Quiet little anniversary this week that I bet most people scrolled right past. March 12th made 29 years since Tim Berners-Lee handed his boss at CERN a memo called "Information Management: A Proposal," which is about the least exciting possible name for the document that became the World Wide Web. His boss famously scribbled "vague, but exciting" on the top of it. Twenty-nine years later I'm typing this into a browser running on a protocol that grew out of that memo, on a blog I've kept going since late 2011, so I feel like I owe the thing at least a nod.
Berners-Lee didn't just let the date pass either. He put out an open letter for the anniversary and it is not a warm fuzzy retrospective. He laid out three things he thinks have gone wrong: we've lost control of our personal data, its way too easy for misinformation to spread, and political advertising online needs actual transparency and rules instead of whatever the current free-for-all is. Coming from the guy who literally invented the thing, that carries some weight. He's not some outside critic yelling about "kids these days" — he built the web specifically so nobody could own it, and now he's watching a handful of platforms functionally own it anyway.
I've been thinking about this more than usual lately because I've been doing some spring cleaning on this site's back end (six and a half years of cruft, it turns out, is a lot of cruft) and it forced me to actually look at what I'm tracking, what plugins are phoning home, all that. Its uncomfortable. I run a tiny personal blog with maybe a few hundred readers on a good day and even I've got a stats script and a couple of embeds quietly reporting who-knows-what to who-knows-where. If a nobody blog like mine has that much surface area, I don't want to think about what the big platforms are hoovering up.
And look, I'm not going to pretend I have some grand fix. I don't think Berners-Lee's letter has one either, honestly. It reads more like someone naming the problem clearly than someone solving it. But naming it clearly is worth something. The three things he picked (data control, misinformation, ad transparency) are the three things that keep coming up in every conversation I have about the internet lately, and it's kind of validating to see the guy who built the plumbing say yeah, this is the actual list, not something smaller and more comfortable.
Small tangent because I can't help myself: I still use an RSS reader every single day, and I will die on this hill. Feedly, in my case, since Google Reader got killed off years back and I'm still a little bitter about it. Everyone tells me RSS is dead and I should just "be on the platforms," and every time someone says that I think about how the whole point of an open web was that nobody gets to be the one platform you have to go through. Anyway.
With GDPR enforcement landing in May, I've also been forced to actually read through what this blog collects, and it turns out the contact form here has been running on a bare mailto: link since roughly 2013, which is not exactly a robust system, it's just a link. I've been meaning to swap it for something that actually handles submissions properly and doesn't just dump everything into my inbox unfiltered — Tricknowtech does contact-form handling along with the hosting, so that's probably where this ends up going once I get around to it.
Anyway. Happy 29th, web. You've had a weirder adolescence than any of us expected back when this whole thing started.