This Is for Everyone - by Tim Berners-Lee (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A Sunday Times Bestseller

The inventor of the World Wide Web explores his vision's promise--and how it can be redeemed for the future.

Since its invention in 1989, the World Wide Web has changed everything--transforming humanity into the first digital species. Through the web, we live, work, dream, quarrel, and connect. It has launched a new era of creativity and collaboration while unleashing powerful forces that imperil truth and privacy and polarize public debate. As artificial intelligence supercharges the online experience, the stakes of understanding the web's origins and evolution, and guiding its future, have never been greater.

In This Is for Everyone, the web's inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, recounts the story of his iconic creation and offers a vital perspective on today's most urgent technological questions. With his trademark humor and candor, he recounts how he arrived at CERN, the European Council for Nuclear Research, as a young engineer. At a time when the internet's use was primarily academic, he foresaw its potential as a tool to connect people, information, and ideas. By inventing the World Wide Web, he realized this vision.

Born in the same year as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, Tim Berners-Lee would become a different kind of technologist, famously distributing his innovation for no commercial reward. As the web rapidly gained users around the world, he oversaw its global governance and developed HTML, HTTP, and other fundamental protocols. His goal was to unleash a wave of creativity and collaboration for the benefit of all--a goal he has pursued to this day.

Peppered with rich anecdotes and amusing reflections, This Is for Everyone is a gripping, in-the-room account of the invention of the web, the foundation of our digital world. As the rapid development of artificial intelligence brings new risks and possibilities, Berners-Lee also offers a crucial guide to the decisions ahead--and proposes a new approach to the web that enables users to control their data and put it to rewarding new uses. In so doing, he shows how our digital lives can be reengineered for the sake of human flourishing rather than for profit or power.

Review Quotes

"An affable, avuncular narrator . . . Berners-Lee's decision to make the web public was characteristic; throughout his career, he has been a mensch . . . In place of the usual [tech book] tics--the uncritical fetishization of AI, the insistence that technological advances will serve as a panacea, and the accompanying refusal to engage with political or philosophical questions--Berners-Lee is quite explicit that social conditions shape how technologies are deployed. He knows better than anyone that 'the free, open access communications paradigm we have did not arrive like magic. It was the product of a fair amount of political wrangling, ' much of which he is responsible for."
--Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post

"Berners-Lee gave the online world not just a technology but an attitude. Call it a credo or . . . an aesthetic. It's in the slogan he uses as his title: This Is for Everyone. Along with other Internet pioneers, he believed that the essential tools--shared protocols and software--should be available to everyone free of charge. No company or government should control the web--that was his vision . . . Nothing could be further from the early hopes of Tim Berners-Lee; yet he remains an optimist by nature."
--James Gleick, The New York Review of Books

"Part memoir, part manifesto, Berners-Lee's chirpy book This Is for Everyone is both an engaging history of the origins and evolution of the web and an ingenious road map for how we can reclaim control over our digital lives. His big idea, which has now become his latest personal obsession, is to restore data sovereignty to every individual by redesigning the web . . . To his credit, the seventy-year-old Berners-Lee is still fighting to preserve the web's original promise, which, he argues, has been despoiled by malign users, rapacious corporations and authoritarian governments."
--John Thornhill, Financial Times

"[This Is for Everyone] is a cool breath of air in an overheated room. Berners-Lee literally invented the world wide web, and he's clear-eyed about the benefits and the dangers. The book is a reminiscence about how the web came into being, and contains some very sharp thinking about what we need to do now. The personality that comes through is charming, clever, self-effacing, interesting and thoughtful about his creation."
--Naomi Alderman, The Observer (London)

"Tim Berners-Lee's This Is for Everyone is more than just an autobiography. This book is an insightful recounting of the development of the World Wide Web and a profound declaration on how humanity should remain at the center of technology as we move forward in the twenty-first century."
--Al Gore, former US vice president

"This Is for Everyone takes us on a journey with this incredibly important man and his work as a visionary. Full of warmth and humanity, he is on a mission to fight for the integrity of the web: determined that his living, evolving creation will bring us all together in harmony."
--Kate Bush, human

"As a company running computer networks before the dawn of the internet age, Bloomberg was an early beneficiary of the towering wave of change that Tim Berners-Lee ushered in with the World Wide Web. His book offers a fascinating look at the origin and evolution of a world-transforming invention and how we can harness its potential as a force for good."
--Michael Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg and Bloomberg Philanthropies and mayor of New York, 2002-2013

"Tim Berners-Lee stands tall among our greatest inventors, making history not just because of the World Wide Web he pioneered, but because he made it available free to everyone. Not only that, but his story of creativity continues: his Solid project seeks to put the control of technology where it should and must be--in the hands of the people."
--Gordon Brown, former prime minister of the United Kingdom

"Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the World Wide Web is a landmark event of the last fifty years--and his tireless work to keep the web accessible to everyone is a service to humanity. In this absorbing, entertaining, and all-important book, Berners-Lee tells the story of the web's genesis, reckons with its evolution, and offers urgent and visionary guidance for its future."
--Darren Walker, president of Ford Foundation and author of From Generosity to Justice

"Sir Tim Berners-Lee's powerful memoir takes us on a guided tour through the creation and evolution of the web by the inventor himself with a humble, gripping, inspiring personal story. This is not just a history; it's an extraordinary personal testament to human and technological potential and a critical reminder that as AI begins to even more dramatically transform our lives, we must work, as Tim does, to ensure that technology is built to nurture creativity, collaboration, and compassion for all."
--Ruth Porat, president and chief investment officer of Alphabet and Google

"How lucky we are that the first new major application built on top of the generative internet was Tim Berners-Lee's brainchild, the web. The web's affordances reflect Tim's extraordinary brilliance, his deeply humanistic values, and his humble outlook, and this book represents a definitive account of just how it worked. This Is for Everyone is both eye-opening memoir and stirring manifesto: the inventor's sketch of how we got here, and a road map for where we might still go, if we choose wisely."
--Jonathan Zittrain, cofounder of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University; and author of The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It

"The World Wide Web is only thirty-six years old, but like much in our industrialized society we already take it for granted. However, it did not happen by accident--like everything that we make, first it had to be designed by someone. That someone is Tim Berners-Lee, and in This Is for Everyone, he describes its creation. It is a great story, and the narrative is full of insights into the world of science and makes for compulsive reading."
--Lord Norman Foster of Thames Bank OM

About the Author

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 at CERN in Switzerland. Since then, through his work with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Open Data Institute, and the World Wide Web Foundation, he has been a tireless advocate for shared standards, open web access for all, and the power of individuals on the web. A firm believer in the positive power of technology, he was named in Time magazine's list of the most important people of the twentieth century.