Tim Berners-Lee Invented the World Wide Web. Now He Wants to Save It
October 6, 2025
Tim Berners-Lee may have the smallest fame-to-impact ratio of anyone living. Strangers hardly ever recognize his face; on “Jeopardy!,” his name usually goes for at least sixteen hundred dollars. Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, in 1989, but people informed of this often respond with a joke: Wasn’t that Al Gore? Still, his creation keeps growing, absorbing our reality in the process. If you’re reading this online, Berners-Lee wrote the hypertext markup language (HTML) that your browser is interpreting. He’s the necessary condition behind everything from Amazon to Wikipedia, and if A.I. brings about what Sam Altman recently called “the gentle singularity”—or else buries us in slop—that, too, will be an outgrowth of his global collective consciousness.
Source: Tim Berners-Lee Invented the World Wide Web. Now He Wants to Save It | The New Yorker
Tim Berners-Lee may be one of the most consequential humans, not just in the last few decades, but ever. Certainly in comparison to his fame or lack thereof.
The inventor of the World Wide Web, of HTTP and HTML, and I think as much if not more importantly, the fundamental principles of the World Wide Web embodied in the World Wide part of the name. I’m sure Tim is materially very comfortable, but he never strove to convert the success of his technology into monumental wealth.
This is a very New Yorker-style profile which I highly recommend.
