In 1989, tucked away within the halls of the European Council of Nuclear Research (CERN), a young English programmer named Tim Berners-Lee was confronted by a maddening problem: the scientific world was drowning in disconnected networks. Sharing documents across these fragmented systems was slow, clunky, and error-prone. Berners-Lee saw what others didn’t: what these networks desperately needed was a universal “glue,” a standardized way to make information available to anyone, anywhere.
The Birth of the Web
Working late into the night, Berners-Lee assembled a toolkit—Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and Universal Resource Locators (URLs). With these tools, he created a new “documentation system” that was far more than the sum of its parts. It allowed computers and their users to transmit and display documents seamlessly, forming a new digital “place” called the World Wide Web—named simply as www.
HTML made it easy for anyone to describe and present documents online, HTTP standardized the format for their exchange, and URLs provided a readable way to find anything on the network. Suddenly, with only a server and some basic coding skills, anyone could publish a web page. If you had the address, you could access the world from your screen.
Publishing for the People
This was a revolution for publishing. Services like Geocities and Blogger sprang up, letting anyone publish their thoughts—and reach a global audience—at no cost, with no editor or gatekeeper. The early web felt radically open: creative amateurs and would-be writers poured their dreams and stories online, their work funded by a simple model: advertisements beside their posts.
There has always been a debate about this model. Scholars like Ethan Zuckerman suggest the “original sin of the internet” was its embrace of ad-driven attention economy. In those earliest days, alternative models like subscriptions or micropayments were impractical. Paypal didn’t exist yet, credit cards couldn’t be used online, and with the enormous cost of keeping the new internet running, few investors were willing to risk their money without the promise of big, advertising-driven returns.
But the most powerful force shaping the early web wasn’t financial or technical—it was psychological. People prefer free things, even if it means trading a bit of their attention. The web’s openness led to a flood of content, but very little of it was seen. Most sites languished in obscurity, waiting for a solution to discovery.
The Rise of Search—and Google’s Big Idea
This “discovery problem” was solved with the advent of web crawlers and search engines. Dozens of early search startups tried to index the chaos, but Google stood apart. Its PageRank algorithm, inspired by academic citations, rewarded web pages that other sites linked to, using the “social proof” of links to infer quality and popularity. Looking for potato recipes? Google found them—and ranked them by the number of other relevant sites that vouched for them.
Not only was Google the best at finding what you needed, but its model of serving targeted ads alongside each search made it wildly profitable—changing forever how information and advertising intertwined online.
Social Media’s First Age: Connection and Chaos
The explosion of the web soon gave rise to early social networks. Friendster, Myspace, and Facebook appeared between 2002 and 2004, offering something unprecedented: a web page just for you, linked to your friends, showcasing a carefully curated life. These sites began as simple networks but rapidly became the center of youth social life.
Myspace, once the king with its wild customization (born from a security flaw that let creative users inject code and change their profiles), ballooned to 130 million users. The platform’s anything-goes openness made it chaotic—a digital carnival of messy design and fleeting connections. The site’s culture of adding strangers for friend-count points made growth easy, but real relationships were rare. By the time Myspace was sold to NewsCorp in 2006, users were eager for something better.
Facebook and the Social Graph
Facebook’s edge was simple but profound: real relationships. By requiring college email addresses and connecting real friends, Mark Zuckerberg and his co-founders built what they called the social graph—a map of authentic human connections. Unlike Myspace’s carnival, Facebook was tight-knit. Within a few short years, with its relentless expansion and incremental feature upgrades, Facebook would secure its place as the marketplace of digital connections for hundreds of millions.
The Web’s Next Chapter
Between 2009 and 2012, a handful of key innovations—from news feeds to rapid-sharing tools—made social media even more instantaneous. Each change, taken alone, seemed minor. Together, they made publishing not only universal and free, but also lightning-fast, fostering the perpetual, always-on communities we take for granted today.
The web began as an ambitious solution to a technical roadblock but rapidly became the nervous system of world culture. Its path—from scientific frustration, to global publishing revolution, to the ever-shifting terrain of social media—shows how tiny inventions, accidental features, and human psychology can echo across decades, shaping everything about how we connect and communicate online.
Source : Source : Outrage Machine: How Tech Is Amplifying Discontent, Undermining Democracy, and Pushing Us Towards Chaos by Tobias Rose-Stockwell
Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/64005201-the-master-builder
Read the Previous Article in the Series :
Thinking Beyond Science 
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