Tuesday, March 12 marked the 35th anniversary of the World Wide Web. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the visionary who designed it, now says the web is “perverse,” and doing more harm than good. The way it has evolved, he says, generates dysfunctional incentives that allow a few giant platforms and their all-knowing algorithms to steer human behavior into antisocial, destructive directions.
So how do we fix the internet? Berners-Lee knows as much as anyone that it cannot be achieved with Band-Aid solutions. Previous approaches to solving the internet’s ills—for example, the European Union’s privacy protections, such as 2016’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and its “right to be forgotten” laws—have not delivered on their promise because they failed to address the core problem of the net’s design. As the great architect and design philosopher Buckminster Fuller once said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” That’s the mindset we need to bring to this most urgent of tasks.
Read more at TIME Magazine.