I’ve just rummaged through the faded construction paper and report cards left over from the last time I thinned out the box of my primary school papers saved so long ago by my mom. It was only last year I tossed at least half of what had been sent home with me when mom and dad downsized two decades ago. Whatever the mental algorithm I used that afternoon, it was clearly different than the one I’d have used this morning. As a result, the first picture of me in the newspaper that I was looking for is obviously lost to me now. You’d have been amused, I’m sure.
It was 1968 and I was in Grade 5. The photo was me and a few other kids whose real names I don’t remember; in the photo they were Julius Ceasar and Mark Anthony. I was Brutus, wrapped, as were the others, in a sheet-become-toga, a blade in my hand, poised and ready to strike. I think I was smiling; inappropriately for the tone of the moment, of course. One of my favourite memories of that play was creating the soundtrack for the thunder. To make the noise, which ended up sounding e.x.a.c.t.l.y. like thunder, the class rubbed those plywood stacking chairs back and forth across the clay tile floor in the basement of the school. Brilliant. It could have been a career-defining moment. Sound technology, I mean; not acting. If I’d only known sound technology was a thing…
Beware the Ides of March
I am writing on the Ides of March, the threat of which Caesar had been warned about by the Soothsayer, and the day upon which I was pretending to drive my dagger into his breast. Soothsayers and childhood memories aside, though, it seems a day upon which reflections relevant to our past, present, and future might be appropriate. Maybe we should have a holiday that allows time to consider how the world is turning, whether toward the pristine or the twisted, the strong or the weak, the joy-filled or the tragic, the broken or the whole.
In the Christian calendar, the season of Lent, which we happen to be in as I write, is considered a time for just such reflection. Its opening day, Ash Wednesday, is a day of penitence often observed with fasting and the drawing of ashes upon one’s forehead in the sign of the cross by a priest. During Lent’s four weeks, believers are challenged to expose themselves to the full frontal of their actions over the previous year, thereby aligning themselves with the final repudiation by the disciples of Jesus, a Christian’s source of both inspiration and salvation. It’s a heady story and countless believers have borne the weight of their complicity in the world’s wrongs and the inadequate depth of their faith during the lengthening days of these four, seasonally liminal weeks.
Learning and Growing
When an infant is born, its brain only weighs about a quarter of its adult weight. Between then and the age of five, that brain will almost quadruple in size. After that, growth slows, the basic structure of the brain already established. Sure, it accumulates information and processes the various stimuli it receives every single moment of its living existence. Nighttime cleaning processes clear out the physical detritus of our daily thinking and there can be a lot of junk files that need erasing; trust me. But the brain doesn’t change much physically unless something happens to it, or a system, like that night cleaning, goes awry.
But like the physical structure of our brains, as we age, we also seem to have difficulty changing the ideas we wrap our brains around as young adults. Without sincere effort put into exploring outside the norms of our families and communities, exposing ourselves to extraordinary events, or being open to the tutelage of others who have earned our respect, we tend to recycle the same ideas over and again. The brain can get better or worse at what it does, absorb and process new information, but we train it well and tend to do that early. Changing our minds, continuing education ... these things are difficult. Evolution-wise, that was probably a good thing. In today’s world? Maybe not so much.
Born in the Mid Days of March
There is an anniversary that coincides with this week of the Ides; it’s the birthday of the World Wide Web. Although we didn’t get access to it until 1991, the web was created by British computer scientist, Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 while he was working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. That makes it thirty-five years old. It quickly became the source for everything you think you want to know or see and much you may wish you hadn’t. (Maybe it’s a good thing that my KWS photo exists only on microfilm at the Kingston Public library.)
The web, of course, outstrips the human brain by miles. We’ve been so busy exploring and building it that, hey, our brains might not even be able to comprehend how huge the www has really become. Indeed, we might struggle to comprehend the size of a single website: think Wikipedia. By the time www was five years old, it had far surpassed the quadrupling any infant brain could manage. Its growth was and only ever will be exponential. That’s what it was built to do. Berners-Lee's creation was tool designed to bring together information and people in ways that could expand the former and nurture the latter.
Summer of ‘93
I think back to what I was like when I was thirty-five. It was the summer of 1993. The first climate summit, in Rio, had already taken place. I’d spent the previous few years studying theology and protesting free trade, global warming, arms trading, and demanding women’s rights. I was newly installed in a congregation in Toronto and loving my work.
But I was often beside myself, frantic with desperation as a parent, my first child born in 1983 at one minute to midnight on the nuclear annihilation clock, which, in 1993, was temporarily paused, and my second child born with only minutes left on a new clock, the one ticking down the time we had left before we destroyed the earth’s capacity to sustain our own species, so many other species already lost or endangered.
How did we get here? How could we avoid catastrophe? What might save us from ourselves? In the early nineties, still typing commands to indent paragraphs and italicize words as I hammered out a sermon, the newly minted world wide web seemed the answer to our most urgent need.
