The Hidden History and Dangerous Future of the Web:

The World Wide Web, built upon the foundations of the Internet, has been the most significant technological development within recent history, sparking a global reformulation of capitalism and resistance. The Web is defined as a "universal information space" by its inventor Tim Berners-Lee of the W3C, paralleling the universal scope of politics today as recently noted by Hardt and Negri. While its effects have been scrutinized, the governance and history of the Web itself has received little inquiry. The evolution of these governing networks, including the recent hegemony of Google and Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the Semantic Web (a term first used by Foucault), yet remains a hidden history. However, with the increased dependence on these networks by humanity, the survival of an open Web in the era of climate change and generalized ecological crisis is of utmost importance, for the very survival of humanity will require a open-ended global communications infrastructure.

Harry Halpin is a researcher in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh and visiting fellow at Duke University in Interdisciplinary Studies. He works primarily with artificial intelligence and the Web through the World Wide Web Consortium, the "United Nations" of the Web that governs standards like XML and XHTML. He is the Chair of the GRDDL W3C Working Group and a member of the W3C Semantic Web Co-ordination Group. His has published widely at intersection of the Web, artificial intelligence, philosophy of the mind, and computational linguistics.