Weaving the Web (Berners-Lee, 1999)

Tim did not really conceive of the possibility of the centralising and totalising effects of social media:

The Web’s universality leads to a thriving richness and diversity. If a company claims to give access to the world of information, then presents a filtered view, the Web loses its credibility. (p.143)

Happily, the Web is so huge that there’s no way any one company can dominate it. All the human effort people and organisations have put in all over the world to create Web sites and home pages is astoundingly large, and most of the effort has to do with what’s in the Web, not the software used to browse it. The Web’s content, and thus value, will continue despite any one company’s actions. (p.144)

Apropos the “alt-right” etc:

The analogy of a global brain is tempting, because Web and brain both involve huge numbers of elements - neurons and Web pages - and a mixture of structure and apparent randomness. However, a brain has an intelligence that emerges on quite a different level from anything that a neuron could be aware of…[W]riters have contemplated an ‘emergent property’ arising from the mass of humanity and computers. But remember that such a phenomenon would have its own agenda. We would not as individuals be ware of it, let alone control it, any more than the neuron controls the brain. (p.222)