A less tangled web

You could say it’s all his fault. The reason we no longer pop into the bank, send each other letters, or buy and sell secondhand bicycles through the local newspaper is because Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the internet. Indeed, the reason we have Donald Trump may be his fault too.

Being a scientist and an academic, Berners-Lee possibly lacked the venal imagination to foresee the monster he would create. Where he saw a world in which important information and ideas could be shared freely, others saw the chance to make fortunes out of pornography, gambling and facilitating the opportunity for anonymous misanthropes to vent their spleens upon the world. He was reportedly devastated by Russian hackers’ attempts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, and the Cambridge Analytica Facebook privacy breach. The internet had ‘‘failed rather than served humanity’’, he said.

So now he’s trying to put things right, with a project called Solid that will allow users to choose where their data is stored, and who can access it. We wish him well, though cynics might say it, too, will end in tears.

As Vanity Fair so sagely put it earlier this year, the internet was not stolen from us; instead we ‘‘gave it away with every signed user agreement and intimate moment shared with technology’’. That’s Vanity Fair the magazine, not the novel now being serialised on TV. Though one suspects Thackeray would have had no difficulty recognising the shysters and charlatans who have made themselves famous through social media.

Solid may save our data, but can it save us from our vanity?