Meg Kissack

“What if we didn’t think of a website as one thing that answers to a million people? What if instead, there were millions of websites, each one handmade by a single person?

Imagine you had a huge bread machine and an enormous bag of flour. You made so much bread that you gave some away. And people came to eat the free bread, and they liked it and wanted more. They told their friends. Free bread! People just kept coming—ten people; 100; 100,000; 100,000 million. A googol. To keep up with demand, you find yourself in... See more

Anyone can set up a web site and point to all the other web pages. Everyone is a publisher. Everyone is a peer. That’s why it’s called a web. Individuals knit themselves together by linking to one another. Everyone tends his or her own little epistemological garden, growing ideas from seed and sharing them with anyone who comes by.

Artists can think expansively about what a website can be. Each artist should create their own space on the web, for a website is an individual act of collective ambition.

Berners Lee wants to make sure this thing we’re all connecting to is truly working for us, as individuals: “I want to challenge us all to have greater ambitions for the web. I want the web to reflect our hopes and fulfill our dreams, rather than magnify our fears and deepen our divisions.”

Today more than ever, we need individuals rather than corporations to guide the web’s future. The web is called the web because its vitality depends on just that—an interconnected web of individual nodes breathing life into a vast network. This web needs to actually work for people instead of being powered by a small handful of big... See more