New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

by James Bridle

by this time, he was at university, studying physics; after that, he worked on typesetting for digital printers, before joining CERN, where he developed the idea for hypertext – previously expounded by Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart, and others. And because of where he was working and the need of researchers to share interlinked information, he tied this invention to the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the domain name systems that underpin the emerging internet and – ta-da! – the World Wide Web just happened, as naturally and obviously as if it were meant to be. This, of course, is only one way of telling the story, but it tickles our senses because it makes sense: the rising arc of invention – the graph that always goes up and to the right – coupled to a personal history that leads to myriad interconnections and the spark of insight at the right moment, the right place in time. The Web happened because of the history of microprocessors and telecommunications and wartime industry and commercial requirements, and a bunch of different discoveries and patents and corporate research funds and academic papers and TBL’s own family history; but it also happened because it was Web Time: for a brief moment, the dispositions of culture and technology converged on an invention that, in hindsight, was predicted by everything from ancient Chinese encyclopaedias to microfilm retrieval to the stories of Jorge Luis Borges. The Web was necessary, and so it appeared – in this time...