Is it?
Open Letter
In an open letter published this week, on the Web’s 35th anniversary, March 12th, Berners-Lee began by considering the early days when his invention’s “trajectory was impossible to imagine”. He’d created the web as a “tool for humanity” that would "allow for collaboration, foster compassion and generate creativity.” He even referred to those goals as the “three C’s”. And for the first many years, that seemed to be exactly what it was accomplishing: the web encouraged the creation of “small, more localised communities, provided individual empowerment and fostered huge value.” He wasn’t the only one who felt the excitement; we all did.
Yet in the past decade, instead of embodying these values, the web has played a part in eroding all three of the gifts Berners-Lee believed undergirded it - collaboration, compassion, and creativity. Governments and international regulatory bodies have been too slow to regulate or oversee. And capitalism – ah, capitalism – has pushed its own self-interests, targeting parties vulnerable to its messages with mined and manipulated information, distorting fact into a spectrum of varying “truths.” The communities who access the web, looking for information, receive it after corporate interests have refracted it through multiple lenses themselves until the subtleties of truth are no longer engaged by once-diverse, multifaceted communities but by groups conveniently and manipulatively wedged into simple, antagonistic boxes. Not what Berners-Lee had imagined. Not even close.
Still, Berners-Lee has hope. He promotes Contract for the Web, a global plan of action “to make sure our online world is safe, empowering and genuinely for everyone” which is supported by almost 500 companies. He engages in the work of helping individuals and companies find safe places on the web to store their data and information so it isn’t vulnerable to outside users. Solid Project is one of those initiatives. And he’s founded the World Wide Web Foundation, an organization geared to protecting the values the web was meant to enhance and strengthen.
But his hope, from what I read, is also in the smaller companies, the resistance, those who hold the values dear and are unwilling to be absorbed into the great vast indifference of the www. He sees it in a variety of smaller organizations that have emerged on the edges, mentioning Github, BlueSky, and Mastodon in his letter, each of which is inspired by the original vision of a worldwide web of possibility that truly engages the individual and the organizations they create. It encourages them toward a better future for all through access to information and the potential of those same Three C’s: collaboration, compassion, and creativity.
Innovative market solutions ... are essential to this process. Forward-thinking legislation from governments worldwide can facilitate these solutions and help manage the current system more effectively. Finally, we as citizens all over the world need to be engaged, and demand higher standards and greater accountability for our online experiences. The time is now to confront the dominant system’s shortcomings while catalysing transformative solutions that empower individuals. This emergent system, ripe with potential, is rising, and the tools for control are within reach.
Et Tu?
When my classmate, wrapped in a sheet, looked up into my eyes and questioned me, “Et tu, Brute?”, he was reciting the lines of a Shakespearean play. Perhaps above all the others Shakespeare ever wrote, this line continues to haunt us. Because we each know it, viscerally. We have felt it as a friend turned away. And we have witnessed it whenever the world has looked away. No words better convey a sense of betrayal, of the realization that the belief, the confidence one had in another was being torn from their heart. The lines have gone down in history, reiterated when betrayal is at hand, spoken when one upon whom another relied has withdrawn their life giving support. Do you, too, betray me? My friend? Someone I trusted?
We are here, peculiar in the universe, because of a billion billion billion little changes that took place over a length of time we cannot calculate. And that same length of time - or something longer than we might like to imagine - may be how long we’d need to adapt to the environmental changes we are imposing on our only home.
Those changes we managed over millions of years differentiated us from the rest of nature through the emergence of cognition. Nothing else with it has survived, though evidence of them has. We are peculiar in our ability to reason and create, to reflect upon the past, to plan for the future, to rally ourselves for one another in times of trial, to stand aligned against injustice, to paint and carve and raise our voices in song, build community, imagine a world wide web that might provide limitless possibilities for cooperation, and so so so so so much more.
And we are peculiar in our ability to reason and destroy, weapons of mass destruction ready for the rattling in various corners of the world, human trafficking stealing individual dignity to sate the grotesque desires for power our cultures have birthed, the insatiable need for the newest, fastest, and brightest trinkets plundering rainforests and canyons and distracting us from the needs of others in our communities, and, both wilfully and blindly, the needs of future generations.
As Tim Berners-Lee works to hold and continue to build his vision of a world wide web that can enhance rather than betray humanity, that can create rather than destroy civilization, we, too, must recommit ourselves. At once, we need to see ourselves as part of the problem and part of the solution, looking to our day to day activities and assessing them, one by one. “Is consuming this - reading it, eating it, buying it, watching it - a good thing for my wellbeing, my family, my community, my world? Or is consuming it, pleasant though it might seem right now, an “Et tu, Brute?” moment, one in which I betray not only others, but my own heart?”
Which is it?
OMGoodness!!! Too funny!!! So many lines!!!!
I was in that photo! I remember having to learn so many lines!