put you in the opening ceremony." How do you wrap your head around that?
The timing feels loaded though, doesn't it? Apple's stock is getting hammered. Facebook's IPO is looking like a disaster. There's this weird moment right now where the internet has absolutely won, but nobody's really sure if the companies that are supposed to be running it are sustainable or worth anything. And then Boyle puts the actual creator of the web on stage—not Steve Jobs (not alive anyway), not Mark Zuckerberg, not anybody wearing a hoodie—just the low-key British physicist who believed it should be for everyone.
I don't think I'm reading too much into it. That's exactly what it was doing.
The rest of the ceremony was fine. Lots of industrial revolution stuff, lots of noise, some genuinely cool moments with the children running around. But it's the Berners-Lee bit that's going to stick with me. It felt like someone was saying something that needed saying, even if you had to watch the Olympics opening ceremony to hear it.
What I love about that moment is how little fuss there was. He didn't give a speech. He didn't have pyrotechnics. He just walked out, typed on a weird oversized keyboard (which honestly was a funny touch, very British), sent a tweet, and walked off. The crowd probably didn't even know who he was. But the people who did know got it.
The web turning twenty-three this year (feels weird to say that), and we're still figuring out what it means. We've got this amazing open platform that connects billions of people, and we're simultaneously running this insane race where venture-backed startups are trying to monetize every possible behavior on it. We've got governments getting nervous about it, privacy advocates scared of it, and businesspeople completely convinced they can package and sell the whole thing back to us in the form of an app.
Putting Berners-Lee in the opening ceremony felt like a little quiet argument for remembering what it was actually supposed to be about. Open. Decentralized. For everyone.
I'm probably going to rewatch that ceremony sometime, just to see that bit again. And I'm going to remember that on July 27, 2012, someone decided the Olympics opening (the biggest broadcast moment of the year for a lot of people) was the right place to remind everyone where the web came from.
Not a bad message for the world to see.