Thirty two years ago, on this day, April 30th, 1993, British scientist Tim Berners-Lee, then at CERN, publishes the protocols for what would become the “World Wide Web.”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 357ppm. As of 2025 it is 427ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that ARPANET and Darpanet were already “a thing”, but getting computer to speak to computer was not necessarily that easy. Berners-Lee’s genius was in the codification but also in refusing to patent it.
What I think we can learn from this is that there is such a thing as an intellectual commons, but that commons requires rules and governance. This is possible, despite what actual racist scumbags like Garrett Hardin may have though. Having said that, the AI slop and the broligarchs are making Hardin’s view plausible.
What happened next
1995-96 the internet for public consumption begins to kick in. You have email, then you have Hotmail, web based email. You have websites, internet cafes, Hollywood making websites for things like the movie Independence Day and so on, and I was relatively young back then. I’m very glad that I hit my adulthood, if you can call it that, before the internet and certainly before social media, and certainly, certainly before smartphones. Because those things are like the blood in Alien they are acid, and they will burn through any container you care to mention.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
Also on this day:
April 30, 2007 – Rudd hires Garnaut – All Our Yesterdays
April 30, 1985 – New York Times reports C02 not the only greenhouse problem