There are several marker points where one can speak of when Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. Today in 1990 is one of them. He’d already formulated the ideas, but on this fateful day at the beginning of the last decade of the twentieth century, with his collaborator Robert Cailliau, he published the formal proposal that laid it all out. Pretty much the whole thing would be up and running within a year.
I love the fact that Berners-Lee would eventually find himself a Unitarian Universalist.
But the more interesting thing to me is how this astonishing advance in human communication has come to be called the Web. I see the single most important contribution of Unitarian Universalism is how it upholds the spiritual principle of an “interependent web” of all existence.
I’m moderately confident the term World Wide Web was coined by Berners-Lee before he became a UU, but whatever the details, I find that in his person there is a common touching point between these two usages of the metaphor “web,” absolutely delightful.
It reflects a deeper observation of how the world really is. The consequences of this observation, spiritually and, I feel, politically, are an endless well of wisdom.
As Denise Levertov sings.
Intricate and untraceable
weaving and interweaving,
dark strand with light:
Designed, beyond
All spiderly contrivance,
To link, not to entrap:
Elation, grief, joy, contrition,
entwined;
shaking, changing, forever
forming, transforming:
All praise, all praise to the great
web.
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