Blain’s Morning Porridge Sept 16^th 2025 – The Man Who Enabled the Digital Economy Would Like it to be Better.

“One URL. One Hypertext. One Protocol. One Link. One Web to rule them all.”

Sir Tim Berner-Lee’s autobiography, “This Is For Everyone” is a delight. In a world that is increasingly riven and polarised – largely through the deliberate misuse of the tools his web protocols enabled – his calls for a polite reset will likely fall on deaf ears… There is simply too much money to be made monetising the passions and addictions that drive social media – which is why we ultimately may need to regulate Big Tech and the Web.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s new autobiography, This Is For Everyone, is one of the most refreshing things I’ve read in years.

Berners-Lee is not your standard Tech Lord. He actually did something unique, rather than clambering to the top on the shoulders of others. TimBL (as his early email address defined him), is the man who invented the World Wide Web. His insights, and the solution he crafted, enabled the global digital economy to explode with opportunities by making the interner and all its content open and accessible. He catalysed perhaps the biggest wave of technological innovation in history – the information age.

Calmly and succinctly, he tells a marvellous story about the rise of the digital economy from the perspective of someone who made it work for everyone, rather than making themselves rich. He comes across as an excited, enthusiastic and likable Nerd, keen to explain and very engaged to listen.

I you were to pick up the autobiography of your average, run of the mill, egotistical Billionaire member of the Dark Tech Alignment they would brag about their cultural, business and political significance, their power, wealth and influence, their supreme intelligence, while simultaneously trying to excuse their vaulting ambition and limitless greed and avarice behind veils such as “effective altruism” or “philanthropic capitalism”. . (How Bezos spent $40 mm on his splendiferous Venice Wedding while muttering about trickle-down economics.)

However, if you listen very hard and read between the lines of Berner-Lee’s book… it’s also a warning of how Big Tech and Greed have suborned his creation, and continue to do so. He treads lightly – realising that even his messianic status in the pantheon of Tech Gods might not protect him if he rocks the boat too hard – like telling social media companies outright how their efforts to monetise us are destabilising and damaging society.

Can you imagine the lengths Elon Musk would go to punish Berners-Lee if he said X has enabled a “cesspool of conspiratorial paranoia”? Or that Tik Tok has become a prime force of how the: “addictive forms of social media have multiplied into something misleading, toxic and habit-forming.” Instead, he gently suggests it by asking us to look at what the bad parts of the Web have become. (I would pay good money to watch Musk go ballistic if Berners-Lee blamed him directly for what Twitter has become. Truth Social? Let’s not even go there – it is political 1984 megaphoning up to 11, enabled by the Web.)

Benners-Lee’s creation has spawned legions of billionaires, creating more wealth, speculation and outright nonsense than any other invention in history. Tech nerds got insanely rich because they spotted the opportunity to monetise the product. That product, of course, is ourselves. Our data is taken, ransacked and packaged for those who want to sell us a fridge, a car, or politics. Today there is little stopping any shoddy consumer good or evil intent being marketed across the web.

While writing about AI last week, I used the quote from The AI Con: “Sam Altman, the CEO of Open AI, like all the great tech barons of our era, is an adman.” Nothing has been closer to the mark.

Today the web directly impacts nearly everyone on the planet – it markets to us all, influencing our lives to an extent we barely realise. Increasingly it makes us angry and afraid. Polarising news manipulation threatens to destabilise democracies. We no longer know quite who or what to trust – were there 100,000 racist thugs on last week’s “Free-speech” March in London, or was it 3 million peaceful patriots? Someone is telling porkies – but who? Our ability to differentiate between lies and the truth, has been blurred by the bad side of the Web, which seeks to make us addicts by feeding “currated” pap.

Berners-Lee makes the point there is much good on the internet, but it’s clear he’s concerned about the bad. The aim of the original web was to make everything open. The trick of apps like Linked-in and Facebook has been to ringfence the data these firms have collated from customers, which they then metaphorically charge these same customers to access. They double dip us by charging (in data) to put us on the site, and then to use our own data to sell to us! The monetisation of marketing across the internet is what’s driven Tech wealth. Computing genius exists, Berners-lee is proof of it, but its almost secondary to the parasite many Apps have become.

