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The man credited with inventing the World Wide Web has received the 2016 Turing Award, often referred to as the Nobel Prize of the computing industry.
The Brit Sir Tim Berners-Lee was honoured by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and receives a $1m prize courtesy of Google. He is recognised for pioneering the Web in 1989, while working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).
Basic building blocks of the internet as we know it, such as the language for webpages HTML, the communications protocol HTTP and the naming scheme URLs were designed by Berners-Lee. He also coded the first internet browser using open source software.
“The first-ever World Wide Web site went online in 1991. Although this doesn’t seem that long ago, it is hard to imagine the world before Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s invention,” said ACM president Vicki L. Hanson. “Sir Tim Berners-Lee not only developed the key components, such as URLs and web browsers that allow us to use the Web, but offered a coherent vision of how each of these elements would work together as part of an integrated whole.”
In an interview with the BBC after the announcement, Berners-Lee criticised attempts to weaken encryption on devices, threats to net neutrality and raised concerns about online privacy, which he says is a “basic human right”.
Reading the comments of the man credited with inventing the internet as he talked about the concerns he has for the way the internet is heading, was comforting.
It’s something I have been thinking about a lot lately, particularly because I just finished reading Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, published in 2013. The novel is set in 2001 New York pre-9/11, and centres around Maxine Tarnow who runs a fraud investigation agency called Tail ’Em and Nail ’Em. Maxine is asked to look into an IT security firm called hashslingrz and soon finds problems with the company’s books and relationships with potential terrorists.
While the narrative arc is great, the book very clearly deals with fears and anxieties about what it means for the virtual world to seep more and more into the material one.
As Maxine’s father, Ernie, says about the internet: “This magical convenience that creeps now like a smell through the smallest details of our lives, the shopping, the housework, the homework, the taxes, absorbing our energy, eating up our precious time. And there’s no innocence. Anywhere. Never was. It was conceived in sin, the worst possible. As it kept growing, it never stopped carrying in its heart a bitter-cold death wish for the planet, and don’t think anything has changed, kid.”
Maxine retorts that the internet is just chat rooms and online shopping and then adds something about it empowering billions of people with the “promise of freedom”.
“Call it freedom, its based on control,” retorts Ernie. “Everybody connected together, impossible anybody should get lost, ever again. Take the next step, connect it to these cellphones, you’ve got a total web of surveillance, inescapable.”
Ernie’s pessimistic view would have many label him a Luddite, but you have to admit it rings true in 2017, where spying exposés abound.
Curiously, I discovered through a book review of Bleeding Edge that Pynchon in fact had an article published in the New York Times on 28 October 1984, titled Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite? “Historically, Luddites flourished in Britain from about 1811 to 1816,” wrote Pynchon. “They were bands of men, organized, masked, anonymous, whose object was to destroy machinery used mostly in the textile industry.”
Pynchon says it isn’t clear if the Luddites actually used the term to describe themselves, but it was often used to polemically refer to them, implying an irrational fear and hatred of science and technology.
He argues that their more modern descendants have misunderstood these Luddites. “The knitting machines which provoked the first Luddite disturbances had been putting people out of work for well over two centuries. Everybody saw this happening – it became part of daily life. They also saw the machines coming more and more to be the property of men who did not work, only owned and hired,” wrote Pynchon.
This was the first time I had ever come to grips with the origins of the word “Luddite”. When I thought about these Luddites as revolutionaries in the context of a labour struggle, it gave me a whole new perspective on the word.
So the next time someone calls you a Luddite because you point out how the adoption of technology is causing worker exploitation, acts of violence or any other social ills, you don’t have to feel like these points are irrational – in fact, the opposite is true.
This article originally appeared in the 20 April edition of finweek. Buy and download the magazine here.
