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The web is a miracle
Not everything has to be a business.
I don’t think the web could happen again.
A public-minded developer, operating in a public service research institution, built an open knowledge-base with no eye on profit or even productizing it. Because of its openness and simplicity, it spread to other like-minded researchers, and then beyond. It wasn’t a product or a startup or a business, and nobody tried to build one around it until much later.
The foundations of the web are pure. And they changed the world.
I wonder what kinds of conditions would need to be true for another platform to be built in a similar way? Lots of people have tried, but none of them have the purity of participation for the love of it that the web has. Even Tim Berners-Lee’s own subsequent attempts are a startup.
Why have we lost that community-hacker sensibility? How can we get it back?
One answer might be that we don’t have the right kinds of research organizations. TBL’s work at CERN was kind of a fluke that happened at the right point in the development of personal computing. There are design organizations, and R&D organizations, but all of them are looking to productize. There’s nobody just jamming on openness platforms with significant institutional support.