One of the things that makes me giggle is Billionaire financier Peter Thiel’s ransacking of the Tolkien cannon to name his firms like Andruil and Palantir. In terms he, his protégé JD Vance and others of the Dark Alignment will understand… if Berners-Lee were a character, I suspect he’d be Bilbo Baggins, a civilised, well learned and cultured hobbit, an evocation of utterly decent Englishness, finding himself waking through lands filled with dangers and the temptation of enormous power he’d never dreamed existed, but adapting to everything as it happened while essentially emerging unseduced (although battered) by the experience. In contrast, many of the Tech Lords wear their rings of power and wealth in pride – perhaps they are the equivalent of ring-wraiths? (Swelling theme music from LOTR playing in background…)

Berners-Lee makes the point he was born the same year as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates – 1955. He home-built his first computer from bags of broken transistor switches and a busted TV, growing up in a happy family of mathematicians.  His parents worked with the godfather of computer science – Alan Turing. There is a dig at Gates when he describes how early software was initially built collaboratively to move computing forward with little thought of profit till: “[Gates] began to develop the software and evolve the industry…. If you enforced copyright the profits could be enormous… Microsoft was on its way to becoming one of the most valuable firms on Earth.”

What Berners-Lee does not need to say in the book is how any attempt to have developed a commercial web would immediately have spawned competing monetizable alternatives, each trying to own and profit from the opportunity. Today’s open web would likely never ever happened – we’d live in a world where algorithms would direct us to sites the owners had paid up to have us sent to. He saw the opportunity and make it open, transparent, and work with nary a thought of personal profit or glory. He wrote: “The way [forward] was to donate the intellectual property behind the web to the public domain. For the web to succeed it had to be free.”

As a result, Berners-Lee is not a billionaire. His stated concern today is still building a better Web for everyone – perhaps a doomed hope: the reality is the commercial genie is out the bottle, she is not going back in.

You can sense his unstated frustration at the way money has directed the development of the net – he knows it has become tainted, and often flawed. As noted above, he merely hints it. He doesn’t say it outright too loudly – after all he still has to work with Zuckerberg, Bezos and the rest if the web is to be reformed – but I suspect he has little time for the Libertarian form of wealth-trumps-everything version of Capitalism that drives Silicon Valley billionaires and investors.

Between the lines of the book one can sense is frustration at how the web has been suborned and allowed to stray. He politely calls much of social media as deliberately addictive, laced with “Rage Bait” which is designed to unlock individuals data and to allow them to be marketed. He references Digital Sovereignty many times – our right to own our data and determine how it used. Today we think the internet is liberating and affirming, but the reality is it is dominated by a small group of Libertarian Capitalist firms intent of monetising the product – ourselves! The need for greater rather than less Regulation is apparent, and that is likely to be a point of conflict.

There is currently only one rule of web-based businesses: people are the product, therefore Tech resists any attempt to regulate how tech treats them. They wish to ensure Tech is given unfettered access and control. One outcome is the current political and societal instability we so clearly see as Politics becomes a lucrative product to market across the web. It’s a problem Europe is beginning to understand, but not America where it is seen as an opportunity. There, the primacy of the freedom to make a buck by exploiting one’s fellow man is sacrosanct.

For all the talk about freedom and justice – it’s largely the Freedom of Big Money to monetise people that counts in Meta’s current valuation.

That is broadly the big divide in Big Tech. Berners-Lee and others want people to control their own data and set their own agenda. Meta, et al, want unfettered rights to advertise to us by controlling our data. Governments see enormous opportunities to surveil their populations.

As AI takes over, it threatens to give even more asymmetric power to owners over workers (who can be replaced so easily – apparently – by AI). That power has been acquired by ruthlessly harvesting the data that should belong to individuals, creatives and inventors. Today’s web and the successive Tech Bubbles like the Dot.com, the Metaverse, NFTs, etc and now AI have all be founded in the start reality most Tech boils down to advertising and marketing. (That said, one of the stories from the book is how the original 9000 lines of web operating code was later sold in NFT form!)

Where will we go from here?

Finally, a quick reminder of the UK housing conf the week after next: Join 500+ industry professionals, including 200+ mortgage originators and investors at the UK Mortgage Finance Conference on 29 September at The Landmark London — tackling housing affordability and innovative funding solutions. Use discount code BLAIN10 for 10% off registration.

Back to the day job and the next train to London…

Bill Blain

CEO – Windshift Capital

Author – The Morning Porridge

Partner – Shard Capital