THE LEAD STORY in Vanity Fair on July 1, 2018, reads like the script of a Hollywood thriller, “Nearly three decades earlier, Berners- Lee invented the World Wide Web. On this morning, he had come to Washington as part of his mission to save it.” It was a day in summer 2018, just weeks after the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, which had made it decidedly clear to the public that their data was not in safe hands on the Web. Instead, each individual's personal thoughts and political preferences were analyzed by unknowns in the service of exploitative and manipulative third-party interests. A few months later, on the thirtieth anniversary of the WWW, Berners-Lee explains in an open letter: “While the web has created opportunity, given marginalized groups a voice, and made our daily lives easier, it has also created opportunity for scammers, given a voice to those who spread hatred, and made all kinds of crime easier to commit.” Berners-Lee's “pain in watching his creation so distorted,” in the words of Vanity Fair, culminated in an appeal to take a stand for the Web—for the Web We Want—as his campaign came to be known. This campaign, started by Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web Consortium, which he founded on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Web, begins:

The main problem for Berners-Lee is the centralization of the Web that has transformed it from a safe place for the exchange of knowledge and the interaction of its users into a constantly surveilling, data-consuming monstrosity. His response to this unwelcome change is a platform called Solid, which will, “reclaim the Web from corporations and return it to its democratic roots.”