The first 25 years of the web weren't always pretty.
To think that our biggest reward for patiently dialing up on our 14.4-kilobits-per-second modems -- remember that magical ping of a connection finally being made? -- was a design-free world of GeoCities flashing GIFs and implausibly dancing "hampsters".
Yet there was magic in our early online homesteads that we really ought to hang on to. We linked to each other's pages to build community and share knowledge, rather than to optimise our search-engine rankings. We invented tools for civic-minded sharing, such as Creative Commons, and bypassed the closed communications networks of multibillion-dollar corporations. And we cultivated our online identities in decentralised, individualised corners of the web (even, admit it, on pages not dissimilar to this one), without worrying that we were being microtargeted by advertisers' algorithms -- or mass-monitored by national security agencies.
Tim Berners-Lee, whose paper proposing the world wide web was published a quarter of a century ago, explains in our cover story why his "radically open, egalitarian and decentralised platform" has become such a powerful tool for communication, knowledge-sharing and democracy. Yet we need to act on his warnings that the web's future is under threat from government censorship and mass surveillance, and from corporate walled gardens and commercial self-interest. If we allow stock-price-maximising businesses to determine how we socialise and shop online; if we let governments decide what knowledge should be restricted and what personal information we are unwittingly giving up -- well, all of us will be the poorer.
There's still time to apply for our dozen WIRED Innovation Fellowships. Fellowships are open to anyone working in fields normally covered by WIRED -- from science to design -- who has the potential to make a significant impact. We'll cover the WIRED Fellows in the magazine, give them access to our events and, through our network, give them support and mentorship that can help them achieve their potential. See more at <a href="http://wired.co.uk/fellows" target="_blank">wired.co.uk/fellows</a> -- and do spread the word.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
