Those were the words of Sir Tim Berners-Lee as he addressed the audience at the Science Museum on Tuesday. I was there with Robin, my fiancée’s father, for the 30th birthday of the World Wide Web.
I forgot I had tickets until I got a reminder email the previous afternoon. With a 5pm start time, I figured I wouldn’t be able to attend but my manager kindly encouraged me to leave work early. I’m thankful he did. The lineup of speakers each detailed how they’ve had their lives transformed by the web, as I have. It felt emotional at times. Since the late 90s, the web has provided me an escape from the circumstances I was born into but never satisfied with. For that I’ll always be grateful.
When asked if he had any regrets about the implementation of web technology, Tim pointed to the commercialisation of domain name registration. He was disappointed that corporate interests had ruined things for the rest of us. That message stuck with me and, unfortunately, reared its head again later in the week when I learned that a company in the email industry was attempting to buy the Email Geeks Slack community out from underneath of its admins (including me) and users.
More than the greater web industry, so much of the email industry smells of corporate bullshit. Practitioners need a decentralised, democratic hub free of corporate influence. A true community. For over two years, I’ve been helping build that and I won’t let VC money ruin it.
“The idea of a permissionless space is important to the web and we need to fight to keep it that way.”
Sir Tim Berners-Lee
- I saw The Hold Steady again last Sunday. They’ve transitioned to a touring model where they do weekend of shows in one city. In London, they do Friday and Saturday nights in a large venue and Sunday night somewhere smaller. I saw them at The Lexington last year and now Oslo Hackney. It was a good show, as always, but I’ll probably skip it if they come back next year.
- We did our first ‘sprintless Friday’ at work. The idea is that we wrap up our two-week sprint on Thursday and use Friday for something self-initiated, similar to the “10% time” concept made famous by Google. Our team self-imposed some guidelines: What we work on will be beneficial to the company. We’ll still do our morning standup meeting to announce what we’ll be doing. And we’ll gather at the end of the day to share what we built and/or learned. I decided to wrap my head around Jackie Balzer’s approach to z-index management and refactor our CSS accordingly.
- I watched the wine fraud documentary Sour Grapes on Saturday night. The implicit theme — never addressed outright but sitting just below surface level the whole time — is that the whole scam was made possible because most connoisseurs are full of shit.